Burlington Vermont’s experiment in municipal fiber was once thought to be shining example of why muni-fiber broadband was such a great idea. Those dreams have now turned into a $50 million nightmare for the tax payers of Burlington Vermont the majority of whom don’t use the service.

Municipal fiber is seen by many as the holy-grail of broadband utopia, but like utopia it hasn’t had much success in the real world. This paper examines the challenges of implementing community owned fiber and why tax payers are getting stuck with a huge debt.

The FCC yesterday announced its plan to create a volunteer “digital literacy corps.” But based on the government’s track record in implementing a similar technology-oriented volunteer plan, the National Emergency Technology Guard, the idea will never meet the FCC’s lofty expectations. Congress authorized NET Guard in 2003, but it took five years just to launch a pilot program.

Conventional wisdom says that more innovation for applications on the Internet must involve much more bandwidth. But once we understand the economics of video on the Internet, we quickly begin to understand why applications will never be high bandwidth.

A new global poll shows that 79 percent of people believe Internet access “should be a fundamental right for all people,” but 53 percent also think “the Internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere.” They are sending conflicting messages because proclaiming Internet access a “fundamental right” is an invitation to destructive bureaucratic meddling in the digital marketplace.

We have invited Jeff Turner, Principal/CTO of Interstream, to share his perspective on the technical implications (vs. the philosophical digressions and debates) of net neutrality. He has gained this perspective over his many years as an executive at some of the top hardware firms that built the web (including Cisco and Novell).

Free Press is asking the FCC to consider a number of changes to the NPRM Net Neutrality regulations which they claim will “promote investment”. But once we examine their proposal in detail, we find that it will produce just the opposite and devastate the U.S. economy.

The FCC cites the $41/month average cost of broadband as an obstacle to broadband adoption, yet broadband costs as little as $15/month and is 20 times faster than dial-up services. The real reason for lagging broadband adoption seems to be dirt cheap dial-up services, virtually free local calling, and the fact that dial-up is “good enough” for nearly all websites and email.

The Internet is fundamentally biased against long distance communications by giving them much lower speed limits in data transmissions than short distance communications. But this is a good design feature because it encourages more efficient short range file transfers and this is precisely what has happened with Content Delivery Networks.

Network bandwidth costs can vary tens or even hundreds of times depending on various factors. These factors must be taken into account for any comparison of broadband to be useful.