Advocates for a public, high-speed municipal network for Northampton Massachusetts
Monday, the Northampton High-speed Community Network Coalition completed a business survey for members of the Greater Northampton Chamber of Commerce. Soon to be retired executive director Suzanne Beck has promised that she will send the survey out to her membership. This survey is not a city-sponsored survey, but it will give early insight into the …
From masslive.com: For the past 18 months, SHELD has been “gearing up” and planning for the residential component. “We’re launching fiber right now. We’re constructing into what we call “Fiberhood” areas,” he said, “which will roughly serve 250 to 300 customers.” Fitzgerald expects the first two neighborhoods will have gigabit-speed internet by July. He added …
Penny Geis of Leeds announced her candidacy for the Ward 7 city councilor seat being vacated by Alisa Klein. Penny is a prominent member of our coalition and supports a community network. Geis supports municipal broadband, and she is an active member of the Northampton High-Speed Community Network Coalition. “It is a really critical infrastructure …
Rachel Maiore of Leeds recently announced her candidacy for the Ward 7 city council seat. The current incumbent, Alisa Klein, recently announced she will not run for reelection, leaving the seat open. Ward 7 includes Leeds and parts of Florence. She supports a community network for Northampton. From the Gazette article: Maiore is a supporter …
We spoke with the city manager of Sanford, Maine a year ago when we were looking into what cities of similar size to Northampton were doing. In Sanford’s case, they were looking for ways to attract businesses. Their municipal broadband project was centered around this need. They are making great progress (see video) and expect …
Here’s EntryPoint Network’s Jeff Christensen’s complete presentation last Thursday to members of the Northampton High-speed Network Coalition and interested members of the public. One hour and forty-seven minutes were recorded. Our thanks to Northampton Community TV for recording Jeff’s presentation. There’s plenty to dig into here if you are curious about this technology including the …
Jeff Christensen of EntryPoint Networks spoke Thursday night at FreePress in Florence. His topic: how to build municipal networks right. The two-hour meeting was taped by Northampton Community TV and attracted a number of people from outside of Northampton curious to hear him speak. After the video is edited and posted, we’ll make available a …
Jeff Christensen and his company, EntryPoint Networks, is helping communities create entrances to the Internet using municipal networks that are open to ALL service providers. This approach dramatically reduces costs, empowers ownership of networks by subscribers and allows multiple service providers to compete for your business over a shared community platform. Jeff has already met …
Shutesbury, Massachusetts is still stuck in dialup/DSL-land. Comcast long ago decided it wasn’t profitable to wire up the town. But this is changing as the town wires up, thanks in part to the commonwealth’s Wired West initiative. In March 2017, the town voted to create a Municipal Light Plant for the purpose of bringing a …
Both Plainfield and Worthington in the hilltowns have been passed over by the internet age. Internet connectivity required dialup modems over telephone lines … so 1990s and sizzling speeds up to 56 kilobits per second. DSL lines are also an option at 128k kilobits per second to 3 megabits per second, depending on how far …