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New Fact Sheet: Community Broadband and Public Savings
We have already published a fact sheet on the critical role community broadband plays in job development. Now, ILSR presents a collection of how community owned broadband networks save money for local government, schools, and libraries while providing cutting edge services. The Public Savings Fact Sheet is now available.
Though schools, libraries, and other community anchors need access to faster, more reliable networks, the big cable and telephone companies have priced those services so high that they are breaking the budget. But when communities create their own connections, affordable high capacity connections are only one of the benefits. A community owned network offers the promise of self-determination -- of upgrades on the community's time table and increased reliability for emergency responders.
The Public Savings Fact Sheet is a great piece to share to mobilize other members of your community. Share it with decision makers and use it to start meaningful conversations. Distribute it widely and often.
We are always developing new resources. If you have an idea for a new fact sheet, we want to hear it.
Community Broadband Bits 16 - JD Lester and Larry Gates - Chanute, Kansas
Chanute's Gig: Rural Kansas Network Built Without Borrowing
Spirit AeroSystems Chooses Chanute
We told you how Chanute, Kansas, was using their community network to serve local businesses. Now we want to share a story about how the community network helped bring a new business to Chanute.
Chanute, who is named after Octave Chanute an aviation pioneer, adopts the motto "A Tadition of Innovation." Chanute has proven that they are serious about that mantra with the expansion of their community network. They boast free Wi-Fi in all green spaces and parks, schools that are connected with fiber and wireless, several fiber loops throughout the city, plans for a smart grid, and are even exploring FTTH capability.
Spirit AeroSystems, the world's largest supplier of commercial airplane assemblies and components, just opened a new manufacturing facility in Chanute. The plant is expected to create up to 150 new jobs in the southeastern Kansas community and will include a health clinic on site for employees.
As Spirit was approaching different communities, it had a variety of requirements that included reliable electricity and reliable broadband. Nothing exorbitant -- they weren't asking for a gig or even 100Mbps. But they needed reliability. And Chanute was poised to deliver. Publicly owned networks do not exist in a vacuum; they are often one piece of a well-run community.
If Chanute only had a slow DSL and absentee-owned cable company offering broadband, maybe Spirit still would have chosen them and maybe that would have been the tipping point for a different community. We don't know for sure.
What we do know is that Chanute is getting more jobs and that owning their own network helped.
Chanute, Kansas, Publicly Owned Fiber-Optic Network Serves Area Businesses
I continue to find it odd that more communities with publicly owned networks do not create official videos or other promotional material that is readily accessible on the Internet. Videos discussing fiber-optic investments continue to be the exception to the rule.
But it was a video promoting Chanute's fiber-to-the-business network that I stumbled across in a search for something else. It turns out that Chanute has built a network with a variety of current and planned uses: