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Broadband task force status report says current government funding won't be enough to achieve universal adoption The FCC says 3 million to 6 million people are "unserved" by basic broadand service, and that current government funding won't be enough to get broadband to all of them. "[C]urrent mechanisms, such as Universal Service and stimulus grants, are insufficient to achieve national purposes," according to a status report Tuesday from members of the FCC's broadband task force. The government has allocated $7.2 billion in stimulus grants and loans for broadband, while the FCC is considering expanding the Universal Service Fund (which telecom...

SNIPPET: "When including about $10.5 billion in matching funds committed by the applicants, the total price tag for the proposed broadband projects topped $38 billion. The Recovery Act provided a total of $7.2 billion to the two agencies to expand broadband services, of which NTIA will use $4.7 billion, largely to deploy broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas, and RUS will invest $2.5 billion to facilitate broadband deployment in primarily rural communities. Approximately $2.4 billion from RUS and up to $1.6 billion from NTIA is available in this first grant round."

The federal government is spending $7.2 billion over the next year to bring better broadband to the masses, a lofty goal by any measure. But the feds are making it loftier than it needs ...

One gets the feeling that if Dallas Mavericks owner and HDNet CEO Mark Cuban wasn't absolutely terrified of broadband video, he wouldn't be constantly ranting about how broadband video is going to fail. Cuban's spent the last five years urging ISPs to block P2P, supporting the cable industry's vision of net neutrality (as in: none), insisting the Internet is dead, lamenting broadband video's shortcomings and generally pouting a lot. Apparently, Cuban believes that if he scares his readership enough, the inevitable advertising revenue losses cable TV will someday feel from online video won't actually happen. This week on the Mark...

StimulatingBroadband.com 07/09/09 A federal agency program first announced online on Monday, July 6, to recruit volunteer reviewers to make approval and denial decisions on the first round of approximately $ 1.6 billion in Recovery Act broadband stimulus competitive grant applications has set-off a firestorm of protest. The program is being launched by the National Information and Telecommunications Administration (NTIA), of the US Department of Commerce. A description of the volunteer reviewer solicitation program was posted at: Call for Reviewers Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, part of the joint federal agency site BroadbandUSA.gov. NTIA states its its Call that the agency "...is...

Wattsburg, Pa. — Vice President Joe Biden visited a small town on the outskirts of Erie today to talk to rural folks about federal stimulus money that can be used to expand broadband access to the Internet for rural areas that typically have poor connections. Apparently stimulus money and broadband are not all that interesting to the local folk here: Only around 100 or so people have showed up so far to hear Biden talk at noon at Seneca High School off Route 8 in Wattsburg. The room looked so sparse that about 30 or so chairs were removed by...

WASHINGTON -- Obama administration officials will announce rules Wednesday for handing out $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus funds, but some companies already are raising concerns about how long it could take to award the money. Officials are expected to detail how they plan to distribute $4.7 billion in broadband money from the Commerce Department in grants and $2.5 billion from the Agriculture Department in grants or loans.

Doug King publishes his keyboard music online and his wife, Marjorie, sells home-made pottery to customers in Iceland, China and New Zealand. But doing business from their rural Dane County house is virtually impossible without high-speed Internet. "We got to the point where we’re simply unable to do business" using the dial-up Internet their phone company provides, King said. The couple finally signed up for a wireless modem from Verizon, which in the last year has sought to build nine cell towers in rural Dane County to keep up with growing demand. But wireless service isn’t available everywhere, either, leaving...

Analysts say the value of the Internet means providers can sell bandwidth much like utility companies sell electricity or municipalities sell water. Time Warner Cable's expansion of its bandwidth cap testing marks the evolution of the Internet to a utility, like water and energy, where people pay for what they use. People who have used the Internet for years have grown accustomed to paying one monthly price for unlimited access. However, that model is no longer sustainable as the increasing number of devices and people place higher demands on bandwidth, a finite commodity. Without controls, Internet users could experience "brownouts"...

