Washington

The City of Seattle, which selected the open access, open services model as a general direction for its municipal broadband effort last year, is planning to issue an RFP to actually select a fiber to the home vendor. City officials continue to be dismayed with the service offerings from the incumbent telephone and cable companies.

Here is a story about a woman who the the Director of R&D for a high tech multimedia firm. She lives in Winthrop, Washington, and sleeps in a teepee. Now I know many of you will probably stop reading right there, but this article highlights a growing trend and the power of fiber to change rural communities. From the article, here is a description of Winthrop:

Initial tests by the Liftport Group of Washington state of their robotic lifter went well, and the company says the next test could use a mile high fiber composite ribbon.

Arthur C. Clarke, the writer and scientist who developed the concept of the geostationary satellite, writes in The Time of London about the potential of the space elevator.

I wrote recently about Seattle's plan to invest heavily in fiber. The work that the city has done now seems even more timely because a list of "Most Unwired Cities" came out recently, and Seattle holds the number one slot, just as the city has identified "wired" technologies like fiber as critical. One of the things everyone forgets is that "unwired" hot spots still have to get access back to the wired network, and fiber is usually the most desirable way to do this.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article on a report issued by a City of Seattle task force that concluded that the city has to take broadband seriously, and must begin immediately.

This is a must read article that makes many good points. Rather than rehash them, here are some of them verbatim: