California broadband report may be model for other states

CALIFORNIA BROADBAND REPORT MAY BE MODEL FOR OTHER STATES
[SOURCE: InfoWorld, AUTHOR: Grant Gross]
A California report offers a deep look into who has broadband there and who does not and may serve as a model for other states, said an official with Cisco Systems. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Broadband Task Force, which released the report Thursday, found that 96 percent of Californians have access to broadband, but speeds vary significantly region to region. Only about 54 percent of Californians have access to 10Mbps, and about 56 percent of the state's residents subscribe to broadband service, the report said. The report makes several recommendations, but one of the other major benefits of the study is its household-level information about broadband service availability, said Jeffrey Campbell, Cisco's senior director of technology and communications policy. An examination of broadband availability with this granularity hasn't been completed in the United States before, he said. Charles Giancarlo, Cisco's former chief development officer, served as co-chairman of the Broadband Task Force. The mapping "was necessary and important," Campbell said. "It's something that other states and the federal government can learn from. It's difficult to figure out how to start solving the issue of whether there's enough broadband ... when we just don't know where there is and isn't broadband in this country." California is "poised to become the world's leader" in broadband if it adopts the recommendations in the report, said Dale Bonner, the secretary of the state's Business, Transportation and Housing Agency and a task force co-chairman, in a statement.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/01/18/California-broadband-report-mo...