Bruce Kerfoot summed up an equally pressing issue at the summit. He owns Gunflint Lodge near Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area.
Kerfoot said his family recently decided to vacation in a remote Swiss village. It took them two minutes to make an online reservation at the resort they had chosen. "There is not one person in Europe who can make an online reservation with me," Kerfoot said.
Further, Kerfoot said he hasn't had a foreign visitor all year while half the customers at Canadian wilderness resorts in the Rockies have come from Asia where travelers overwhelmingly prefer to book online.
Living in remote and rugged northeastern Minnesota, Kerfoot is among some 100,000 households in the state that don't have broadband. And he can't get it even if he wants to pay for it.
The Cost of Digital Exclusion: Rural Minnesota waits for high-speed Internet
Some great coverage here of how the America's telcos are choking off business for rural Americans:
Federal Government Buys Into a Telco-sponsored Oxymoron: Satellite Broadband
Here's how the federal government perpetuates the myth that satellite internet service is broadband:
Just as satellites orbiting the earth provide necessary links for telephone and television service, they can also provide links for broadband. Satellite broadband is another form of wireless broadband, and is also useful for serving remote or sparsely populated areas. [Satellite is NOT broadband]
Downstream and upstream speeds for satellite broadband depend on several factors, including the provider and service package purchased, the consumer’s line of sight to the orbiting satellite, and the weather. Typically a consumer can expect to receive (download) at a speed of about 500 Kbps and send (upload) at a speed of about 80 Kbps. These speeds may be slower than DSL and cable modem, but they are about 10 times faster than the download speed with dial-up Internet access. Service can be disrupted in extreme weather conditions. [And you cannot use it for real-time commodities trading, VPN, VoIP, or watching videos, movies, TV, etc.]
Types of Broadband Connections - Broadband.gov
List of Rural Broadband Projects Funded August 5
This week, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the funding of 126 new Recovery Act broadband infrastructure projects to help create jobs and provide rural residents in 38 states and Native American tribal areas access to improved service.
The announcement is part of the second round of USDA broadband funding through the Recovery Act. A complete list of projects receiving Recovery Act broadband grant awards today can be viewed in full by clicking here. PrecisionAg.com - More Rural Broadband Projects Funded
The announcement is part of the second round of USDA broadband funding through the Recovery Act. A complete list of projects receiving Recovery Act broadband grant awards today can be viewed in full by clicking here. PrecisionAg.com - More Rural Broadband Projects Funded
Rural Poor to Get Poorer? 14 to 24 million Americans lack access to broadband
From International Business Times:
Read the full article for a detailed look at the issues involved. We have to say that between inter-agency wrangling and the lobbying might of the big telcos (who want $20,000 per mile to connect rural users) the outlook is not good.
"In March, the FCC introduced the comprehensive National Broadband Plan. The FCC says somewhere in the range of 14 to 24 million Americans lack access to broadband internet connections. Most live in poorer, sparsely populated rural communities." -- FCC's National Broadband Plan Comes Under FireThose poorer rural communities are only going to get poorer if they don't get broadband. No broadband = lower property values; apart from the Amish, very few Americans want to live or work or raise a family without broadband. Lower property values = declining tax base = fewer services = poorer schools, and so on in a cycle of decline.
Read the full article for a detailed look at the issues involved. We have to say that between inter-agency wrangling and the lobbying might of the big telcos (who want $20,000 per mile to connect rural users) the outlook is not good.
National Summit Brings Together Technology, Rural Ed Experts to Focus on Solutions
Interesting event:
More than 150 rural education stakeholders and technology experts from 26 states came together to learn from one another and provide feedback to federal officials today at a National Rural Education Technology Summit in Washington, D.C. Federal leaders in education, content, and connectivity held up the work of rural superintendents, school leaders, education service agencies, and researchers as examples for leveraging technology to overcome distance and increase access to high-quality teaching and learning in rural schools. -- U.S. Department of EducationWonder if they discussed how teachers can assess homework fairly across the digital divide. For example, if half your students have broadband at home and the rest don't, how do you compensate for that when grading homework? This is a problem in a lot of rural schools today.
