Georgia’s House of Representatives dealt a blow to major telecommunications incumbents Thursday when it rejected legislation that would have precluded many Georgia towns from getting into the broadband business. The vote was 94 to 70.

An earlier version of the legislation would have banned municipal broadband networks if any private firm was offering service with a speed of at least 1.5Mbps. The latest version raised the minimum to 3Mbps in an effort to appease critics.

» via ars technica

The US is a long way from its goal of making broadband Internet available to all 314 million Americans. In its third annual broadband progress report, the Federal Communications Commission says 19 million Americans have no option to buy fixed broadband Internet service, and an additional 100 million Americans that do live in areas where broadband is available are not subscribers.

The FCC defines broadband as 4Mbps download speeds and 1Mbps upload speed. So, many people have Internet access that isn’t counted in the report. But the US is decidedly behind many other countries. A report last year by the International Telecommunications Union showed the US having 27.6 fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants, behind 15 other countries including first place Netherlands, which achieved 38.1 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants.

Exactly how many people in the US have any type of Internet access is not detailed by the FCC. US Census figures from 2010 showed that in 74.2 percent of households, at least one person had Internet access at home, outside of home, or both.

z» via ars technica

The White House and the National Science Foundation today announced a new technology effort to increase broadband coverage and develop apps for education, health care, public safety, energy, and manufacturing.

The effort, called U.S. Ignite, is designed to help various government departments connect with start-ups, businesses, and universities developing wireless technologies. Founding sponsors include Mozilla, Verizon, AT&T, and Cisco.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Canadians enjoy among the fastest, most widely available and least expensive broadband Internet in the developed world, says a report released Thursday.

The report, based on the results of 52 million speed tests of broadband users across the G7 countries and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) membership, was produced by Montreal-based consulting firm Lemay Yates Associates Inc. on behalf of Rogers Communications Inc., the country’s largest broadband service provider.

It disputes the OECD’s own report, published in July, that ranked Canada’s high-speed Internet offerings significantly below those of other countries.

» via Financial Times

Federal regulators are set to reveal their plan Thursday for an overhaul of the $8 billion fund that subsidizes phone service in rural areas and for the poor, with the goal of redirecting the money toward broadband expansion.

The Federal Communications Commission is also preparing to disclose new rules for the byzantine system that governs how phone companies pay each other for phone calls. It’s a system that, virtually everyone in the industry agrees, is outdated and leads to perverse schemes by carriers to stimulate certain kinds of phone traffic.

However, reform of the system has been held up for years by competing interests.

» via Yahoo! News

As part of a broad effort to encourage more Americans to use high-speed Internet and be able to compete in the global economy, the Federal Communications Commission has brought together a group of private companies that will offer free computer training to people in disadvantaged communities.

Starting next year, the familiar blue-shirted Geek Squad from Best Buy, one of the nation’s largest electronics retailers, will work through service organizations like Boys and Girls Clubs, Goodwill and 4-H in 20 cities to offer training in basic computer literacy. Microsoft will also offer such training, as well as job-search training, in schools and libraries in 15 states and in their stores nationwide.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday outlined a plan to transform the Universal Service Fund, an $8 billion fund that is paid for by the nation’s telephone customers and used to subsidize basic telephone service in rural areas, into one that will help expand broadband Internet service to 18 million Americans who lack high-speed access.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

If you’re in Kansas City in the next few weeks, you may notice a few engineers walking around, consulting maps and surveying your street or neighborhood. These engineers are kicking off the next phase of Google Fiber—detail engineering.

There’s still a lot of work to do before we can offer ultra high-speed broadband to Kansas City in early 2012. The detail engineering phase will help us gather the geographical information we need to build the Google Fiber network later this year.

» via Google Fiber Blog

Today’s cable networking technology, known as DOCSIS, is currently deployed by providers such as Comcast in a version known as DOCSIS 3.0, and ISPs are using it to deliver up to 200 Mbps downstream. But Arris has upped the ante by allocating more channels for broadband and bonding them together, enabling speeds of up to 4.5 Gbps downstream and 575 Mbps up. Doing so takes away from the channels used to deliver actual TV channels, but if one accepts the thesis that television programming will gravitate toward an on-demand IPTV model, this becomes less of a concern than delivering more broadband capacity.

» via GigaOM