News

Next Century Cities (NCC) is hosting Digital Northwest: A Broadband Summit for Regional Broadband Leaders at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center in Seattle, Washington. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is co-hosting the event.

Starting this spring, the City of Springfield, Massachusetts will offer free municipal Wi-Fi and new dark fiber capacity to a 7-block area of the city’s downtown known as the “Springfield Innovation District.”

Alabama

Google Fiber joins forces with municpal broadband network by Jon Brodkin, ArsTechnica

Officials in the City of Ammon, Idaho, are moving closer to expanding their municipal network to residents with a Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network. The FTTH expansion is the latest phase in their incremental approach in this community of 14,500 people in the southeast corner of Idaho.

Dear Readers: Since I first wrote this story with my attempt to analyze this bill, I have revisited my earlier interpretation. If you read this bill analysis before, you will notice some changes.

Vernon, Vermont, is a little town in search of a boost to the local economy.

Next Century Cities and WifiFoward will present the results of new research on wireless technologies. The report (to be released on February 29, 2016) provides a detailed analysis of LTE-U and Wi-Fi in the context of local governments.

Approximately 30,000 businesses and residential properties in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska, will have access to gigabit Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) by the end of 2016.

Alabama

Montgomery launches first city-owned Internet exchange point in Alabama by Colin Wood, GovTech

Kentucky

Huntsville Utilities and Google Fiber announced today that the utility will construct a dark fiber network and that Google Fiber will offer services to the community via the city's new fiber infrastructure investment.

Minnesota's Paul Bunyan Communications' is bringing better connectivity to homes and businesses across northern rural Minnesota via fiber. The cooperative is also helping local school districts save precious dollars while obtaining the Internet access kids need for a 21st century education.

Last fall, Durango joined a number of other Colorado communities that voted to reclaim local telecommunications authority. This January, the city began using its fiber resources to partner with a private provider and offer free Wi-Fi along the downtown corridor.

As communities across the country realize the big corporate providers may never bring the kind of connectivity they need, public-private partnerships (PPPs) are sprouting up everywhere. A new report by Joanne Hovis, Marc Schulhof, Jim Baller, and Ashley Stelfox, takes a look at the issues facing local governments and their private sector partners.

The Editorial Board from the Boston Globe recently kicked off a series titled "The Cutting Edge of the Common Good." The editors intend to offer suggestions for how to create a prosperous city through ideas to benefit Boston's 4.7 million residents. 

In Hudson, Ohio, local businesses prepare for the expansion of the municipal fiber network, Velocity Broadband, and a large business relocates its headquarters to take better advantage of the fiber connectivity.

Excitement from Local Businesses

The Coalition for Local Internet Choice North Carolina chapter (CLIC-NC) and the Community Broadband Networks Team here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) have teamed up to create a new fact sheet: Fast, Affordable, Modern Broadband: Critical for