benton's blog

Although we may take for granted these days that “everyone uses the Internet,” recent headlines demonstrate that Internet and broadband adoption are not yet universal and much work still needs to be done if the U.S. is going to realize the full benefit of these powerful tools. Without broadband, people and businesses are cut off from the $8 trillion global Internet economy, limiting opportunities for jobs and economic prosperity.

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Achieving a Strategic Bandwidth Advantage

And a Psychology of Bandwidth Abundance

To

Drive High-Performance Knowledge Exchange

Fujitsu Conference on

Paving the Road to Unlimited Bandwidth:

Technologies and Applications for a Connected Age

It was the best of oversight hearings, it was the worst of oversight hearings. Oh, who are we kidding – we’ll never pull off a Dickensian metaphor throughout this week’s roundup. But we did note the coincidence that the three agencies most responsible for extending the reach and affordability of broadband in the US were called before Congress for oversight hearings this week.

Our big story of the week comes from across the pond, in London Town where, for many months, regulators have been examining the business practices of one of the world’s largest media empires.

For over a century we have used the radio waves to communicate with our neighbors. Even today radio remains the primary way that Americans consume media, reaching 93% of the American population on a weekly basis. Radio can be an excellent outlet for news, democratic discourse, community engagement and even life-saving emergency information, and, in many instances, it is just that.