Now that we know our own FCC isn’t going to help us out of the broadband mess in America, that their past policies helped to create, we have to figure out a way to help ourselves out. One small helpful aspect of the National Broadband Plan is an admonition to Congress that they support schemes to run high-speed fiber to anchor institutions like schools, hospitals, and libraries nationwide. These institutions can then act like central office hubs for neighborhood networks, sharing their fast connections with the entire community, and gaining maintenance fee help from the connected community. The FCC describes no specific action, but hopefully it will inspire Congress to stop the parliamentary games and electioneering, and actually get something done this year. Barring federal aid, local organizations like NELA-ISC can help these institutions install and maintain these networks, in return for open access to distribute connections to neighboring members.

As it turns out, provisions in the Broadband portion of the 2009 Recovery Act already have some of the same goals. Applications taken by the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) for round two of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) are now closed, yet no “Anchor Institution” registrants in the North East Los Angeles region can be found in the BroadbandMatch database.

To be fair, I just found out about these grant resources recently myself — not nearly in time to get any grant application paperwork together. Is it possible that the Recovery Act administrators have not taken any steps to inform our local institutions of their eligibility, at the same time rich incumbents like Qwest are already begging them for more funding? I fear that is exactly what happened. To be honest, the number of applicants to these programs, and to experiments like Google Fiber for Communities, make the odds of being selected seem quite low. With the massive amount of lobbying in Washington D.C., it never feels like small communities like ours will be heard through all the noise.

Regardless of how big the challenge seems right now, we know we have to work together to be heard. I will be talking to the ERNC April 6th, 2010, about local resources and fostering greater cross-institution collaboration. In addition to our excellent Land Use Committee, I will recommend and volunteer myself for the formation of a local Technology Infrastructure Committee. I will be looking for all interested Eagle Rock Stakeholders to join this committee, to share any personal technical expertise with the community at large. Depending on the success of this effort, I may end up encouraging similar committees to be formed in all the Neighborhood Councils within the Northeast Los Angeles region.

These kind of studies are always skewed in some way, based on sampling methods, size, question order, use of “push poll” methods, and the way questions are phrased. Even without looking at any of these studies, it’s easy to guess that recent unemployment rate increases have probably created poverty rate increases as well. Both increases mean that better access to online tools for education, job searches, online résumé updates, and job applications are even more important now than ever. Of all these studies, the SSRC study seems to go into the most depth over whether low-income populations understand how (lack of) access to the Internet affects their lives. Interviewees told the SSRC that high speed Internet access is a basic necessity, the same way electricity has become a basic necessity to our modern lifestyle.

The analogy between electricity and Internet access is interesting. It shows that many people understand that the Internet is basic to modern national infrastructure, in the same way our electrical lines and roads are. When any of these basic services are unavailable or too costly, we tend to share some of the blame between the responsible government agencies and local providers. It seems strange then, that so many are so willing to let Internet provider incumbents set the terms of access, without more redress through calls for government action. Too few people seem to remember that the telephone and cable companies had little to do with the initial creation of the Internet, and it was government and public institutions that started the process. Government and public University institutions continue to drive open uses of the Internet further, while incumbent access providers try to hold it back. Maybe giving people a chance to own their own “driveways” onto the Internet would change how people address the Internet’s importance politically.