Eight Bold Steps to a National Broadband Strategy

Jim Baller and Casey Lide, well known for their broadband legal work and excellent daily listserv on community broadband and telcom issues (see http://www.baller.com/contact.html), have just released an excellent proposal to help guide a national broadband policy, called “Eight Bold Steps to a National Broadband Strategy” see http://www.baller.com/pdfs/baller-lide_8Steps_NatBBStrategy.pdf What is interesting about this paper is that it mirrors what many local leaders have done with the Get Broadband program – Form a local leadership group, understand your local market, identify and study your options and take definitive action. A National Broadband Strategy would lay the foundation for better laws that promote broadband. There are new voices calling for this type of action every day.

Given that the Get Broadband communities (and friends) include new and not-so-new voices we wanted to ask you blog readers what you thought. Do you think a national vision is important, possible, too early, too late? Have you read this vision or others you could tell us about? What did you think? What would you add, change or remove? Most importantly, how – if at all – would a shared vision help with your local efforts?

GIS used to map city access to healthy foods

National Public Radio is current running a story on a group in Philadelphia that is using high-tech mapping technologies to show that people in poor neighborhoods need more places to shop for healthy food. (You can read or listen to the story online.)

It’s a great example of how access to broadband technology can provide access to information that will make a difference in the lives in a community.

CPI suing FCC to get at real state of broadband

Ars Technica just published an article (CPI suing FCC to get at real state of broadband competition in the US) about the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) and their struggles to gain access to raw data collected by the FCC.

The FCC collects information from every telecom company in the US; they give the agency data on each company’s line deployments, broken down by ZIP code. The FCC reports on this data but the results have been questioned by several, including last year by the General Accounting Office.

It is an interesting case that brings to the fore two issues that go hand in hand: Freedom of Information and equal access to broadband technology.