Cable and telephone companies are gearing up for a fight as regulators begin work Wednesday on a national broadband strategy that could bring major changes to how Internet services are delivered to American homes. The $787 billion government stimulus package requires the Federal Communications Commission to provide a road map for how potentially billions of future taxpayer dollars should be spent to build or upgrade Internet lines across the U.S. The agency will map out how the U.S. can ensure that every American not only has access to broadband, but has service that runs much faster than what's available today....

Obama's $8B Broadband Plan Launches Tuesday Next Tuesday, the White House will launch its high-speed Internet plan using more than $8 billion in stimulus funds. Leaders from the Department of Commerce, Department of Agriculture and Federal Communications Commission will meet to discuss how the different agencies will use the funds to rural and other areas that don't currently have high-speed, or broadband, access to the Web. There are separate programs at the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications & Information Administration and the USDA's Rural Utilities Service that fund construction of new high-speed Internet networks. They are mostly focused on rural areas...

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - A new study is revealing, what some may consider, startling information about Utahans and what they do online. New research shows Utah is number one in the nation for online pornography subscriptions. The research is just coming out Tuesday, from a study done by Harvard Business School Professor Benjamin Edelman, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. It tracks subscriptions to online pornography sites by states. The study measures the online porn subscriptions per thousand people, per thousand homes with internet users, per thousand homes with broadband users, and also when accounting for...

The House Democrats' $825 billion legislation released on Thursday was supposedly intended to "stimulate" the economy. Backers claimed that speedy approval was vital because the nation is in "a crisis not seen since the Great Depression" and "the economy is shutting down." That's the rhetoric. But in reality, Democrats are using the 258-page legislation to sneak Net neutrality rules in through the back door. The so-called stimulus package hands out billions of dollars in grants for broadband and wireless development, primarily in what are called "unserved" and "underserved" areas. The U.S. Department of Commerce is charged with writing checks-with-many-zeros-on-them to...

Under an Obama administration, some form of broadband stimulus package is coming—and $6 billion is already being kicked around as a starting point. But if you build it, will they come? Pew's Internet & American Life Project reminds us that a hardcore contingent of holdouts won't, no matter how cheap or how fast the connection is. One important component of any broadband stimulus would be availability, with many pundits hoping for a scheme similar to the universal service scheme that wired even rural America for phone service decades ago. In summing up its recent research on broadband, Pew's Associate Director...

Mobile broadband users in Stockholm will soon be able to surf the internet on a new high speed 4G network, following the signing of a deal between Ericsson and TeliaSonera. The order from Finnish-Swedish telecom provider TeliaSonera marks the first commercial deployment of Ericsson’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) network technology and will provide mobile internet users with data speeds up to ten times faster than those offered on current networks. "LTE brings the highest possible performance and network capacity, which is needed to meet the needs of the fast growing group of mobile broadband users around the world,” said Ericsson’s...

Every household in the country will be guaranteed access to broadband internet, according to a draft report by Lord Carter on the future of the telecoms and media industries.Lord Carter, the communications minister, will propose a "universal service commitment" to broadband - akin to the guarantee offered on postal services and fixed-line telephones - that by 2012 would provide minimum download speeds of 2 megabits per second to every household that wants it, according to people who have seen a draft of his report, entitled Digital Britain. Such speeds enable people to watch video online, including the BBC iPlayer.The...

President-elect Barack Obama's ambitious economic recovery plan has a goal to create 3 million American jobs in the next two years. Broadband is a part of the answer. Broadband has the potential to transform our country. It will create jobs in the growth sectors of our economy — jobs that are driving the collaboration and interaction economy. Obama deserves our full support as he looks to revitalize our economy. An economic stimulus package that focuses on infrastructure must put America's broadband infrastructure at the head of the list. We have the opportunity to bring broadband to those who do not...

The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders. Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers. At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic...

Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance. Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that: The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. A few years ago, Google's apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as...

License Plates for the Internet - The Blueprints for Obama's Assault on the Internet The report's recommendations emphasize taking away cybersecurity from DHS in order to create a special department to oversee cybersecurity. It recommends ending the division between civilian and national security systems. And calls for establishing "international norms" when it comes to the internet. And it focuses a good deal on identity verification, not just for Federal employees, but for ordinary Americans as well. The report urges a move away from passwords, and toward physical identity verification, via a device that would verify an individual's identity. And calls...