In February Google announced that it was going to provide one or more communities gigabit broadband fiber with the goal of serving as a test bed. A group of us on Maui put together a Facebook page, a blog and a YouTube site which we are still evolving. We also worked with Maui County Councilmember Sol Kaho`ohalahala to create a response to Google’s RFI on behalf of the Maui County Council. We submitted this response last Friday, March 26th. The Washington Post reported that "1,200 municipalities responded from Maui to Maine". So we are already in the mindscape for this.
Our Maui response is under the banner HiFiMaui and there is a website there that will shortly have info about what we submitted and more. See http://hifimaui.com. We also have a YouTube channel: http://YouTube.com/hifimaui. Last but not least we have a Facebook fan site called GoogleFiberForMaui. Please go there and support the effort. As of now there are over 500 fans.
There is a great general background site on broadband that went live in mid March hosted by the Federal Communications Commission: http://broadband.gov There is a regularly updated blog with smart well written entries, and a good overview of the benefits of broadband in the areas Economic Opportunity, Education, Health Care, Energy & Environment, Government Performance, Civic Engagement, and Public Safety. While the feds are "only" talking about a 100 mb goal (Google’s is 10 times this) it is still quite relevant since the Fed goal is 20 to 100 times faster than what we have now for most of Maui. There is also $7.2 billion in Federal stimulus money supporting this, so IF we don’t get picked by Google - this is still stuff we need to start thinking about and getting creative.
Here is some background on what Google is up to:
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