I'm happy to have a new article up and running at Science Progress, a branch of the Center for American Progress. The topic: the coming of the high-speed Internet to the width and breadth of Virginia. I'll give you a taste, if you promise to hop on over there and read the whole thing:
"Let me tell you how I decided to come live on the rural frontier," starts Joan Minor.
Minor is, improbably, the official blogger for Rose Hill, Va., a tiny mountain town tucked deep in Virginia's tobacco and coal-mining country, who came to live there because of the state's unique broadband policies. "You know the magazine Fast Company? They did this issue on people who work from all these bizarre locations -- like a monastery on an island somewhere," she explains with a hearty laugh. "What all those places had was a broadband hookup. And that was my inspiration."
Minor moved to her Appalachian oasis after catching word that high-speed Internet was on its way. As recently as two years ago, as Minor tells it, getting online to run her grant-writing business required actually meeting the Internet halfway. "I used to drive over the hills for 45 minutes to Duffield because that was the farthest point west the Internet went."
But while the federal government limps along with its fortune-cookie message of a broadband policy -- "The market will provide" -- in Virginia the global communications network is being pulled and cajoled into every corner of the state where Virginians want and need to get connected. This approach not only gives the state a much needed economic shot in the arm. It also demonstrates a realist approach to bringing broadband to Americans where they make their homes, giving them the tools to live the lives they want to lead.
There's more, much more. Hope you'll give it a read, and please don't be shy about sharing your thoughts about the piece or about broadband policy more generally, either over there or right here.
Wowza -- $20 billion is a lot of dough for what essentially amounts to air. After a mere 260 rounds of bidding, the FCC has wrapped the auction of the 700 MHz chunk of the wireless spectrum. And the amount that the auction brought in to government coffers should -- emphasis on "should" -- draw widespread attention in DC to how important to America's technological future are innovative technologies that operate on the high-quality spectrum space returned to the public by the switch to digital television. As of now, we don't know a great deal about how the auction went in terms of which corporations came out winners and which come out losers. We won't know that until the identities of the winning bidders are made public in the next couple of months. And we'll have to wait for the dust to settle to see how good a job that the FCC has done managing what is, at the end of the day, a resource that belongs to the American public.
But one thing we do now is that the 700 MHz auction pulled in a whole lot of scratch. It's crass, I know, but if the size of that number draws some much needed attention in Washington to how important wireless innovation can be to the future of this country, then I say so be it.
