Sascha Meinrath

As Internet access moves increasingly to mobile platforms, control over access to the public airwaves will determine whether wireless broadband networks are closed, costly and channelized - or open, affordable and innovative. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that spectrum is scarce and must be auctioned as exclusive licenses. The reality is emerging technologies and business models that allow shared, opportunistic and unlicensed access to an abundance of bandwidth for all. This forum will review the… more

In a major win for the public interest, the Broadband Data Improvement Act passed the Senate (on September 26th) and the House (on September 29th). Due to amendments, it now goes back to the Senate for final approval (should be pro-forma) before it lands on George Bush's desk.

With the United States falling further and further behind a host of other countries, the question on many people's minds (including the folks over at Point-Topic who created this graphic) is, "Why is this happening?"

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It was just last year that those of us raising alarms about the massive half-decade market failure in the United States to adequately provision broadband services were facing a misinformation campaign that raw numbers mattered more than percentage rankings. According to this argument, the U.S. broadband market was sound because we had more broadband lines than anyone else.

The misinformation brigade got so much attention (mainly due to incumbents funding a propaganda campaign that "everything is fine here, nothing to see"), that public interest groups had to issue… more

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been taking a lot of people to court--basically, harassing folks in an attempt to curb file-sharing. The $220,000 verdict against Jammy Thomas got a lot of news (and probably worried a lot of folks). However, on appeal (i.e., after a new court not cherry-picked by the RIAA to try the case looked things over), the RIAA lost… again. ZDnet covered the verdict.

At its heart, the verdict reaffirms that simply making a copyrighted work available is not the… more

Take the question of spectral availability. While this might seem one of the easiest to settle-is more than half of US TV spectrum lying fallow or is it not?—the answer isn't obvious. The New America Foundation, a think tank that supports white space devices, claims that 25 to 80 percent of TV bandwidth is unused, depending on where you look. When the group hosted Google co-founder Larry Page at a DC event a few months back, Page also spoke of… more

On the third annual "Earth Day for the Internet", communities across the country are holding events to learn about and advocate for that marvel of modern infrastructure, the Internet. In the nation's capital, advocates, experts and government representatives will honor OneWebDay, September 22, with a tribute to the Internet's role in politics and the politics of the Internet.

Organizers in DC are embracing OneWebDay 2008's theme of participation in democracy. They launched an e-Democracy time capsule on August 22, 2008 and… more

Just ask St. Cloud, Fla. This central Florida community of 28,000 residents commissioned and now owns a truly citywide Wi-Fi network at no additional cost to residents. For more than a year, it has been the only town in the country able to offer 100 percent service availability, according to a study released earlier this year by the independent wireless testing company Novarum. The survey dubbed St. Cloud’s $3 million network the best metro Wi-Fi in North America – ahead of Mountain View, Calif., where locally grown… more

“We’re finally coming back around to ideas that were around before the corporate franchise was shown to be a failure,” says Sascha Meinrath, research director of the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Program, who launched one of the nation’s first community wireless projects while he was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “So much money was being spent to push the corporate model that it was all cities heard about. There was no PR or marketing for community wireless groups. But unlike the… more

The policies set by the U.S. federal government on media ownership have tremendous impact on community media that traditionally has played an important role in fostering community awareness and involvement. For local municipalities and constituencies, the on-the-ground media ownership rules ultimately boils down to the question of how diverse the opinions expressed in local media will be and how representative of topical issues the local news will be.

The past twenty years have seen an unprecedented number of media mergers spanning… more

How we measure success is as important as what we are measuring. On March 19, 2008, the FCC dramatically revised its broadband data collection, in essence, finally giving in to mounting evidence that current assessments have been woefully inadequate. Previous data collection may have allowed politicians to declare "mission accomplished" -- that universal affordable broadband is available throughout the United States -- yet the fact remains that large swaths of the United States have fallen behind a growing list of… more