Tag Archives: Internet access speed

Secret meeting of Lowndes County Commission and state reps @ LCC 2013-12-20

The VDT report doesn’t say when or where, and doesn’t say whether Dexter Sharper (District 177) wasn’t invited or chose not to attend.

There’s nothing about this meeting in the online agendas or calendar, even though that calendar lists Pictures with Santa at the Historical Courthouse (12/19/2013).

There is this undated public notice with no agenda:

The Lowndes County Board of Commissioners will meet with members of Lowndes County’s Legislative Delegation on Friday, December 20, 2013, at 4:00 p.m. in the Commissioner’s Conference Room located on the 3rd floor of the Judicial-Administrative Complex, 327 North Ashley Street, Valdosta, Georgia.

K. Paige Dukes, County Clerk
pdukes@lowndescounty.com 229-671-2400

Matthew Woody wrote for the VDT 22 December 2013, Commissioners host local delegation, oddly omitting the when and where and much of the why from the traditional who, what, when, where, and why of journalism.

The Lowndes County Commission hosted Continue reading →

Rural broadband economics slides

Use of fast Internet access by as many people as possible improves local income and jobs, and fast Internet access is necessary for creative workers, according to a nationwide detailed study.

Courtesy of lead author Brian Whitacre (pictured), here are the slides from Broadband’s Contribution to Economic Health in Rural Areas: A Causal Analysis, presented at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference and previously blogged here as General broadband adoption improves rural economic health. They’re a lot easier to see than my blurry pictures. You can see the Valdosta MSA on the maps of some of their underlying data.

-jsq

U.S. broadband among most expensive worldwide: why?

We don’t have to continue letting the duopoly gouge us for slow and expensive Internet access. We don’t have to wait for Washington or Atlanta, either. We do need our local leaders to stop defining away the issue and get on with doing something about.

Tom Geoghegan wrote for BBC News 27 October 2013, Why is broadband more expensive in the US?

Home broadband in the US costs twice as much as it does in Europe and three times as much as it does in South Korea, according to a new report. Why?

Because we let the duopoly get away with it, as Susan Crawford has been reminding us for a while now. Continue reading →

Open House at Mildred Hunter on Common Community Vision @ VLMPO 2013-10-23

“We have broadband”, said Bill Slaughter, while other people had different opinions on that and other topics Wednesday night at the Mildred Hunter Community Center.

Corey Hull introduced the session and a small but vocal group of citizens discussed all the main topic headings. He noted that there are more than twelve plans already in place in the various cities and counties in the Valdosta Lowndes Metropolitan Planning Area. Yet there were many common themes in those plans, and VLMPO was looking for other common areas in these meetings and online, and more specifically strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. If you have a community group of any size, VLMPO can come talk to it. They’ve been to the Chamber, to Rotary, to churches, etc. They expect to wrap this process up in December, with common vision and goals for the next ten or twenty years.

Local officials present included Matt Martin, Planning and Zoning Administrator for the City of Valdosta, and Lowndes County Chairman Bill Slaughter. Martin didn’t say much, but Bill Slaughter was quite vocal. I thanked him for speaking up, even though I didn’t agree with everything he said. He helped clarify current county codes for stormwater retention, and Martin helped clarify the city’s codes.

As a long-time participant in local development (he’s CEO of Waller Heating and Air) Slaughter said when people are buying houses all they look at is Continue reading →

General broadband adoption improves rural economic health

Want more income, jobs, and creative workers? Get as many people as possible to use fast affordable Internet connections: that’s the result of a nationwide detailed study. Adoption matters more than availability, and speed matters for creative workers.

Broadband’s Contribution to Economic Health in Rural Areas: A Causal Analysis Brian Whitacre, Oklahoma State University; Roberto Gallardo, Mississippi State University; Sharon Strover, University of Texas at Austin, presented at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, September 2013.

Conclusion and Policy Implications

This research yields important findings on the effect of broadband on economic gains, namely on household income and employment levels. The ability to do matched county comparisons, specifically in non-metro counties, demonstrates the influence of adoption (as opposed to availability) in producing these positive outcomes, and constitutes another indication that development efforts should focus on mobilizing populations to subscribe to and use broadband capabilities. Again, cultivating local leadership, mobilizing the services of cooperative extension educators nationwide, and working more closely with each State Broadband Initiative could be fruitful avenues for targeting adoption.

We’re in a fertile field for economic improvement this way:

Figure 1 displays Continue reading →

AT&T can do gigabit when competing with Google Fiber

A challenge gets the incumbents beyond selling slow and expensive as long as they can. Both these networks will use fiber optics, and that plus fast wireless to reach everybody else would be very interesting.

Roger Cheng wrote for Cnet yesterday, AT&T attempts to out-Google Google in Austin fiber race: The telco says it will begin offering its “GigaPower” service to Austin and surrounding areas this year, with further expansion and a 1-gigabit connection planned in 2014. But how much will it cost?

The company said on late Monday that it would launch its “GigaPower” super-fast home Internet service on December 1 in Austin, a city that Google has said it would deploy its own speedy Google Fiber service.

GigaPower would start with speeds of 300 megabit per second, or roughly 40 times the speed of the average U.S. Internet home connection, before upgrading customers to 1 gigabit per second next year. Google also plans to offer its own 1-gigabit connection some time next year.

By moving first 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 →

Common Community Vision for Lowndes County

What do you the citizens want Lowndes County to be? Here’s a chance to speak up, so when somebody asks where were you when the decisions were being made, you don’t have to answer “lying on the couch watching television.” (Thanks to Nolen Cox for that phrase.)

Corey Hull wrote on facebook today, Help Spread the Word for the Future of Lowndes County,

My office is conducting a survey and gathering public input on Facebook (go to www.facebook.com/valdostalowndesmpo) about what they want the Lowndes County Common Community Vision to be ( www.bit.ly/LowndesCCV). So far our participation has been low. I am calling on all of you to encourage your friends, family and colleagues to spread the word and let us know what you think about the future of Lowndes County and its cities.

Over the next two months there will be future opportunities for public input so stay tuned.

Thanks for your help.

On the Southern Georgia Regional Commission’s website, Lowndes County Common Community Vision, Continue reading →

How fast industries can change: mobile phones and solar power

In only half a dozen years Microsoft went from laughing at the iPhone to admitting MS had none of the mobile phone or mobile device market, while Apple became the most valuable company in the world. Another entrenched industry, electric power will also change radically in only a few years, and solar power will win like the Internet did.

MG Siegler of Google Ventures blogged this on ParisLemon 20 September 2013, What A Difference Six Years Makes…

Steve Ballmer, 2007:

Right now we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year.

Steve Ballmer, a few months later:

It’s sort of a funny question. Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody.

Now we’ll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.

Steve Ballmer, yesterday:

Mobile devices. We have almost no share.

And it wasn’t just Steve Jobs riding Moore’s Law on an iPhone: Continue reading →

Not spots of Internet coverage in the U.K.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Jonathan Blake wrote for BBC 30 August 2013, Campaigners challenge countryside mobile coverage plan,

Last month details were given about which so-called “not spots” would benefit from the £150m Mobile Infrastructure Plan.

The Countryside Alliance has said that it thinks the approach is “not good enough”.

Under the plan, Vodafone, EE, O2 and Three will operate equipment paid for by government funds.

“It’s brilliant that they’re doing it,” said Charlotte Cooper from the Countryside Alliance.

“[But] we’re a little bit concerned Continue reading →

On the LAKE front

Citizen dialog for transparent process by the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange