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According to a Pew Research Center Internet & American Life Project study, "The Mobile Difference," nearly 40 percent Americans have positive and improving attitudes about their mobile communication devices, thereby further immersing themselves into a more robust digital lifestyle.
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How will broadband affect burgeoning controversies over health care? The answers to this question and more came courtesy of a Broadband Cenus-hosted, hour-long panel discussion. View a video of the discussion.
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President Obama on Innovation and Sustainable Growth. President Barack Obama has new plans to strengthen the economy that will all favor people with hi-tech educations.
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Elevate Miami, a comprehensive Digital Inclusion program launched by the city of Miami, aims to serve youth, low-income families, minorities, seniors and residents facing barriers to digital inclusion.
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The Knight Center of Digital Excellence held its first Stimulus Webcast Session for Knight communities and program directors July 23. Watch it online now.
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By pushing hard on broadband, lawmakers hope to close the "digital divide" that has long separated rural America. In doing so, they hope to give rural consumers access to the same sorts of high-speed services and opportunities - think telemedicine, distance-learning and Web-based commerce - that city dwellers have enjoyed for years.
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Archive for February, 2009
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
President Obama’s Tuesday night address to Congress and the nation touched on a lot of economic subjects, but made only one direct mention of broadband connectivity.
However, the three legs of the president’s economic plan – energy, health care and education – all will be inexorably tied to broadband. We have just begun to explore these avenues.
As the president reminded us last night, we are not quitters.
Keep coming back to Community Connection for developments in these and other related issues.
See the text of President Obama’s address here.
Tags: bandwidth, broadband, community, Congress, digital, infrastructure, Internet, Knight Center of Digital Excellence, Obama, president, recovery.gov, stimulus
Posted in Digital news, Knight Center, Obama notes, Stimulus Package | No Comments »
Friday, February 20th, 2009
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is signed and the federal government is about to spend $787 billion to stimulate a struggling U.S. economy.
If you’d like to track where that money is going, here are some Websites to watch:
• Recovery.gov: Obama’s official American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Website lets taxpayers see how and where money is being distributed - to which states, congressional districts, even to which federal contractors. Future plans include the ability to display that information visually.
• ShovelWatch: This is a joint project of the nonprofit investigative journalism organization ProPublica, morning news program The Takeaway and WNYC, New York’s flagship public radio station. ShovelWatch currently features investigative news articles, radio segments, interviews and links to other news reports on stimulus spending. Over time, the site plans to engage citizens to help track how funds are being spent in their local communities and to what effect.
• Stimulus Watch: In response to federal legislation, the U.S. Conference of Mayors has released a list of “shovel-ready” projects in cities around the country it would like to see funded. Stimulus Watch allows residents with local knowledge about these projects to discuss and rate them.
• ‘‘American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act of 2009’’ – download PDF of the bill.
Here at the Knight Center of Digital Excellence, we’ll keep close watch on how the roughly $7 billion earmarked for deployment of broadband networks is spent.
If you find other sites that track stimulus spending in your community or region, please let us know.
Tags: Knight Center of Digital Excellence, recovery.gov, shovel projects, shovelwatch, stimulus, stimulus watch
Posted in Digital news, Knight Center, Opinion, Stimulus Package | No Comments »
Thursday, February 19th, 2009
One element of the stimulus package generating a lot of attention: How to modernize the nation’s power grid. Although the U.S. still relies on old technology to generate and distribute our electricity, investments are being made to digitize the grid, to make it smarter and more efficient.
Out of the roughly $787 billion stimulus spending President Barack Obama signed into law this week, $4.4 billion is marked to help modernize the electricity grid.
A digitized electric grid would require a robust broadband system, so that home meters and appliances could communicate with one another, and information could be sent back to utilities.
A digitized smart grid could benefit in ways such as these:
• Better manage peak and off-peak electricity use, so to cut costs by reducing waste;
• Prevent widespread blackouts such as the infamous power grid failure of 2003;
• Allow appliances to communicate with each other and the grid, in order to adjust energy use to take advantage of off-peak use. (This is akin to making a cell phone call after 9 p.m. to save money.)
