In the News: Christopher Mitchell
April 2018
Media Outlet: Governing
As we’ve documented over the years, a number of American small towns are taking on the big challenge of providing a better broadband Internet access future for their residents. In this article for Governing Magazine, Alex Marshall covers the phenomenon.
For his research, Marshall reached out to Christopher Mitchell, ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks initiative director for feedback on why small communities are investing in this infrastructure:
They are mostly towns you’ve probably never heard of, places like Sandy, Ore., Leverett, Mass., Lafayette, La., and Longmont, Colo. Yet these smaller communities, and hundreds more like them, have something even the techiest big cities such as New York, San Francisco and Seattle don’t have: widespread, fast and well-priced broadband service.
Big cities usually have the edge in the traditional drivers of economic development. They have the universities, the sports teams, the big airports, the interstate highway access, the ports. But in arguably the most forward-looking part of the economy, some smaller localities have the edge. They made it for themselves by developing their own broadband networks, typically employing the latest fiber-optic technology. “I believe over the next three to five years people are no longer going to be surprised that some small cities have much better internet access than big cities,” says Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, whose national map shows more than 500 communities with some type of publicly owned network.
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Read the full story here.
