St. Paul Community Broadband Creating Community Connections

Below is a wiki explaining what municipal broadband is:

"Municipal broadband deployments are broadband Internet access service provided, either fully or partially, by local government. The means of connection include unlicensed wireless (Wi-Fi), licensed wireless (such as WiMAX), Line-of-Sight, and Fiber Optic technologies. The most widely used type of broadband is Wi-Fi, with reports of around 350 citywide projects in the U.S. being launched within the past few years.

Rather than using the sometimes unreliable hub and spoke model of distribution, most municipal broadband networks use mesh networking.[1] A series of radio transmitters throughout a city, with each transmitter connected to at least two other transmitters, relay radio signals through the whole city. This allows for a reliable connection for users. Mesh networks are also faster to build and less expensive to run than the hub and spoke model.

Here's the data from our digital access survey.

From KFAI:

The cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis have taken different approaches to closing the digital divide – and cities elsewhere in the Minnesota are exploring what is meant by the Municipal Commons. Minneapolis chose Wi-Fi Internet access in league with a private firm; St. Paul is looking at using fiber optical cable to connect citizens, and the entire range of technologies may already be obsolete with the rapid development of faster and faster connections. TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and LYNNELL MICKELSEN talk with local techies and troubadours of the movement to close the gap between Internet haves and have-nots from both cities.

GUESTS:

CHRISTOPHER MITCHELL, Director, Telecommunications as Commons Initiative, Institute for Local Self Reliance;

ERIC LAMPLAND, Principal Network Architect, Lookout Point Communications

From the YouTube description:
This video talks about what broadband is and why it's important for everyone.

It was made to educate people from the City of St. Paul, MN. Being that, St. Paul is starting to think about how and what kind of broadband infrastructure they want... Input from the people is needed!!

I also posted this in the Broadband Basics section.

The Economist has an interesting column arguing that there is no evidence that super-fast wideband is any better, from a macroeconomic policy-maker perspective, than slow broadband. What this suggests to me is that the immediate concern should be on expanding access to regular broadband rather than increasing bandwidth for the top tier of subscribers.

I've started working on a map of places to get online in St. Paul. Please add points to this map.

View Larger Map

SF2866, currently making it's way through the Minnesota Legislature, would require the commissioner of commerce to produce a comprehensive statewide inventory of existing broadband service and capability by a certain date; specifying minimum inventory and mapping requirements.

Sunday's (April 27th's) Star-Tribune included this poorly-researched article on the ongoing difficulties Minneapolis is having with its citywide wireless project. In what is apparently an attempt to mimic the CityPages' style of journalism-through-personal-experimentation, the Strib journalist drove around with a laptop testing the wireless signal at various points throughout Minneapolis. This might have made for an interesting article, except that the basic premise ("The long-awaited Wi-Fi network is completed and working") is essentially wrong: as of press time, the wireless coverage map still showed numerous zones not covered by the network. Perhaps if the journalist had looked at this map, he wouldn't have been surprised when he couldn't get a signal at 28th and Lyndale, an area clearly marked as a Challenge Area.

April 11, 2008
Few of the ambitious plans, promised by dozens of U.S. cities, for municipal wireless internet service have materialized. That is, until Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle turned on lightning-fast, free internet this week to hundreds of residents of San Francisco's public housing projects. He explains why it's the shape of things to come.