FCC Commissioner: Local governments should not be restricted from building their own networks

FCC Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn spoke to SEATOA earlier this week, and she mentioned municipal broadband as an important part of a connected United States. Much thanks to Catharine Rice for providing the excerpts below: Excerpt from Speech by FCC Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn SEATOA’s 9th Annual Conference Asheville, NC – April 27, 2010 The [...]

No matter how much they repeat it, the cable giants don’t want a level playing field

The Salibury Post did a really insightful editorial recently on the latest anti-municipal broadband bill to enter our State’s legislative chambers. The City of Salisbury is building a fiber to the home network that is very similar to the FTTH network we have in Wilson. The draft Sen. David Hoyle (D-Gaston) plans to introduce May [...]

Moratorium against new community broadband to be pushed May 5th

Sen. David Hoyle of Gaston County said Wednesday that he’d like to see a moratorium on new community broadband in NC. He’ll bring it up again at a committee meeting on May 5th. Senator Daniel Clodfelter mentioned that several other legislators felt the issue was important enough to warrant attention. Here’s a great article Jay [...]

NC’s Broadband Fight Continues Tomorrow (Apr. 21)

Wilson’s municipal broadband operation is right on target. In spite of the difficult economy of the past two years, sign-ups are great. People are excited about Greenlight, and they’re showing their support by signing up. The biggest obstacle, as I see it, is the constant stream of legislative attempts to limit cities and towns from [...]

Monopoly protection bill comes up again this Wednesday (Apr. 21)

Just when you think the anti-municipal broadband bills have finally faded away, another one comes along. Long story short, the bills (which have been reconstituted several times since they were born in 2007) sandbag cities and towns in NC and effectively kill any future municipal broadband deployment. They were created in partnership with the cable [...]

Great Facebook fan page available for community broadband

As countless cities and towns wait to see who will get the Google fiber gift, more communities are realizing that they may need to pursue fiber on their own. Wilson asked the private service providers to build a fiber network and they said no, so we built it ourselves. Today, we have 100M synchronous connections [...]