IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

As many as 35,000 people in rural Alaska may lose Internet access, long-distance phone service or both for hours at a time this week because of a "zombie" satellite that has wandered off course and is expected to scramble the signals of the Bush's main telecommunications provider.

"Almost every single person out in rural Alaska uses one of those services somehow," said David Morris, spokesman for General Communication Inc.

The Obama administration awarded roughly $10 million on Tuesday to boost Internet access in Alaska libraries and improve Internet literacy and usage in the state's rural communities.

The two grants are a small part of federal stimulus legislation targeted to improve Internet access in parts of the United States where it remains poor. Via the stimulus, millions have already been awarded to private companies to improve commercial Internet access in rural Alaska.

Internet service for thousands of people in two Arizona Indian communities will get a healthy boost and state and tribal libraries will provide 200 computer stations for Arizona's workforce thanks to $15.7 million in stimulus announced Friday by the White House.

President Barack Obama said the government would provide grants and loans to invest in 66 new Recovery Act broadband projects nationwide. The $795 million in grants and loans through the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture are matched by more than $200 million in outside investment.

Dave Phillips of the University of Arkansas Community College at Hope, and Wesley Woodard with the Economic Development Council, have been key in organizing the county wide plan.

Experts worry that the National Broadband Plan, a mandate currently being considered by policy-makers as a way to bring broadband to every home, would create a digital divide, setting speed goals for rural areas that are 25 times slower than urban areas.

Such a divide would curtail rural educational opportunities such as distance learning and threaten consumer welfare by limiting rural telemedicine initiatives.

ulius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has outlined his vision for broadband in the U.S.: delivering 100 Mbps connections to 100 million homes.As part of an update on the National Broadband Plan due before Congress in mid-March, Genachowski sketched out a plan that would keep the U.S. competitive with other nations and enable 90% of the population to have and use broadband, up from about 65% today.

Today too few rural Americans take advantage of the opportunities broadband provides. Only half of rural residents subscribe to broadband – compared to 65 percent nationwide – because too many communities in rural America don’t have adequate access to broadband infrastructure.

Internet Innovation Alliance Urges Congress to Establish National Commission on Telemedicine

The expansion of broadband internet service has facilitated the development of telemedicine technologies improving healthcare to more Americans at a reduced cost, according to a new study commissioned by the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA). The report titled, “Advancing Healthcare Through Broadband: Opening Up a World of Possibilities” examines telemedicine and e-health trends and technologies.

Standing on the stage of the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics, Jay Dominick, vice chancellor of information technology at UNC-Charlotte, moderated a panel representing what the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) calls "community anchor institutions" – a key component to BTOP.

High-speed Internet access is becoming more common in Tennessee, but a digital divide still exists even in some of the state's fastest-growing and wealthiest counties.

The growth of broadband in Tennessee outpaces the national average, according to a recent report. Still, pockets around the Nashville area have no access to high-speed Internet, usually because they are too remote or still too sparsely populated for providers to consider them profitable.

The FCC devoted 25 pages to healthcare technology issues in the plan released last week, which calls for the nation to have 100-megabit Internet connection to 100 million U.S. homes by 2020.

Connected Nation, which started as a state program called ConnectKentucky, uses mostly state and some federal and private funding to stimulate broadband roll out. The nonprofit group says it has expanded broadband availability in Kentucky from 60 percent of households to 95 percent of households since January 2004.

Governor Schwarzenegger commissioned the Task Force back in November 2006, and the group was given the goals of making access universal, pushing the buildout of new broadband infrastructure, and driving the use of broadband-only applications.

A California report offers a deep look into who has broadband there and who does not and may serve as a model for other states, said an official with Cisco Systems.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Broadband Task Force, which released the report Thursday, found that 96 percent of Californians have access to broadband, but speeds vary significantly region to region. Only about 54 percent of Californians have access to 10Mbps, and about 56 percent of the state's residents subscribe to broadband service, the report said.

With more than 10 million California residents not connected, the FCC can't achieve its goal of giving 90 percent of American households high-speed Internet access by 2020 without closing much of the digital divide in California, she added.

If telecommunications is the central nervous system of the modern economy, some remote parts of the region are still playing with skeletons.

But a plan to use state technology grants to expand the ubiquity of broadband connections across a five-county Central Sierra region could reverse that trend.

Back in 2005, the California Public Utilities Commission ordered major telecommunications companies to provide $60 million in seed capital for investments in the expansion of high-speed Internet access into underserved areas. It was a condition imposed on merger deals between AT&T, SBC and others.

A surprising number of respondents to a survey are sure they can live without the Internet, and aren't very interested in enhancing broadband service, especially if they have to pay for it.

On the other hand, those communities that have Internet access don't know what they'd do without it. Users say they find information on health care and personal safety, and pursue distance learning, as well as buying goods and communicating with friends and family.