IP: Shoofly pie, and broadband, too

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Living near Pennsylvania Dutch country , happy to send a shoofly pie recipe
to anyone who wants it :-) Dave


------ Forwarded Message
From: Tim Finin <finin () cs umbc edu>
Organization: http://umbc.edu/
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 10:31:46 -0500
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Subject: Shoofly pie, and broadband, too

Dave - The Baltimore Sun has a good article on how many
small, rural towns are installing and running their own
broadband services and making plans to use them to provide
community services (meter reading, local telephony, etc.)
It made me wish I was back in the Wisconsin village where
I was raised.  Tim

--

Shoofly pie, and broadband, too
http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/bal-bz.rural10mar10.story

Update: Weary of waiting for affordable, high-speed Internet service,
Kutztown, Pa., decides to install its own system.

By Andrew Ratner, Sun Staff, Originally published March 10, 2002

KUTZTOWN, Pa. - This town midway between Reading and Allentown has
about 5,000 residents, an annual Amish festival renowned for its apple
butter and shoofly pie, a Main Street adorned with hex signs and
gingerbread facades, a neighborhood park with a wooden band shell and
a hardware store where the vending machine sells candy for 15 cents.

Oh, yes, and one more thing:

The local government will soon offer its own high-speed Internet
service to every resident and business. And the price will likely be
less than people in Maryland pay if they can even get broadband
Internet service where they live. Kutztown, on the edge of
Pennsylvania Dutch country, is the latest of 100 cities and towns
across the country that have installed their own high-speed systems
for Internet users.

Some of the places simply have the wealth or know-how to do so, such
as Palo Alto in California's Silicon Valley or the Boston suburb of
Braintree. But Kutztown, like many of the more rural towns that built
their own systems, simply tired of waiting for one of the large
providers such as Verizon Corp. to discover them. As politicians in
Washington dicker over how to bridge the so-called "digital divide,"
these towns built their own bypass to the information superhighway.

"Some of these towns were too small to get the attention of the large
incumbent providers; the rate of return isn't there for them," said
Ron Lunt, director of telecommunications services for the American
Public Power Association, a trade group of municipal utility companies
in Washington. "And I don't see the large incumbent providers
upgrading the systems with the entrenchment and stock prices the way
they are."

...

http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/bal-bz.rural10mar10.story


------ End of Forwarded Message

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