One of the goals for this site is to help communities that are organizing to build their own community-owned broadband networks. To that end, we are going to build a library of resources used by communities that have already organized for the same goals.
We want to collect pamphlets, flyers, videos, audio (of debates, radio programs, etc), anything that will useful to other communities and allows us to learn from each other. If you have suggestions for items we can include in this effort, please let us know.
I'm going to start this with a flyer John St Julien shared with me on my recent visit to Lafayette: a flyer they used to advertise one of the many community meetings they held prior to their successful referendum in 2005. You can download a higher resolution pdf here.
Ruston, Louisiana officials say they’re throwing in the towel, and will be selling a city-owned fiber network that has existed for the better part of 15 years. City officials say they finalized the decision at a city council meeting earlier this month, though they’d already sent out a Request for Proposal (RFP) for potential bidders as early as February.
As the municipal broadband movement continues to gain momentum, here is a new fact sheet that highlights the dramatic surge in the building of publicly-owned, locally controlled high-speed Internet infrastructure. We also unveil a new map of municipal broadband networks across U.S.
The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund was supposed to drive affordable fiber into vast swaths of long-underserved parts of rural America. But the program has been plagued with problems since its inception, putting both current and future broadband funding opportunities at risk. French-owned cable company Altice is the latest to announce it would be defaulting on 18 census block groups in Louisiana.
The American Association of Public Broadband’s (AAPB) publishes a new step-by-step handbook to guide communities in building their own broadband networks. The handbook is a key part of AAPB's strategy to double the number of public networks in the next five years, supporting communities in leveraging these networks for economic development, smart city initiatives, and attracting new residents.
In the quest to unlock billions of dollars in broadband infrastructure money, Louisiana and Virginia have outpaced all other states in the speed with which they are dispatching the BEAD program’s requirements. Louisiana was the first to complete the challenge process and is still the only state to have received approval for Volume 2 of its initial proposal. Virginia, meanwhile, has completed their challenge process but now appears locked in a battle with the NTIA over the low-cost plan parameters they intend to set. How their challenge maps are built and displayed offer lessons for BEAD moving forward.
The Center for Digital Equity has published a new fact sheet for digital navigators that explains commonly used words related to Internet access that are not so familiar to those outside of the tech industry.