As COVID continues to disrupt school and work, and as a new Congress and president take office, we expect the country’s broadband gaps to receive heightened attention—and funding.
Local communities will continue to play a critical role in infrastructure deployment, often with private partners. With this in mind, we are devoting our next three blog posts to issues related to identifying and attracting suitable partners, as captured by our September BBC workshops.
As a starting point, we invite you to watch or listen to the first of our highly regarded supersession moderated by CLIC President Jim Baller on September 22. That session featured speakers who covered a range of important topics:
· Digital C describes how the non-profit called One Community created a fiber physical network, then sold it to the private sector;· Allo Communications is looking for communities that “want fiber”;
· MetroNet is looking for communities who want to work with them, across the board, so that its complex fiber construction can go smoothly;
· Facebook wants to replicate the model it used in North Carolina to lease the excess fiber capacity along its data center routes to nonprofits or local communities.
Supersession 1 can be watched here, downloaded here, or just listened to here.