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Charles City, Iowa, has a population of something less than 8,000. It has a state-owned fibre optic network to the local school. We're putting a proposal together for a last mile solution for our kids to access the fibre optic network from their homes that is workable and affordable. It now calls for Meraki units at $50 per house (one-time fee) and an OC-3 line to the center of town for access fee of $3 per house per month.
That gives us a 45Mbps upstream/backhaul arrangement. The
state-owned fibre optic network is also administrated by the state.
It's hoped that the state will provide a last mile solution for every
community by putting up antennas at one side of the community, and a
dish at the other side, blanket the community, and enable a true 21st
century education that lets every child connect to the network from
their homes.
It also, as it happens, impacts on the upcoming digital tv cutover
on February 9, 2009. In April of this year, the state enacted a law to
take control of community franchise contracts. The law entitles
communities with populations of 50,000 or less to have 2 public,
education, government (PEG) channels. Each analog tv channel converts
to as many as 8 digital channels (I think). That translates into
something like tens of thousands of digital public access tv channels
for the state of Iowa, all commencing broadcast across the fiber optic
network on February 10, 2009.
Analog public access tv studios are expensive to build and operate.
Digital public access tv studios are not. Our community will be using
cheap desktop computers loaded with audio and video software that is
freely available from Stanford University's Center for Computer
Research in Music and Acoustics. In other words, the digital camera
files get edited and formatted for Iowa Public TV consumption, and for
Internet TV consumption, with little more than a cheap desktop
computer, microphone, camera, sitting on someone'skitchen table. Nice,
eh?
In small, rural communities, any money used for unnecessary purposes
is a non-starter. In the case of public access tv and radio,
archive/storage issues are handled through the use of global
repositories such as the Internet Archive, and/or the ibiblio.org
project at the University of North Carolina. In today's world, the
opportunities to treat small, rural communities equally as emerging
markets for companies providing wireless infrastructure solutions is
becoming clear. Adding value to the low-ball, labor intensive wireless
mesh network infrastructure, is obvious. Will the industry adapt, and
compete with this template that is on the verge of being adopted by the
state of Iowa?
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