Before the Industrial Authority 19 February 2013 meeting, Gretchen told Bill about how she’s now videoing at Rotary and putting playlists on the web with some delay. Bill and Gretchen (and Commissioner John Page) go to the same Valdosta Rotary Club. This is yet another use of Internet access: attracting participants to local community groups, and getting their speakers to a wider audience.
-jsq
And now a word from the only person in the room at the the Industrial Authority 19 February 2013 with actual experience in bringing Internet broadband access to new areas, invisible behind the camera but clearly audible, Gretchen Quarterman:
I’m super-excited about the whole broadband thing, because you know that’s near and dear to our heart, and our background.
But please be very careful about the buill that’s before the legislature that will prohibit municipal Internets. Right now the legislature is trying to take off the table muncipal Internets. And I think that a municipal Internet would be a really great solution here. So let your legislator know that’s a bad idea; they shouldn’t take that off the table from us.
That’s HB 282, in opposition to which Amy Henderson of Georgia Municipal Association said:
Broadband is economic development.
Gretchen continued:
At the Chamber’s annual meeting when a local speaker stood up she talked about the that’s doing really well right now is agriculture
and I’m pleased to announce that the South Georgia Growing Local Conference will be here in January of 2014 the last weekend, a Friday and Saturday. It’s an equivalent of the Georgia Organics big conference that they have in Atlanta. Except that it’s for south Georgia local growers, farmers, homesteaders. We just were in Reidsville this last January and Lowndes County is going to have it next year.
And the whole series of South Georgia Growing Local Conferences (this will be the fourth) has been organized largely online, in yet another use of Internet access for economic development, in this case sustainable local development.
OK, one more: Rotary Clubs need broadband.
-jsq
Unfortunately, Andrea Schruijer made clear that much of what
had just been said at the
the Industrial Authority 19 February 2013
hadn’t been heard.
It’s not that we’re saying we don’t have broadband. We have connectivity; that’s not the issue. We have great partners that help us with that.
Well, local “leaders” need to learn to say it: “we don’t have broadband!” Many of the people of Lowndes County and even more in the surrounding counties can’t afford Internet access at all, as Idelle Dear told the Lowndes County Commission. And the “great partners” Ms. Schruijer bragged about will never provide it for us without a lot of prodding, because AT&T and Verizon and Sprint and Comcast and Mediacom don’t think anything outside the Atlanta beltway has enough population density to bother with, and even in Atlanta all people get is U.S.-style low-speed low-reliability Internet connectivity that would never even be on sale in Japan or France or Korea or Finland or even Estonia.
Tom Call illustrated my point when he
talked about a residential project
where a provider installed cable and claimed they were providing voice, TV, and Internet access, but then didn’t actually have the capacity for Internet
when people started using it.
Mary Gooding spoke up for VSU at
the Industrial Authority 19 February 2013,
saying that
VSU President McKinney was
in Athens (as was President Perrin of Wiregrass), but he and
VSU:
We too believe that this is a huge strategic initiative for our community. And we were thrilled after the meeting that we attended that the city, the county, both educational institutions, the Industrial Authority, everyone there, the hospital for sure, all agreed that this had to be a significant incentive.
Mary Gooding added:
At Valdosta State it’s becoming one of our biggest road barriers to online degrees, to online classes. That’s again more bandwidth that’s needed to be able to deliver degrees and classes online.
That’s all good, but where were the superintendents and school boards of the two K-12 school systems? Where were library Continue reading
Angela Crance,
Special Assistant to the President of
Wiregrass Georgia Technical College,
told
the Industrial Authority 19 February 2013:
I’m here for Wiregrass, and we just want to thank you for bringing this up and making it a top priority for the community [looking at Lowndes County Commission Chairman Bill Slaughter] and the Industrial Authority….
Continue readingIt’s definitely a priority for us…. Only 14% of our citizens have a college degree and we need 70% to have a college degree within ten years. To be able to accomplish that we’d better have
Another bad idea from ALEC already passed in SC and NC and is now in the GA legislature, getting coverage in several national technical and political blogs: HB 282, which would effectively forbid municipal broadband if any commercial carrier offers 1.5Mbps. It's up for a hearing this week: time to call your state rep.
Timothy B. Lee wrote for ArsTechnica 14 Feb 2013, Bill would ban muni broadband if one home in census tract gets 1.5Mbps: Approach could leave some Georgia residents without a viable broadband option.
Continue reading
Incumbent broadband providers are pushing legislation that would restrict Georgia towns from building municipal broadband networks. Under the proposal, if a single home in a census tract has Internet access at speeds of 1.5Mbps or above, the town would be prohibited from offering broadband service to anyone in that tract.
State-level restrictions on municipal broadband networks are
Something good out of Chattanooga? The city with the fastest metropolitan Internet access plans to turn that into jobs.
