No Scale Advantage in Netflix Speed Ranking

Date: 28 Apr 2014 | posted in: MuniNetworks | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

Netflix has continued to publish monthly rankings of ISPs average speed in delivering Netflix video content to subscribers. Though they first published data about the largest, national ISPs like Comcast, AT&T, and the link, they have an expanded list with many more ISPs. I recognize two municipal networks on the expanded list of 60 ISPs. For … Read More

Report: Energy Storage – The Next Charge for Distributed Energy

Date: 26 Mar 2014 | posted in: Energy, Energy Self Reliant States | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

Browse the Report Introduction What is Energy Storage? Empowering Local Energy Community Solar and Storage Removing Barriers to Storage Supporting Renewable Energy Summary Footnotes DOWNLOAD THE REPORT Executive Summary Distributed energy storage promises to change the electricity system during the next decade, as fundamentally as distributed renewable energy has in the last decade. Already, promising examples … Read More

Crap Cable Threatens Cloud Services

Date: 24 Sep 2013 | posted in: MuniNetworks | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

For my money, the best headline of last week was “The U.S.’s crap infrastructure threatens the cloud.” The rant goes on to explain just how crummy our access to the Internet is. As a patriotic American, I find the current political atmosphere where telecom lobbyists set the agenda to be a nightmare. All over the world, … Read More

Locally Owned Networks Protect Privacy and Limit Consumer Surveillance

Date: 2 Aug 2013 | posted in: MuniNetworks | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

Since the story broke about the NSA domestic spying practices, debate among concerned citizens has revolved around the Big Brother surveillance model. Most of us shudder at the thought of our federal agencies from DC watching, noting, and recording our actions. However, there is another type of Internet surveillance that largely escapes notice and likewise threatens … Read More

Utah’s Xmission Keeps Customer Data Private

Date: 20 Jul 2013 | posted in: MuniNetworks | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

We have not wirtten much on the NSA spying scandal but encountered a recent article in the Guardian that our readers can appreciate. Rory Carroll reports that Xmission, one of the local Internet service providers working with UTOPIA, has long refused to turn over private data to local, state and federal officials absent a proper warrant. … Read More

We Can’t Shop Our Way to a Better Economy

Date: 27 Nov 2012 | posted in: MuniNetworks | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

Our colleague at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Stacy Mitchell (too brilliant to be a relation of mine), recently gave an incredible presentation that focuses on some of the threats to our economy and how we can build stronger, more resilient communities. She doesn’t discuss broadband explicitly, but much of her critique of the largest corporations … Read More

New Book Investigates How Big Companies Like AT&T Rip Us Off

Date: 29 Sep 2012 | posted in: MuniNetworks | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

A  recent book by David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print, examines specifically how big companies have found ways to take advantage of the tax and regulatory systems to their benefit and to the detriment of consumers. The sad part – we don’t even realize it. Johnston discusses how big companies and their leaders exploit tax rules to re-distribute … Read More

U.S. Wind Project Size

Date: 24 Jul 2012 | posted in: Energy, Energy Self Reliant States | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

Big dreams for renewable energy often goad people into imagining big wind projects, with hundreds of turbines.  But lots of smaller projects are just as likely to add up to big numbers. Counting wind projects from 1999-2010 (based on data from LBNL’s excellent Wind Technologies Market report) the average size of an American wind project is … Read More

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