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UC2B Granted $22.5 Million, Champaign City Council Deciding Tuesday Whether to Accept Funds

Posted in SPLOG to Word by Josh King on Friday, March 12, 2010 at 9:32 pm

The Champaign City Council is deciding at their meeting on Tuesday at 7pm whether to accept $22.5 million federal grant already awarded to the two cities and the University for creating jobs and building internet connectivity in our community. If you support the deployment of a municipal broadband network in Champaign-Urbana, please consider contacting your city council member to express your support of the plan. Here is a .doc file containing contact information and a sample correspondence. Whether or not Champaign accepts the grant funds has a strong bearing on whether federal stimulus money under the Broadband Opportunities Program will be used to create jobs in both Champaign and Urbana or provide essential services to underserved parts of our community. Our acceptance of this money also has a strong bearing on the viability of our round 2 funding proposal for community centers, libraries, and schools. Additional, it may have a bearing on Champaign-Urbana's viability for Google's fiber to the home project and future federal stimulus grants.

Project description from the NTIA press release below:

The Urbana-Champaign Big Broadband project plans to construct 187 miles of fiber-optic broadband network to provide high-speed connectivity to area community anchor institutions and support fiber-to-the-home services in four low-income neighborhoods. Known as a leader in computer networking technology, the University of Illinois plans to bring its experience to bear as it works to close the digital divide in Urbana-Champaign. The project will directly connect 143 anchor institutions, including 40 K-12 schools, 17 social service agencies, 14 healthcare facilities, nine youth centers, four public library systems, and two higher education institutions. A majority of these institutions expect to receive their first high-speed Internet connection via this project. The project proposes to create a fiber-to-the-home pilot project for 2,500 low-income households to purchase an affordable high-speed Internet service plan from commercial providers. In addition, the project expects to spur affordable broadband Internet access for local consumers, including up to 50,000 households and 3,700 businesses, by enabling local Internet service providers to connect to the project's open network.

 

4 comments

username

Ben

03/13/10 at 03:29
#1

Make a mental note now -
This is for federal control of the internet. It will be phased in. There is a cybersecurity bill in congress right now. just watch…

username

Ben II

03/14/10 at 03:54
#2

In case you think I’m crazy and Obama loves you -
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/us-declassifies-part-of-secret-cybersecurity-plan/

Josh King avatar featured_post

Josh King

03/15/10 at 03:41
#3

This is federal money, yes. But it is money going to a network that is going to be owned by an inter-governmental of the two cities and the University, not by the federal government. If you’re worried about the local governments spying on us, that’s fine, but it’s distinctly easier for concerned people such as yourself to get involved with the local government and set policy than it is to set federal policy. This network is going to be established with stated principles of open-ness and transparency, and it will be up to the citizenry to help keep it that way by shaping local policy.
Just because I receive a grant doesn’t mean that the grantor owns the fruits of that project once it’s done, unless it states as much in the grant. Frankly, the federal government barely has the wherewithal to run the grant program, they do not have the capability to run all of these networks at present. So unless you think there’s a secret provision to install semi-mythical deep packet inspection devices across the network, they won’t have any greater capability to monitor this network than any private one. Perhaps less; don’t forget, it was large private telecommunications companies that rolled over and allowed their customers to be spied upon by an illegal federal wiretapping program, not community or municipal networks.

username

HAHA

03/17/10 at 03:37
#4

First off did you read the wired magazine article I posted? You should. Second, WAS!? HAhahaaha. What, we aren’t being spied on right now. Its not legal anymore? Obama didn’t just re-authorize the patriot act? Semi-mythical deep packet inspection devices. Semi-mythical deep packet inspection devices. Semi mythical dep packet inspection devices.No copy/paste here. I just had to type that out myself to get the full effect. If you’ve made it this far cool then. let me direct you to a similar situation because you seem smart if set on the right path. look at todays DI. Turn to the back page of the first section and you will see a huge article on the new full-body scanners being installed at Ohare and quick;y all over the country. Now the whole article explains how safe it will make us, and then, in just one half of a sentence, mentions how these extremely expensive, state of the art full body scanners were purchased with “bailout money” last year. It goes on to say they are mostly a reaction to the X-mas day “underwear bomber.”
So you have the top bankers telling congress if they don’t pass the bailout we’ll pretty much collapse. They pass it, take our tax money, buy a bunch of full body scanners, wait until a strange/botched terrorist event happens ON XMAS DAY, and now, through no law whatsoever, we have to have a naked image of us scanned through machines we paid for to stop Osama? Ok too much cwitical thinkin fo wittle me today. I must be gettin pawanoid. People wont wike me! Nighty night fwends…

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