Elizabeth Prann wrote for Fox 26 January 2013, City turns Internet speeds into jobs, that Chattanooga
is home to most advanced smart grid in the nation, customers are enjoying Internet speeds that are almost 100 times faster than the national average. Most Internet users in the U.S. have access to about 4.5 megabits of Internet speed.
We wish! OK, you can get spees that fast here: with Verizon 4G LTE, not too many places via land access.
So what’s Chattanooga got that’s better?
Continue reading
Director Lisa Biagiotti
spent two years travelling around the South
interviewing people about AIDS to make a film,
deepsouth.
She found rural AIDS is a bigger and faster-growing problem
than AIDS in center cities,
yet most health and prevention funding goes to urban areas.
The root cause seemed clear to her: poverty.
Here’s some deeper dirt (literally) on rural poverty in the U.S.,
and one thing we know can help with that: distributed solar power,
for jobs, for reduced electrical bills, and for energy independence.
What politician wouldn’t want jobs for their constituents?
The director said the screening at VSU at the end of November drew more people than the day before in Little Rock. There were clearly more than 150 in the audience in Valdosta. It’s a topic very relevant to here, as Dean Poling wrote in the VDT 26 November 2012,
Organizers note that Georgia is ranked sixth highest nationally for its cumulative number of AIDS cases reported through December 2009. More than 40,000 known HIV/AIDS cases were reported in Georgia as of 2010.
The South Health District’s 10 counties, which include Lowndes and
surrounding counties, report 950 confirmed cases of HIV/AIDS, while many more are likely infected and risk becoming sick because they are not being treated. More specifically, there are about 460 reported cases in Lowndes County.
In reporting these numbers, HIV is the virus (HIV disease) and AIDS is the medical diagnosis made by a doctor of the symptoms, according to South Health District.
It’s a great movie and I highly recommend it. Director Biagiotti spent a substantial amount of her own money and two years to make this film, yet there are aspects she could only note in passing, such as incarceration. She can’t be expected to have researched every aspect; maybe somebody else can step up and help follow more threads.
The movie starts with some maps about poverty and AIDS in the South. It did not, however, look outside the South for poverty. Here are better poverty maps, from the CDC:
Susan Crawford has a plan for getting us fast Internet access for jobs, community, education, and health care.
Susan Crawford wrote for Wired 2 October 2012,
We Can’t All Be in Google’s Kansas: A Plan for Winning the Bandwidth
Race,
about how the incumbent telephone and cable companies that provide
our Internet access aren’t going to help:
They have no incentive to do so. Because they never enter one another’s territories, they don’t face the competition that might spur such expansion.
Instead, incumbent internet access providers such as Comcast and Time Warner (for wired access) and AT&T and Verizon (for complementary wireless access) are in “harvesting” mode. They’re raising average revenue per user through special pricing for planned “specialized services” and usage-based billing, which allows the incumbents to constrain demand. The ecosystem these companies have built is never under stress, because consumers do their best to avoid heavy charges for using more data than they’re supposed to. Where users have no expectation of abundance, there’s no need to build fiber on the wired side of the business or build small cells fed by fiber on the wireless side.
If the current internet access providers that dominate the American telecommunications landscape could get away with it, they’d sell nothing but specialized services and turn internet access into a dirt road.
So what is her plan?
Continue reading
Affordable high-speed Internet access would bring us jobs, community, “online commerce and services, the ability to reach world markets, to invent and innovate, to learn and communicate” and “a wealth of economic activity and information” writes Susan Crawford, a very savvy and experienced communications law professor who has been recommended by many as a potential chair of the FCC, who also explains why we aren’t currently getting it.
The Diane Rehm Show 10 January 2013, Susan Crawford: “Captive Audience”, and that’s the title of her book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, excerpted here:
Continue readingThe sea change in policy that led to the current situation has been coordinated over the past twenty years by legions of lobbyists, hired-guneconomists, and credulous regulators. The cable companies have no incentive to upgrade their core network hardware to ensure that advanced fiberconnections are available to every home throughout the country. Communications companies describe globally competitive high-speed access as aluxury, just as the private electricity companies did a century ago.
Yet communications services are now as important as electricity. Today if you asked American mayors what technology they most want for their city, the majority would say, “affordable high-speed Internet access.” And they want these networks not simply for the jobs created to construct them but because the Internet brings the world to their community. High-speed Internet access gives towns and cities online commerce and services, the ability to reach world markets, to invent and innovate, to learn and communicate. It brings a wealth of economic activity and information. But despite these manifold benefits, Americans continue to treat such services as the exclusive domain of private monopolies and as luxuries obtainable only by the wealthy.
Not coincidentally, the United States has fallen from the forefront