The point: Making broadband access widely and cheaply available is much more than just providing broadband for broadband’s sake. Broadband access is vital to the success of modernizing America, whether through an updated power grid or by bringing any number of other public and private services into 21st century capabilities.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2009-01-29-smart-grid-energy_N.htm
http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/06/news/economy/smart_grid/index.htm?postversion=2009010818
Tags: broadband, electricity, Obama, off-peak, peak, power grid, stimulus, utilities
Posted in Digital news, Stimulus Package | No Comments »
Friday, February 13th, 2009
By Mark T. Ansboury
If America is about to spend nearly $7 billion on building a new pipeline for Internet access, then we should clearly understand the spending choices we’re about to make.
A place to start is by drawing a comparison to our national network of delivering gas and electricity to consumers. Imagine if federal regulation were so lenient that competing companies in the same community each built their own separate grids and pipelines to deliver these essential utilities. Everyone would pay more for gas and electricity in order to finance the high cost of excess infrastructure. In the case of gas and electricity, America has one complex grid and pipeline system to serve everyone. Multiple providers each tap into the same system.
Today, it’s the opposite in the case of broadband networks. Communications companies such as AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and cable operators such as Time Warner, Comcast and Cox each invest in their own separate networks. And who pays for this duplication of expense? You do, (more…)
Tags: bandwidth, broadband, Congress, digital, infrastructure, Knight, Knight Center of Digital Excellence, stimulus
Posted in Digital news, Knight Center, OneCommunity, Opinion | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
While sorting through the ongoing debate over how best to jump-start our economy through an investment in broadband infrastructure, a key concern is what stimulus is the right stimulus – tax incentives or grants and loans.
In the case of building a broadband infrastructure for the U.S., the goal is to create an Internet highway, on par with the Interstate highway system developed in the 1950s, as a way of transforming the way we do business, educate our children, care for the sick, and in short, how we go about our daily lives. There are many potential benefits and positive economic impacts from having a broadband infrastructure.
Now, in planning for how we’ll build this new future, all Americans must recognize the need for investment in our future.
Tax incentives to incumbent providers, while effective in some circumstances, would simply encourage more of the same and keep us standing in place with little or no growth. That won’t do, (more…)
Tags: broadband, CEO, Congress, digital, IBM, infrastructure, Internet, Knight Center, Knight Center of Digital Excellence, Obama, president, Samuel J. Palmisano, stimulus
Posted in Digital news, Knight Center, OneCommunity | 3 Comments »
Thursday, February 5th, 2009
High speed broadband access through a world-class fiber optic network. Sounds great but what does it mean to your community?
A fiber optic network allows tremendously large amounts of data to travel across ultra thin glass strands literally at the speed of light. How fast is fast?
Let’s break it down.
4 Mbps is the minimum (more…)
Tags: bandwidth, broadband, digital, gbps, gigabit, infrastructure, Knight, Knight Center, Knight Center of Digital Excellence, mbps, Obama
Posted in Digital news, Knight Center, OneCommunity | No Comments »
Monday, February 2nd, 2009
We know we need to put people back to work. We also know that a key component of the Obama Plan is to stimulate our economy through the development of a next-generation broadband infrastructure.
Key to this goal is making Americans see – giving them that “Aha” moment – so that there is a clear understanding how broadband can advance our economy in the same radical way that telephone service and electricity did a century ago. As an essential utility service of the future, broadband can change how we do business, deliver health care, educate our children, provide safety services in our communities, and in short, how we conduct our daily lives. This is why broadband (more…)
Tags: Akron, bandwidth, broadband, digital, gigabit, infrastructure, Internet, Knight, Knight Center of Digital Excellence, Obama
Posted in Digital news, Knight Center, Obama notes, OneCommunity | No Comments »
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