Fri
Apr 9 2010
05:21 am

Roane County could have a chance at truly flowering were we to get fast (1 Gb/sec) universal broadband. We aren't winning the Google broadband contest, but we could do like these folks and do it ourselves.

Electing broadband-savvy county and city officials would help. Does anyone know which candidates are the most likely to understand the need for fast broadband? These would be smart folks to support.

Update: The original speed posted was a typo; this is now corrected to 1 gigabit/second.

-- OneTahiti

Interesting Sites

Here's an interesting site with information to be sifted through about community broadband:
(link...)

Also in Fayetteville, TN (Lincoln County) they have fairly recently become a pretty funtional broadband community (not total yet, but certainly better than it was). There is some interesting info on this site, and possibly info that could be used in modeling what might happen in Roane County:
(link...)
I used Lincoln County as they are a community that is similar to us in a number of ways. They are a smaller county - one of those that has only one real town, so the town is pretty good size. But they started out with less broadband access than Roane County has - distances are so great in the boonies that DSL wasn't available, and cable companies wouldn't run cable because of not enough population. See whatcha think.

BTW - the organization "Communities United for Broadband" exists primarily on Facebook. I know FB is the great evil to some on RoaneViews... but if there's info there that helps, so be it.

There is some info about Roane County and broadband on the Connected Tennessee website. Explore that resource at:
(link...)

I suggest pretty thoroughly exploring this website. I think there may be some useful info for us on there.

A first step - seems to be a really necessary step - is to find out exactly where Roane County is in relation to other communities and broadband access. We each, depending on where we live, may have a widely varying perspective on this. I don't know, but it is possible, that while there are pockets in our county that have litle to no service, a makority of the county may have pretty good service... I don't know. But individual experience on one location does not necessarily paint with a broad brush as to what the OVERALL situation may be for the county taken as a whole. We can't brag, complain, or effect change until we know where we really are. See this link:
(link...)

RB

RB

Thanks for the info! I have been aware of that site since its inception. However, those maps are inaccurate.

One, the "Roane County Broadband Inventory" map ((link...)), shows my neighborhood as having DSL available. We wish!

Another, "Roane County, Density of Households Unserved by a Broadband Provider" ((link...)), correctly shows my side of our little dirt road as being unserved, but shows the other side as having broadband, which it does not. If it did, I would buy a plot of forest on the other side of the road, get in broadband, and run a line over to my place.

-- OneTahiti

I wonder...

... if these folks are amenable to correcting their maps? Or how they arrived at the information they display. I wonder if some of it may have to do with a graphic equivalent of demographic number-rounding?

Do you think the overall Roane County maps are generally inaccurate, or that there may be isolated pockets of inaccuracy?

I wonder if anybody has tried to point out these errors to these folks.

This info has to be a good starting point, though. I don't think anybody will be able to make much headway with a county-wide broadband project unless they are quite conversant with all aspects of the information discussed and referred to on these sites.

RB

The data for the maps comes

The data for the maps comes from what is reported by the internet service providers. I contacted connectedTN when I saw that they claimed high speed internet access was available where I lived (south of the river). ConnectedTN told me their records showed AT&T DSL was available. After confirming with AT&T that it was not, I asked ConnectedTN to update their maps but they never did.

100GB/s? I would be happy with the most basic high speed, anything better then dial-up.

Good info, SMH, and thanks!

It's valuable to know that you did attempt to get this corrected. That's something we need to work on, but we need to know that before we can get anything done.

RB

RB

I too have tried to get such maps corrected, to no avail.

- OneTahiti

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