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
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
In 2004, the FCC initiated a proceeding to determine rules to allow the unlicensed operation of wireless communication devices in unused television band spectrum between channels 2 and 51. These vacant and unassigned television channels, known as the TV “white spaces,” would help make affordable wireless broadband in rural America a reality.
Although the U.S. once led the world in Internet deployment and innovation, our nation continues to plummet in international rankings in terms of broadband adoption, speeds and costs. As a result, there is growing support for an affirmative national broadband policy to promote more affordable and ubiquitous access to high-bandwidth connectivity. An MP3 audio recording can be downloaded below, while video is available at right.
Since 2001, the e-NC Authority of North Carolina has been at the forefront… more
...Addressing the New America Foundation, Page painted a picture of slippage in broadband penetration in the United States, framing his comments in Google's mission to “organize the world's information.” In his talk, Page noted that years of successful usage of wireless microphones in the UHF band suggests that unlicensed devices could similarly operate without causing interference. Page believes that tapping the unused TV white spaces for broadband access would be a tremendous opportunity to bring the Internet to more Americans,… more
REPLY COMMENTS OF CONSUMERS UNION,
CONSUMER FEDERATION OF AMERICA,
FREE PRESS,
AND
NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION
SUMMARY
Free Press, Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, and New America Foundation submit these comments in response to the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service’s request for input into the issue of long-term, comprehensive highcost universal service reform.
The New America Foundation/Wireless Future Program is pleased to announce that the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks (ISC4CWN) will be held on May 28th – May 30th, 2008 in Washington, DC.
Co-hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) at its downtown headquarters, IS4CWN is the largest gathering of community wireless networking developers, implementers and allies working to build universal, low-cost wireless broadband networks around the world. The Summit serves as an integral… more
Google co-founder Larry Page made a rare trip to Washington this week. No, he wasn't lobbying for net neutrality or being grilled about Internet censorship in China. It was all about the white spaces -- and Google's growing fixation with wireless communications.
With opposition mounting, Page came to bolster Google's push to gain public access to these white spaces, slivers of wireless spectrum between the broadcast channels used by TV stations. . .
