C Spire activated gigabit fiber service Monday in Quitman, Mississippi, which the company said it believes will restore the economic fortunes of the town. Quitman's economy has struggled amid job losses and plant closings, C Spire said. “We see a bright future for our town with widespread availability of high speed Internet,” Quitman Mayor Eddie Fulton said in a C Spire news release. Quitman was one of the Mississippi cities C Spire selected last year to as sites for gigabit deployment (see 1311050028).
Worcester, Massachusetts, said Thursday that it reached a deal with Comcast for the cable company to become its cable provider if the firm's proposed buy of Time Warner Cable clears regulatory hurdles. The Worcester City Council voted last month against the transfer of Charter Communications’ license to Comcast because of concerns about Comcast’s customer service record and questions about whether the company would keep open Charter’s data center in the city. Charter and Comcast are transferring multiple licenses in a deal meant to allow its TWC deal to proceed. Charter is getting some divested properties. Comcast agreed to keep the Charter data center, which employs more than 150 people, open for three years and will continue local news and sports programming. Comcast “heard the community’s concerns and is taking its role in Worcester seriously,” said City Manager Edward Augustus, who was empowered to sign off on the city council’s vote on the license transfer. A Comcast spokesman said the company is “delighted to have reached an agreement with the City of Worcester that will benefit local residents and businesses alike.”
Voters in five municipalities and three counties in Colorado voted to exempt their communities from the state law restricting municipal broadband deployments. Colorado law lets communities opt out of the law via local ballot initiatives, which three other municipalities -- Centennial, Longmont and Montrose -- did in previous elections. Rio Blanco, San Miguel and Yuma counties and Boulder, Cherry Hills Village, Red Cliff, Wray and Yuma approved the ballot measures Tuesday with between 72 and 83.8 percent of the vote. The results were a “vindication” for advocates who’ve said local control over broadband deployment had bipartisan support, said Next Century Cities Policy Director Christopher Mitchell in an interview. Heavily Democratic Boulder and heavily Republican Yuma County voted overwhelmingly in favor of exemption, said Mitchell, who is also director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. It’s unclear whether a potential Republican takeover of the Colorado House and Senate would jeopardize any push to have the legislature repeal its municipal broadband law, Mitchell said. Partisan control of both chambers remained in doubt Thursday pending recounts for seats in Adams and Jefferson counties. The elections yielded few other results of interest to municipal broadband advocates, though Mitchell said he was pleased that Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, a Democrat, won re-election. Malloy’s administration was “very supportive” of an effort by New Haven, Stamford and West Hartford to develop gigabit broadband networks (see 1409160049), Mitchell said. Malloy’s re-election “bodes well” for that project and a possible expansion into other cities, Mitchell said.
Alaska Communications got a five-year contract from Alaska’s state government to provide wide area network services to more than 22,000 state employees. The company will provide secure connectivity and high-capacity Internet service between core state government facilities in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau. The contract lets Alaska Communications “enable better service to all Alaskans by providing secure and reliable high bandwidth networks to the State of Alaska,” said CEO Anand Vadapalli in a Wednesday news release.
Roanoke, Virginia, plans to move ahead as a participant in a 42-mile broadband network after its City Council voted 6-0 Monday night to appropriate $100,000 toward final engineering costs for the project. The Roanoke Valley Broadband Authority-proposed (RVBA) network also will serve nearby Salem. There are also proposals to extend the network into adjacent Roanoke and Botetourt counties. Salem’s City Council is set to vote this month on whether to appropriate $100,000 for engineering costs. RVBA estimates the network's Roanoke and Salem portions will cost about $4 million.
The Princeton, Massachusetts, Broadband Municipal Light Plant (PBMLP) and Princeton Broadband Committee plan joint hearings in November ahead of a town meeting set for Nov. 18 to vote on a proposal to borrow $1.4 million to prepare for a planned fiber project. The hearings are set for Nov. 12 and 13 in Princeton’s Town Hall Annex, PBMLP said. Princeton isn’t financially responsible for the $3.7 million in costs for installing the fiber, but the town is responsible for some of the work to prepare for the project, PBMLP said. Internet service will cost $95 per month, PBMLP said. The project’s proponents are also seeking reimbursement for the project via the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, which is deciding how to disburse $45 million in grants to unserved communities in the state.
Cox Communications said it plans to begin offering gigabit broadband service in Chesapeake, Virginia, and other areas of the state. Chesapeake will be the first Virginia location where gigabit service will be available from Cox. The cable operator didn’t provide a specific timetable for the other in-state deployments. Cox began offering gigabit service in Phoenix earlier this month. Cox said Tuesday it anticipates deploying gigabit speeds in all of its targeted markets nationwide by the end of 2016.
A well-trained and stable cybersecurity workforce is “critical” to protecting states against mounting cyberthreats, the National Governors Association (NGA) said Monday in a paper. Governors should ensure that their existing workforce has the “requisite skills to protect and defend state networks and critical infrastructure,” which could in the long term require realigning state education and workforce programs to support cybersecurity training, the NGA said. The group also encouraged governors to utilize the National Guard’s cyber resources for training and incident response purposes. Maryland has “worked aggressively to develop our highly skilled cyber workforce -- this will help address both the state’s and the nation’s cybersecurity challenges, and will also foster growth in our innovative and job-creating cybersecurity business sector,” said Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley, co-chairman of the NGA’s Resource Center for State Cybersecurity, in a news release.
Frontier Communications is offering gigabit-speed broadband in several neighborhoods in Beaverton, Oregon, it said Monday. The deployment fulfills CEO Maggie Wilderotter’s promise in July to provide gigabit speeds in the Portland area in the near future, Frontier said. “Frontier has invested more than $128 million in recent years to upgrade and enhance our Oregon network,” Wilderotter said Monday in a news release. Frontier said it will deploy gigabit service in other parts of the state as continued network upgrades occur into 2015. The telco said it offers speeds of up to 100 Mbps in other parts of Beaverton, as well as in Forest Grove, Gresham, Hillsboro, McMinnville, Newberg, Sherwood, Tigard, Tualatin and Wilsonville.
New York politicians and public interest groups planned a hearing Monday night on the FCC net neutrality rulemaking and Comcast's planned purchase of Time Warner Cable. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, a Democrat, New York City Mayoral Counsel Maya Wiley and former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps were to host the hearing because FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has “ignored” requests for a field hearing in the state, they said. “After waiting months for the FCC to get out of the Beltway, advocates are taking initiative,” Copps said in a Free Press news release. “The voices of millions of Americans must not be ignored. A cloistered conversation in Washington, D.C., advances the special interests, not the public interest. It's time for everyone to speak, and be heard.” The FCC didn’t comment. Interest groups Common Cause, Consumers Union and MAG-Net are also involved in the hearing. Computer & Communications Industry Association President Ed Black said in a statement that “it’s encouraging that Internet users are raising their voices against these threats to the Open Internet and that public officials are listening.”