Next Generation Broadband in Montana

“Right now if you’re sending an email, for example, it goes from Seattle to Minneapolis and then back to Missoula,” Missoula City Councilwoman Caitlin Copple said.

It tracks dark fiber networks, publicly owned stimulus funded networks, and which networks are already advertising and/or delivering gigabit services.

In areas where connectivity options are few, government has stepped in to fill the void, financing modern networks with taxpayer dollars. Cities like Chattanooga, Tenn., and Lafayette, La., have gotten a lot of attention for investing public dollars in broadband infrastructure.

In a global economy, talent and capital can flow anywhere, and they’ll flow to countries with the strongest innovation infrastructure. We’re in a global bandwidth race, and we need to ensure the U.S. has a strategic bandwidth advantage. Without it, we risk losing our global lead on innovation, and we risk watching jobs and investment flow elsewhere.

With billions of things–cars, appliances, cameras, watches–expected to tap the Internet by 2020, demand will only rise. "That is the thing that all network providers are panicking about. That bandwidth requirement is not going away. In fact, it’s increasing."

Telecommunications policy expert Susan Crawford says our government allows media conglomerates to put profit ahead of the public interest.

I bought a house in Kansas City on Monday. It’s next door to the Homes for Hackers and KC Startup Village. It will have Google Fiber in it. I hope it becomes an integral part of the nation’s first Google Fiberhood.

The United States needs to invest significantly more in policies and programs that encourage more of our residents to come online and reap the benefits of the broadband Internet.

Join thousands of colleagues across the nation to find out by taking the school speed test. In less than a minute you’ll know the speed of your school’s Internet access and the types of digital learning it can support.

Chattanooga has long been known as a hub for entrepreneurs and innovators. With the advent of the city-wide Gig network, it’s rapidly becoming a haven for geeks as well.