Back-dated, Scriptified, Testing
I've been working on some video-blogging techniques to show people what some of the malware and malicious activity that we write looks like on screen. Here is an example:
Time Warner Cable Supports "Broadband for America" But Demands $20,000 Per Mile to Deliver
If you are one of the tens of millions of Americans who can't get broadband Internet because it is just not available where you live, and you have looked into the problem of why this might be, you may have encountered BroadbandforAmerica.com. This is an organization that sounds like it might be promoting greater broadband access for Americans, but look a little closer and you will see it is really a bunch of telecommunication and cable companies (telcos) trying to avoid any requirements to provide broadband that might be imposed by local, state or federal government.
That's right folks, it's not a group of people out to help rural communities that can't get anyone to bring them broadband, it's a bunch of corporate and union lobbyists. Indeed, if you read their slogan carefully it says:
Check out the 200 companies and organizations that make up BROADBAND for AMERICA and you will see that they include TWC (Time Warner Cable). As we have previously reported, TWC recently offered to deliver broadband to a rural New York customer for the sum of $100,000. Apparently TWC is happy to expand the coverage of BROADBAND for AMERICA as long as you have $20,000 per mile to give them.
What companies like TWC and the other corporate members of BROADBAND for AMERICA really want is to prevent any kind of universal service requirement for broadband. Such requirements exists in many Western countries and it exists in America in terms of telephone service. That's right, our forefathers in this great land had the foresight to realize that telephone service needed to be universal, available to everyone from big city businesses in New York to farmers and ranchers out on the prairies of North Dakota (after all, it is these farmers who supply the food that the city dwellers consume).
There were and are numerous good reasons for universal service, not least of which is the fact that telpehone companies need to run their wires and beam their signals through rural states in order to connect large population centers. I think most Americans would agree it's not really fair to do that without providing service to the people whose land and air you are using in order to make a profit.
And we are all for making a profit. Even if Time Warner Cable can't run cable for less than $20,000 per mile it would still make, over time, a decent profit from the paying customers it would acquire from doing so. But no, serving Americans who are not immediately and hugely profitable does not appeal to telcos. Sure, they love the federal tax dollars and the free passage they get from states and counties whom they by-pass, but service? Service at anything other than a huge profit is apparently not in their vocabulary.
So, whatever you hear BROADBAND for AMERICA say, in emails and in TV ads (yes, they are using TV ads to try and persuade Americans that 20th century Internet standards are just fine for 21st century America) you should probably regard it with more than a pinch of salt. In fact, why not regard it with about $20,000 worth of salt per word.
That's right folks, it's not a group of people out to help rural communities that can't get anyone to bring them broadband, it's a bunch of corporate and union lobbyists. Indeed, if you read their slogan carefully it says:
Brought to you by over 200 companies and organizations dedicated to expanding the discussion of BROADBAND for AMERICA.They are NOT about expanding the DELIVERY of BROADBAND for AMERICA, they're just about talking about the topic of broadband. And a lot of that talk is just plain nonsense.
Check out the 200 companies and organizations that make up BROADBAND for AMERICA and you will see that they include TWC (Time Warner Cable). As we have previously reported, TWC recently offered to deliver broadband to a rural New York customer for the sum of $100,000. Apparently TWC is happy to expand the coverage of BROADBAND for AMERICA as long as you have $20,000 per mile to give them.
What companies like TWC and the other corporate members of BROADBAND for AMERICA really want is to prevent any kind of universal service requirement for broadband. Such requirements exists in many Western countries and it exists in America in terms of telephone service. That's right, our forefathers in this great land had the foresight to realize that telephone service needed to be universal, available to everyone from big city businesses in New York to farmers and ranchers out on the prairies of North Dakota (after all, it is these farmers who supply the food that the city dwellers consume).
There were and are numerous good reasons for universal service, not least of which is the fact that telpehone companies need to run their wires and beam their signals through rural states in order to connect large population centers. I think most Americans would agree it's not really fair to do that without providing service to the people whose land and air you are using in order to make a profit.
And we are all for making a profit. Even if Time Warner Cable can't run cable for less than $20,000 per mile it would still make, over time, a decent profit from the paying customers it would acquire from doing so. But no, serving Americans who are not immediately and hugely profitable does not appeal to telcos. Sure, they love the federal tax dollars and the free passage they get from states and counties whom they by-pass, but service? Service at anything other than a huge profit is apparently not in their vocabulary.
So, whatever you hear BROADBAND for AMERICA say, in emails and in TV ads (yes, they are using TV ads to try and persuade Americans that 20th century Internet standards are just fine for 21st century America) you should probably regard it with more than a pinch of salt. In fact, why not regard it with about $20,000 worth of salt per word.
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