Tag Archives: fiber

Georgia Broadband Deployment Initiative 2019-04-26

Good about the Georgia Broadband Deployment Inititative (GBDI): wired and wireless, and they are actively doing something, including mapping.

Dubious: stakeholders are only “private telecom and cable providers, local government, and electricity cooperatives”.

Where are universities, technical colleges, doctors and hospitals, local businesses, nonprofits, and the people? Supposedly “Community partnership will be a central component”, but where is the community in GBDI’s plans? Where are the other stakeholders? Where are the public hearings?

Maybe that’s farther along in their timeline: Continue reading →

Broadband fiber correlates with increased house prices

Preliminary research indicates that broadband fiber results in about 5% increase in property values for connected houses. This would indicate that an MSA wanting to profit from broadband should want to deploy it as widely as possible, especially in new housing. Hm, what’s the Homebuilders’ Association’s position on this?

The authors report that “fiber presence is associated with a positive effect on property values”, in The Impact of High-Speed Broadband Availability on Real Estate Values: Evidence from United States Property Markets by Gabor Molnar, University of Colorado at Boulder; Scott Savage, University of Colorado at Boulder; Douglas Sicker, University of Colorado at Boulder.

Continue reading →

AT&T says it invested $675 million in networks in Georgia first half 2013

Let’s compare T’s recent investments in various states. The telco and cableco incumbents played this game back in 2004, too, going on about how much they were investing, so the Valdosta City Council wouldn’t vote to do its own municipal network. What’s the plan to get fast (100Mbps+) affordable (less than $30/month) Internet access everywhere in Georgia?

Christopher Seward wrote for AJC 8 August 2013, AT&T: $675M invested in Georgia networks,

AT&T said Thursday it invested more than $675 million to upgrade its wireless and wired networks in Georgia in the first half of the year.

The investments include new cell towers—base stations used to send signals to mobile phones—more antenna reach, improvements to its 4G LTE network for quicker data downloads and more Wi-Fi hotspots, the company said.

Here’s the actual T PR of 9 August 2013, AT&T Invests More Than $675 Million in Georgia Wireless and Wireline Networks, which has some details about cable, 4G LTE, etc., including this: Continue reading →

Community Assessment Group and Internet access @ LCC 2013-07-22

Valdosta Mayor Gayle was standing next to the video ghetto after the county’s rather rudimentary SPLOST VII presentation Monday morning, so I asked him why I hadn’t seen anything about Internet access either Valdosta’s or Lowndes County’s SPLOST lists? He said that was because it was being handled by the Community Assessment Group (CAG). What’s that?

Mayor Gayle said CAG is a group of representatives from the county and all the local cities, the two school districts (Valdosta and Lowndes County), VSU, Wiregrass Tech, the Industrial Authority, the Chamber, and he may have said others. It’s an attempt at better local cooperation, specifically about issues that cross all the various local governmental and non-governmental groups. So far they’ve had two meetings, Continue reading →

Internet access lunacy maybe partly corrected by Google Fiber

Slower and more expensive than the rest of the world: U.S. Internet access doesn’t have to be that way. Bob knows about our Internet issues here and is interested in helping.

Chunka Mul wrote for Forbes 26 April 2013, The Lunacy of Our Internet Access, and How Google Fiber Could Provide Needed Shock Therapy,

Imagine you are the world’s largest operator of shopping malls, and shoppers can only get to your malls via the equivalent of dirt paths and country roads. What’s more, those meager routes are all controlled by an oligopoly of private, toll-road operators that focus on their profitability, not on getting consumers to the stores in your malls.

The result would be a mess. The roads would be slow yet expensive. Consumers would limit shopping trips. The stores in your malls would have a hard time generating business, so your malls would languish.

Yet the entire online economy runs on an analogous network. The network could easily be lightning fast, pervasive and cheap (or even free). Instead,