Your elected Commissioners and top county staff
listening to Finance Director Stephanie Black’s report,
around 9:30 AM on
the all-day retreat agenda.
The seemingly most boring subject, but the key to all the others.
Gretchen is there videoing, but apparently nobody else other
than the VDT reporter. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Internet access speed
County Commission retreats to Lake Park Thursday and Friday @ LCC 2015-02-05
Everything from Animals to ZBOA
agenda
for the annual Lowndes County Commission retreat, now billed
as 2015 Annual Planning Meeting.
Unlike
the Valdosta City Council,
this retreat is in Lowndes County,
at the same location as the recent Lake Park Chamber of Commerce
annual dinner.
Gretchen will be there with the LAKE camera.
You can go, too: it’s an open meeting.
LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
2015 Annual Planning Meeting
Quail Branch Lodge
7601 Zeigler Road, Lake Park, GeorgiaThursday, February 5- Continue reading
FCC net neutrality written comment period closes Tuesday
Want to continue to see this and other blogs, local newspapers, YouTube, and all the other Internet sources of information that are not owned by the six companies that own 90% of U.S. media?
Then you want the FCC to continue net neutrality,
and you have until Tuesday to send written comments.
EFF has provided this handy form: Dear FCC. Please go there and comment. You’ll thank yourself later.
-jsq
PS: This is what I wrote. Continue reading
Broadband, outsourcing, trash, and fire @ LCC 2014-02-28
The second day of the Commission retreat is finished. Reporting from location, Gretchen noted:
1PM: BroadBand
Chairman Bill Slaughter has a five year goal of making broadband available. Some possibility of creating a fibre ring. He says he’s working with the City of Valdosta.
Well, a year ago in February he said broadband was “one of the number one issues”, but in October he said “we have broadband”, so it’s anyone’s guess what his opinion will be in a few months.
1:06PM: Outsourcing
Commissioner Crawford Powell wants to outsource more county services.
That’s working so well, after all; see the next note.
1:19PM: Trash evaluation
Continue readingDigital Economy Workshop Cancelled Tomorrow
Received just now by email from Julia Shewchuk.
Due to potentially unsafe travelling conditions through tomorrow morning and several people letting us know they would not be attending, we are cancelling the Digital Economy workshop in Valdosta tomorrow. Please feel free to come to the February 6th workshop and we will add an hour before or after to discuss ISP specific issues and review the business survey.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Julia
See previous post for details about the other workshop dates.
-jsq
Digital Economy Plan Workshop
Update 3:30 PM 29 January 2014: Thursday 30 January 2014 session cancelled due to weather; come to the 6 February 2014 meeting instead.
Received by email and there’s a facebook event. -jsq
Good Morning and Happy New Year!
We would like to invite you to one or more workshops to help us develop a Digital Economy Plan for our Region.
The Southern Georgia Regional Commission, in partnership with the Georgia Technology Authority, is coordinating and developing a Digital Economy Plan for the 18 counties in the South Georgia Region to identify the unique characteristics of the digital economy in our region, its strengths, weaknesses, its needs and its opportunities.
The focus and intent of the plan is to Continue reading
Town builds its own gigabit network
And for about $57 a month.
Emily Chung wrote for CBC News 18 July 2013, Small Alberta town gets massive 1,000 Mbps broadband boost: Rural community of Olds builds its own fibre network and starts its own ISP
Ultrafast internet speeds that most Canadian city dwellers can only dream of will soon be available to all 8,500 residents in a rural Alberta community for as little as $57 a month, thanks to a project by the town’s non-profit economic development foundation.
“We’ll be the first ‘gig town’ in Canada,” said Nathan Kusiek, director of marketing for O-Net, the community-owned internet service provider that runs the fibre optic network being built by the non-profit Olds Institute for Community and Regional Development in Olds, Alta., about 90 kilometres north of Calgary.
There’s more in the article.
-jsq
U.S. #58 out of 90 in broadband cost
Stacey Higginbotham wrote for GigaOm 16 January 2014, Two charts that show how crappy U.S. broadband is,
Despite the deployments of a few gigabit networks by Google and the spread of faster cable technology, U.S. broadband is falling behind. It’s expensive both as a monthly bill and on a per-megabit basis when compared to the rest of the world. For example, at $89 per month on average, U.S. residents pay more for broadband than residents in 57 other countries including Canada, Bulgaria, Colombia and the U.K. That’s right, the U.S. ranks 58 out of 90 countries.
The research, from research firm Point Topic concludes that the higher broadband prices are “caused by lower investment in infrastructure as well as lower take-up which prevents them from benefiting from economies of scale.” To get the above data the firm compared the prices paid for residential broadband and includes standalone and bundled services offered over DSL, fiber and cable broadband in the fourth quarter of 2013.
Per-country comparisons like this are hard to act on, but even at the country level we know Continue reading
Deep divisions between U.S. and Asian nations in TPP –Wikileaks
Do you want foreign corporations to be able to sue the U.S. because your county has implemented restrictions of pipelines feeding liquid natural gas exports? Or because your country hasn’t locked up enough people for unintentional infringement of copyright? Or because your state has implemented a GMO-labeling law? Then you oppose the TPP.
After the November
release of
the Intellectual Property Rights Chapter,
in December Wikileaks released
two documents from the secret
closed Salt Lake City TPP chief negotiators’ meeting
of the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
showing deep divisions between the negotiating countries that have
already caused a U.S.-imposed TPP deadline to be missed.
These documents add potential international treaty enforcement of
“mandates” against restrictions on trade to protect national products
or environment or labor to all the reasons
EFF gives for opposing this corporate-power-grab treaty
and the
LNG export pressures for TPP that would drive up the price of fracked
“natural” gas and push pipelines through numerous states for the profit
of a few fossil fuel and utility executives and investors.
The deep divisions among the negotiating countries exposed Continue reading
Ask your Congress members to oppose TPP today
Here’s a handy form by EFF to oppose the secretly-negotiated privacy-deleting corporate-greed-defending natural gas export pipeline-enabling Trans-Pacific Parternship treaty.
Parker Higgins and Maira Sutton wrote for the Electronic Frontier Foundation 28 December 2013, 2013 in Review: The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement,
The biggest TPP story this year was the publication by WikiLeaks in November of the chapter titled “Intellectual Property.” Unfortunately, its contents confirmed many of our worst fears: from ratcheting up copyright term lengths around the world, to boxing in fair use, to mandating a draconian legal regime around DRM software, section after section contained clauses plucked from corporate wishlists and snubbed the public interest altogether.
And then there’s Ted Poe’s House Subcommittee pushing TPP for LNG exports that would propel “natural” fracked gas pipelines such as Spectra Energy’s Sabal Transmission gas pipe through private property and public rivers and watersheds and aquifers.
Here’s what’s up next: Continue reading