Archive for April, 2009
Sarah Palin and the Alaska Budget
Sunday, April 26th, 2009ALERT: Health Emergency Declared - Swine Flu
Sunday, April 26th, 2009J. Todd Foster - They Use Live Dogs for Shark Bait…..
Sunday, April 26th, 2009Virginia - A Hotbed for Recruiting Terrorists?
Sunday, April 26th, 2009On Being Narrow-Minded
Sunday, April 26th, 2009The Left’s Losing Strategy Against Bob McDonnell
Saturday, April 25th, 2009John Brownlee Will Fight To Keep the GUANTANAMO PRISONERS Out Of Virginia
Friday, April 24th, 2009Delegate Harvey Morgan Endorses John Brownlee
Friday, April 24th, 2009Part One. Partisan Blogging; Leftist Edition
Friday, April 24th, 2009Rural broadband is creating job opportunities
Friday, April 24th, 2009From Beaumont, Texas, an interesting article with some good anecdotal data about newly emerging job opportunities where high performance, affordable broadband is available in rural areas. And where it is not, people are actually renting commercial office space to do jobs that could be done from home--a very sad state of affairs. Nationwide, millions of new jobs could open up in rural communities if the right kind of affordable broadband is available.
David Lee Lawson - 12/10/66 - 4/24/07
Friday, April 24th, 2009730 Days Ago
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009Nielsen: 2000% increase in video delivered by the Internet
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009A new report by Nielsen says time spent watching video online has increased in the past five years by 2,000%. And the number of people watching video online is increasing by 10% per year, meaning in about seven years, everyone will be watching video on the Internet. TV is dead, dead, dead.
And as I have been saying for years, the Internet business model being used today by the incumbents and smaller providers is upside down and unsustainable--bandwidth by the bucket does not work when users are asking to refill the bucket faster and faster each day, week, and month. And charging to refill the bucket does not scale up, as the bandwidth quickly becomes unaffordable when watching lots of video.
The solution is to change the business model. It's not hard, and the incumbent providers would actually make more money after the conversion. But some of them are going to go bankrupt rather than admit they need to change.
Wilson, NC fighting for right to offer broadband
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009Wilson, North Carolina decided a couple of years ago to build it's own municipal fiber network after it got tired of begging incumbent providers for better services and getting turned down. Now the fight is being taken to the state legislature, where the incumbent providers are trying to get laws passed to prevent local governments from getting involved in telecom efforts but to also prevent local governments for applying for broadband stimulus funds. This is also happening in Pennsylvania.
Part of the problem is that Wilson selected a municipal retail model, which means residents and businesses buy their telecom services directly from the city, and incumbents typically fight this approach vigorously. An open access, open services model like those used with projects like The Wired Road and nDanville lets incumbent providers use the new community-owned digital road system to sell services--buyers of telecom services purchase directly from private sector providers, not the local government.
Wilson has started a blog on the issue.
Welcome to the Waffle House
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009ZeroGravity Flights Take-Off in Virginia!
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009Municipal fiber better, less expensive
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009Here is a nice little table that compares the price of broadband in various places around the world. Stockholm's municipal fiber network has the best pricing: $11 per month for 100/100 megabits (symmetric). Compare that to some U.S. offerings like one incumbent's 50/20 megabit (asymmetric, less than half the capacity) service for $145.