I had the good fortune to hear Mark Ansboury, the COO of One Cleveland, talk about what he and other leaders in Cleveland have been doing to build what is probably the best planned community broadband infrastructure in the country.
The project has leveraged an initial contribution of dark fiber into a regional Gigabit Ethernet network that connects schools, government offices, museums and arts venues, social service agencies, and healthcare facilities. One Cleveland does not provide any services to individual homes and does not provide any services to businesses. The project feels that is best left to the private sector.
Ansboury had an interesting statistic that did not surprise me but caught other people in the room off-guard--Adelphia's commercial business in the area has increased by 60% since the start of the project. The goal of One Cleveland is to make the broadband pie bigger, and it appears to be working very well.