Missouri

If you are an elected official or an economic developer, everything you wanted to know about why high performance, affordable fiber networks are important is contained in this one story:

It must have been a really slow news day in Kansas City, where Google Fiber crews continue to install fiber in neighborhoods and install underground drops to homes. In what teeters perilously on the verge of parody, local TV station KMBC breathlessly reports on the horror of utility marking done by fiber crews prior to digging.

"....spraypaint markings--what sounds like the work of vandals...."

For years, I've recommended that communities and regions build MSAPs (Multimedia Service Access Points). From our experiences operating one in Blacksburg as far back as 1999, we found that these local data exchange points save everyone in the community money. St. Louis is building a regional MSAP, which I call an RNAP, or Regional Network Access Point.

GovTech has an article on Missouri's new CIO (Chief Information Officer), who was given the daunting task of improving state government IT services, in part by consolidating 16 separate IT fiefdoms. IT folks are notoriously resistant to service aggregation, because it usually means smaller staffs and smaller budgets. Some IT folks like big, complicated, hard to use systems because it justifies big IT staffs and budgets.