On Friday, February 21, 2014, Christopher Mitchell will be speaking in Stockholm at the Stockholm Waterfront Congress Center. The event, titled Fibre: The key to creating world-class IT regions, will begin at 8:30 a.m. in Sweden (1:30 a.m. CST for viewers in the U.S.) and will be livestreamed. Chris will be providing an update on fiber … Read More
“In Mexico we have a saying: ‘don’t ask to be breastfed!'” laughs local radio presenter, Keyla Ramirez. “We have the satisfaction of no longer having to ask them: ‘Please, come and install a service for which we’re going to pay you’.” One Mexican community is exercising its self-reliance muscle to create its own cell phone network. … Read More
This is an older column, but the introduction is so dead-on, I wanted to draw more attention to it: If Dwight Eisenhower had General Motors and George W. Bush had Halliburton, Barack Obama arguably has Comcast. US presidents are often linked to one or two corporations that donate a lot of money to them and then … Read More
Though we often discuss some of the ways European nations have surpassed the U.S. in Internet network investment, they also have some counter-productive rules that limit investment. The Manchester Evening News recently published an article about a plan to bring high speed Internet to a deprived area of 30,000 homes where access is either slow or … Read More
We introduced you to Olds, Alberta and their community network O-Net in 2012. Now this community of 8,500 will be the first Canadian “gig town” where residents will have access to a gig at incredibly low prices. CBC News reports that the Olds Institute for Community and Regional Development, the nonprofit organization building the network, recently approved … Read More
Due to the many exciting developments in the U.S., we rarely have time to peek at interesting projects overseas, but Australia is experiencing a political fight over its ambitious open access network. The opposition party wants to cut the costs of the project by transforming it from a FTTH network to a FTTN project – Fiber-to-the-node … Read More
Back in 2010, we reported on SuperNet in Alberta, Canada. We noted how, even though it resulted in significant middle-mile infrastructure expansion, there were still many, many Canadians along the route that were not connected. We drew a parallel between that experience and the focus on middle mile infrastructure via the broadband stimulus programs. In October, … Read More
For this week’s Community Broadband Bits, we venture outside the U.S. to interview Benoit Felten of Diffraction Analysis about the Stokab muni fiber network in Stockholm, Sweden. Stokab appears to be the most successful open access fiber network in the world. Benoit has just published a case study of Stokab and is an expert on broadband … Read More
The Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation just released a report titled “The Cost of Connectivity.” The report, authored by Hibah Hussain, Danielle Kehl, Benjamin Lennett, Chiehyu Li, and Patrick Lucey examines 22 cities across the planet for speed, triple play offerings, and what consumers can get for $35. The results, unfortunately, are not … Read More
