Community Broadband: Approaches

Approaches to creating affordable access to the Internet. How are other communities using broadband to create a competitive advantage? How does a community get started? How do we keep up with rapidly changing technology, applications and a competetitive market? This is about public policy as it relates to enabling internet communications in your community.

Community Wireless:
A Sister page to this Community Broadband page that deals with wireless access.

MIT Program on Internet and Telecom Convergence
"ITC research aims to clarify uncertainties in the Internet's evolution, organized around three key areas of the Internet: user devices, network access, and global backbone transport."

Communiqué
"This site is all about how people use computers to communicate. It's about telepresence, social software, free software and a free Internet." Based in Sauble Beach, Ontario, Canada N0H 2G0

Let's Underwrite Broadband ( Feb 2003 )
Every American home should be connected to the information superhighway. The problem? The toll is too high. Ten bucks a month from Uncle Sam will help.

The Culture of Broadband: ( Jun 20, 2002 )
As usual, the future doesn't descend on us fully formed, rather it arrives
limping. It's a messy mix of incompatible standards, buggy technologies,
and a nagging uncertainty whether the real thing is still coming or whether
it's already over. But one overpriced cable connection, one hard-to-install
DSL or ISDN link, one experimental wireless network at a time, broadband is
becoming an unequally distributed reality; and the contours of this reality
are emerging.

The Broadband Difference: How online Americans' behavior changes with high-speed Internet connections at home ( Jun 23, 2002 )
This report focuses on the nature of broadband use in American homes. Roughly 24 million Americans (21% of all Internet users) have high-speed connections at home. The Pew Internet & American Life Project's survey of broadband Internet users shows that broadband users spend more time online, do more things, and do them more often than dial-up Internet users. There are three major ways in which broadband users distinguish themselves from their dial-up counterparts. Participate in current online poll.

SmartCommunities - Broadband:
acts as a clearing house of resources that help support the creation of Smart Communities across Canada as well as provide information on related best practices, applications and technologies. It will also provide resources related to broadband technologies, research studies, and funding programs as well as information on current broadband use and trends in Canada.

Preparing a Smart Communities Business Plan:
The Business Plan describes the ways and means by which the community plans to extract social and economic benefits from access to existing, improved, or new electronic networks. A well thought out Business Plan is essential if the community's initiatives are to attract financial and other support, and be successful.

Open Letter to the FCC on Spectrum Policy: Ultra Wide Band ( November 26, 2001 )
The FCC could do a great service to the American people by opening up wireless spectrum for innovative unlicensed activities. The remarkable success of wireless local area networks using the 802.11b (WiFi) protocol shows the potential of an "open spectrum" model. However, current spectrum allocation rules preclude development of this opportunity.

General Guide to Future Proof IT Infrastructure pdf ( June 2001 )
The Swedish ICT Commision
This Guide is addressed to persons in local government responsible for questions and decisions concerning the implementation of IT infrastructure within a municipality. It is also addressed to those who co-ordinate questions relating to IT infrastructure for neighbouring municipalities. In addition, it is addressed to the constructors of municipal networks…
The ICT Commission's vision of a future-proff infrastructure in Sweden is that:

• Everyone will have a fixed Internet connection of at least 5 Mbps real through put capacity within Sweden
by 2005. 5Mbps is and initial value and an annual doubling of capacity shall be feasible.
• By 2005, therefore, Sweden should have constructed a fine-meshed fibre optical network available to all.
• The network shall be technically and competitively neutral and open to all operators, the aim being for everyone,
through free competition, to gain access to high transmission capacity at low cost.

Network Your Community Wi-Lan, Canadian funding structures & approaches
Municipalities across Canada have been tasked by the federal government to provide their communities with affordable public access to the Internet, and the skills they need to use it effectively. community can benefit from one or several federal and provincial government funding initiatives that allow you to take advantage of emerging opportunities in the new global knowledge-based economy.

Municipal Aggregation: A Community Response to Emerging Competitive Opportunities

NRRI: Community Broadband Deployment Database

Business Models On the Web

Tool Kit for Bridging the Digital Divide in Your Community. This Tool Kit is intended for community leaders, government staff, business leaders and grass roots volunteers. It offers some basic tips on how to bridge the digital divide through the development of a community project.

The Digital Divide in a Liberal State: A Canadian Perspective The "digital divide" has emerged as a public policy challenge. This paper examines universal access public policy development in Canada within a North American context and its implications for addressing the digital divide. It concludes that the digital divide will not be eliminated either through public policy or the market due to the liberal public philosophy that is unique to and so strong in North America. The concept of the digital divide represents the dual structure characteristic of North American liberal social welfare policy

Collaborative Website: A Swiki is a collaborative website (or CoWeb, which is easier to say :-). Any page can be edited by anyone. While that seems dangerous (and can be dangerous), it's also amazingly powerful. No structure, no protocols, no standards, but enormous flexibility: Just edit and write. Amazingly, it usually works. It turns out that we all know a lot about writing and talking together. We tend not to mess up one another's space, we tend not to talk trash, and we tend to try to contribute. I guess it's the same reason that we don't generally go walking around writing on all available walls. (And, of course, it's much easier to step back to an earlier version than to clean up spray-paint!)

A Guide to preparing a business case for the use of electronic networks ( 1998 )
Government of Canada Internet Guide Third Edition

CyberSpace, Work, Society and Geography  
Internet resources

The Rural Telecom Consumer and Broadband Access: Market Research ( November 2000 )
Bottom line, there is a great opportunity to sell both Internet services and enhanced features to the underserved rural market.