Broadband Prime’s Top Picks – week 21 & 22
Broadband Prime’s Top Picks is a weekly digest that brings you the top articles that I’ve read the past week. The focus of the digest is not on news, unless ground-breaking rather on opinions, analysis and comments by individuals or organizations relevant to the blog’s favorite topics. Hopefully, this is going to be a list of good information that you might have missed. I am keeping the number of links strictly to maximum 5 to make the digest meaningful and effective.
It has been a hectic fortnight and I did not manage to post on time the review for the 21st week, so I combined the 21st and 22nd together. Apologies beforehand and here we go:
The Role of Communication Infrastructure Investment in Economic Recovery: An excellent OECD paper on infrastructure investment. Quoting from the abstract: “…policy makers need to evaluate the costs and benefits of any public investment in telecommunication infrastructure and select projects which can deliver both strong immediate aggregate demand effects, such as through the employment created by rolling out the networks, and strong longerterm aggregate supply-side effects, which can improve the productive capacity of the entire economy as an improved foundation for commerce and communication.”
Nuevas fórmulas de acceso a la banda ancha: An excellent sum of municipal and public utilities initiatives on fiber access. It works best for those who speak Spanish or can handle the google translator. It’s a good source of information whatsoever (especially for Spanish projects).
Measuring the Effectiveness of the Broadband Stimulus Plan: Ashort informative article published at the Economists’ Voice. “The broadband stimulus plan provides not just an opportunity to connect the few regions of the country (ed. USA) that lack access to broadband, but also to learn what types of subsidies work and what do not. To realize both objectives, the agencies entrusted with distributing these subsidies should think carefully about how to evaluate their true effects and implement funding plans accordingly.”
The Need for Speed: An article by Nicholas Thomson arguing how can USA policy makers use past experiences of Government intervention in NGA from other parts of the world, e.g. massive subsidization (Asian model), creating competition (European model), customer-owned fiber (the Canada’s pilot), direct public investments (Australia, Greece)
Bringing Broadband to Rural America: A must read publication by FCC discussing the challenges of bringing broadband reality closer to all Americans. I haven’t had the time to read and digest, but it seems that few have already done so. You can find some initial reaction at DSL Reports, CNET and InternetNews.
OECD latest Broadband Statistics: Broadband pulse is monitored by OECD Portal at frequent intervals. Latest figures were published on the 20th of May. Based on these data, New York Times demonstrate that lowering price does not necessarily increase broadband penetration.
Canada needs an innovation agenda: A nice piece by Steve Anderson discussing open access and muni co-ops ISPs to improve broadband penetration ratings.
Open Government Dialogue: As I know that many enthousiasts of open government are following this site, this is an excellent resource of ideas on how to create open, participatory, collaborative government administrations.
