Use of fast Internet access by as many people as possible improves
local income and jobs, and fast Internet access is necessary for
creative workers, according to a nationwide detailed study.
Want more income, jobs, and creative workers?
Get as many people as possible to use fast affordable Internet connections:
that’s the result of a nationwide detailed study.
Adoption matters more than availability, and speed matters
for creative workers.
This research yields important findings on the effect of broadband
on economic gains, namely on household income and employment levels.
The ability to do matched county comparisons, specifically in
non-metro counties, demonstrates the influence of adoption (as
opposed to availability) in producing these positive outcomes, and
constitutes another indication that development efforts should focus
on mobilizing populations to subscribe to and use broadband
capabilities. Again, cultivating local leadership, mobilizing the
services of cooperative extension educators nationwide, and working
more closely with each State Broadband Initiative could be fruitful
avenues for targeting adoption.
We’re in a fertile field for economic improvement this way:
Another bad idea from ALEC already passed in SC and NC and is now in the GA
legislature, getting coverage in several national technical
and political blogs:
HB 282, which would effectively forbid
municipal broadband if any commercial carrier offers 1.5Mbps.
It's up for a hearing this week: time to call your state rep.
Incumbent broadband providers are pushing legislation that would
restrict Georgia towns from building municipal broadband networks.
Under the proposal, if a single home in a census tract has Internet
access at speeds of 1.5Mbps or above, the town would be prohibited
from offering broadband service to anyone in that tract.
State-level restrictions on municipal broadband networks are
He said you can get it as close to him as Quarterman Road.
I can attest to that because I have 3 megabit per second DSL,
due to being just close enough to Bellsouth’s DSL box on Cat Creek Road,
but most of Quarterman Road can’t get DSL due to distance.
There are some other land-line possibilties, involving cables in the ground
or wires on poles.
Then there are wireless possibilities, including EVDO, available from Verizon,
with 750 kilobit per second (0.75 Mbps) wide area access from cell phone towers.
Verizon’s towers could also be used for WIFI antennas,
for up to 8 Mbps Internet access, over a wide scale.
Internet speed and access —John S. Quarterman
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 8 May 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
…Lafayette, Louisiana,
Bowling Green, Kentucky,
Lagrange, Georgia,
and
Thomasville, Georgia.
They use it for
public safety,
education (Wiregrass Tech, VSU),
and
It attracts new industry.
If you want knowledge-based industry,
they’re going to be expecting Internet access not just at work,
but at home, whereever they live.
369,629 people died on America’s roads between 2001 and 2009. Following
its analysis of UK casualties last week, transport data mapping experts
ITO World have taken the official data from the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration – and produced this powerful map using
OpenStreetMap. You can zoom around the map using the controls on the
left or search for your town using the box on the right – and the key
is on the top left. Each dot represents a life
The national view is very interesting, but let’s look at Lowndes County:
I don’t know what that adds up to, but it looks to me like a lot of dead people,
and in just nine years, from 2001 to 2009.
Far more dead people than killed by terrorism.
OK, but where are these fatalities happening?
All over the county.
Let’s zoom in on Hambrick Road:
Continue reading →
Let’s leapfrog Thomasville in the 21st century equivalent of roads, rail, and airports: Internet speeds!
Here’s another point from Chris Miller at the
2011 Economic Summit,
according to the VDT story by Dawn Castro 18 May 2011,
:
“Thomasville didn’t have hi-speed internet,
so the process of moving products quickly was not possible,”
he said, “With Rose Net hi-speed broadband, it is now able to
work 25 times faster.
That one simple step boosted economic product growth,
and as we all know, the technical industry creates a
wage growth path.”
Such publicly owned networks can offer services that incumbents don’t,
such as the 1Gbps fiber network in Chattanooga, Tennessee, run by the
government-owned electric power board. And they sometimes have more
incentive to reach every resident, even in surrounding rural areas,
in ways that might not make sense for a profit-focused company.
According to this map of
Community Broadband Networks
by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance,
quite a few small cities in south Georgia have municipal cable networks:
Saturday I heard somebody bragging about how fast the Internet is in Atlanta.
That would be maybe a tenth of the speed it is in Tokyo.
But still blazing fast compared to the broke-down wagon in a muddy ditch
speeds we get in south Georgia:
I wrote that article more than a year ago, and Internet speeds in rural
Georgia have not improved much if at all.
This isn’t just about playing Farmville.
It’s about communicating with your relatives,
about competing in business,
Continue reading →
Use of fast Internet access by as many people as possible improves
local income and jobs, and fast Internet access is necessary for
creative workers, according to a nationwide detailed study.
