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02/11/2008State Role Is Key to Local Progress Especially in Rural Communities
With the start of the New Year, a number of new reports — from Maine to California — have been released describing statewide progress and needs. While it seems that access to broadband is still a very important issue, particularly in rural geographies, these reports have highlighted, sometimes unwittingly, the big gap between “access percentage” and its “adoption percentage.” Most broadband initiatives seem to dwell disproportionately on the more obvious access problem than on the subtleties of driving higher adoption rates. Research points a number of factors — income level, culture, ethnicity, age, language, etc. — not pointing to any one of these, but implying that their combined nexus is the most powerful deterrent to adoption. Regardless of the actual technologies and networking infrastructures used to provide access, state programs need comprehensive, long-term programs for user education and market development to build sustainable community broadband networks statewide. Our projects have taught us that the very “unconnected-ness” of rural areas stifles user knowledge and demand, and prevents development of software application infrastructures so necessary in aggregating community requirements and building sustainable business models. Creative community-based digital literacy plans can use the very factors these reports cited to overcome barriers to user education and adoption. Developing community-based private-public partnerships, educating local users and markets, and creating software that solves community problems and delivers real citizen value are the key ingredients necessary to generating traffic and maximizing long-term community benefits from these networks.
There is often great interest in the community network concept, but many communities need help getting the project started or keeping it going. States can help by centrally establishing an overall process to create community broadband networks. These processes are indeed very replicable, but because no one approach fits all community situations comfortably, they will need to be locally tailored. The least served rural areas frequently need outside help working closely with the local stakeholders involved. These rural communities need assistance developing good strategies for educating key stakeholders, building consensus, and forming cross-sector partnerships. Again, states can provide powerful assistance to these communities by providing experienced advisory resources that help accelerate local progress.
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Related Items:
• City of Lompoc
• W2i Finalizes Digital Cities Joint State Briefing Program in Riverside, California
• Plans for Long Island Wi-Fi Network Face Hurdles
• On the Road to RFP: Miami-Dade Forms SteerCom
• Tallahassee `08
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