Community Broadband Partnerships Demand Creativity

[Commentary] Many communities are at an important crossroad. Maybe yours is one of them. After a year of steady news about broadband stimulus awards and Google’s contest for a 1 gigabit network, there’s widespread awareness about the benefits of true broadband delivering hundreds of megabits per second. With this awareness has come a strong yearning from constituents, local businesses, government agencies and various institutions for a piece of this broadband action. The question that stymies casual observers and visionaries alike, though, is how do we get there from here? Specifically how can we afford it?