Category: nonprofit

Aurora's Nonprofit Approach with Muni Fiber – Community Broadband Bits Episode 123

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Aurora, Illinois, has been named one of the “Smart 21” most intelligent communities of 2015 according to the Intelligent Community Forum. We have been tracking Aurora for a few years and wrote about OnLight, its nonprofit ISP, that we wrote about earlier this year.

With some 200,000 people, it is the second largest city in Illinois but it has one of the most interesting hybrids of municipal fiber and nonprofit partnerships we have come across. For this week's Community Broadband [no-glossary]Bits[/no-glossary] podcast, Lisa Gonzalez takes the reins and interviews Rick Mervine, Alderman of the 8th Ward in Aurora.

Alderman Mervine explains why the city first invested in the fiber network and why they later decided to create OnLight to serve community anchor institutions as well as others in the community.

Read the transcript of this episode here.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show – please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.

This show is 20 minutes long and can be played below on this page or via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed.

Listen to previous episodes here. You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here.

Find more episodes in our podcast index.

Thanks to Jessie Evans for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is “Is it Fire?”

Community Broadband Bits 15 – Geoff Daily – FiberCorps

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Geoff Daily is an old friend of ours at Community Broadband Networks and he joins us for our 15th installment of the Community Broadband [no-glossary]Bits[/no-glossary] audio show. He created a nonprofit organization, FiberCorps in Lafayette, Louisiana, to maximize usage of the LUS Fiber network owned by the community.

Geoff and I discuss the importance of early planning and building social relationships to help local businesses and community anchor institutions take full advantage of new community fiber networks. We discuss his efforts to get local leaders around the same table to find ways of taking full advantage of their new high-capacity network.

Lafayette is one of many communities to realize that a “build it and they will come” attitude is not sufficient to maximize the benefits of public investments in this infrastructure. Communities need to help drive usage or risk losing important benefits that can arise from a new, next-generation network.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show – please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.

This show is 30 minutes long and can be played below on this page or subscribe via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed. Search for us in iTunes and leave a positive comment!

Listen to previous episodes here. You can download the Mp3 file directly from here.

Read the transcript of this episode here.

Find more episodes in our podcast index.

Thanks to Fit and the Conniptions for the music, licensed using Creative Commons.

Community Broadband Bits 8 – Jim Moorehead of Mendocino County, California

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The eighth podcast in our Community Broadband [no-glossary]Bits[/no-glossary] series is a discussion with Jim Moorehead, the Chair of the Executive Committee of the Broadband Alliance of Mendocino County in California. Mendocino is a large, rural county in the northern part of the state that has been left behind by major incumbent providers including AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon.

We talk about what steps they have taken to solve their problems and discuss the frustrating state of broadband mapping — state and federal officials readily accept the dramatic exaggeration of incumbent footprints where broadband is available.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show – please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.

This show is 26 minutes long and can be played below on this page or subscribe via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed. Search for us in iTunes and leave a positive comment!

Listen to previous episodes here. You can download this Mp3 file directly from here.

Read the transcript of this episode here.

Find more episodes in our podcast index.

Thanks to Fit and the Conniptions for the music, licensed using Creative Commons.