Bloomington-Normal Technology Initiative

Connecting Communities Conference

Yesterday I attended the a mini-conference sponsored by the University of Illinois Extension Service at Champaign-Urbana. The title of the conference was “Creating Connected Communities”, and was partly sponsored by the Lt. Governors Office of Rural Affairs. The morning session opened with a report commissioned by the Lt. Governors office titled “Illinois Online: Recommendations for Universal Broadband Access”.

The paper was prepared by Edward Feser (http://www.urban.uiuc.edu/faculty/feser/) and Timothy Green from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and dated October 2004.

The report says that many smaller towns as well as selected areas of within the State’s metropolitan areas lack access to broadband service despite ongoing rollout of digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable modem services by telecommunications companies and cable providers. In some cases the service is available but not affordable. The recommendations of the report say that Illinois’ Broadband strategy should: 1) encourage innovative local and regional solutions to broadband provisioning rather than top-down plan for universal deployment; 2) remain neutral with respect to technologies and provider-types; and 3) include development of the necessary administrative capacity to implement programs with maximum flexibility and effectiveness. There are other recommendations in the body of the report and we hope to have a full copy of the report available on-line or a link to a website.

Other programs included the following: Innovative Telehealth Projects, Distance Learning Options and Demonstrations, Coalescing an IT Agenda for West Central Illinois, and Innovative Community Projects, which included a presentation by Ameren regarding their experiment with Broadband over Power Lines (BPL). The last seminar was by Dr. John Lumpkin, former Director of Public Health for the State of Illinois and now Senior Vice President and Director of the Health Care Group for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. His compelling presentation was called: “The Role of Health Informatics in Improving Health and Health Care.”

Overall it was an interesting and informative conference. I was refreshingly impressed by a presenter, Mr. Richard Schmidt, who along with his family has owned the Home Telephone Company in St. Jacob, Illinois. The Home Telephone Company is one of 48 phone companies providing dial tone in the State of Illinois! The company serves 1,100 customers in a 52 square mile area, and Mr. Schmidt claimed to know all of his customers personally. How’s that for customer service. Dial-up internet service was first offered to their customers in 1995. Since then they have converted approximately 64% of their customers to DSL. They plan to be able to offer all of their customers’ fiber optic internet service within the next two years. They also offer cable television service and wireless internet access to neighboring Highland, Illinois. The Home Telephone Company obviously isn’t waiting for anyone to provide the highest quality internet speed and affordable access to their community and businesses! You can see their website at www.hometel.com.

Here are some other websites that might interest you:

www.dslreports.com

http://dslforum.com/

www.muniwireless.com

<>http://www.baller.com/library-articles.html
this site has good articles of a legal nature on the regulatory issues surrounding municipal broadband and wireless activities. Mr. Baller is well known as a national expert in this area.

--Marty Vanags

posted by BN ED Guy @ 8:14 AM