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Seattle has teamed up with Gigabit Squared, a startup that wants to invest $200 million in building gigabit broadband networks in six college towns around the country, to build a gigabit network.

Seattle, which has its own city-owned dark fiber network, and Gigabit Squared have signed a Memorandum of Understanding and a Letter of Intent that will allow Gigabit Squared to begin raising the capital needed to conduct engineering work and to build out the demonstration fiber network. There are three parts to the network, a fiber-to-home element that will reach 50,000 homes in 12 Seattle neighborhoods. The network will also take advantage of point-to-point wireless, which companies such as WebPass are using, as well as offer some kind of mobile broadband service as well.
This will be Gigabit Squared’s second fiber commitment under an arrangement it has with the Gig.U project headed by Blair Levin. Levin, who led the efforts to write the National Broadband Plan, formed Gig.U to make sure the U.S. maintains a competitive edge in broadband infrastructure. His idea is to build gigabit networks in U.S. college towns so students and researchers can keep up with the broadband speeds that other countries are developing. Gigabit Squared’s first commitment was in Chicago, which it announced in October.

"Leadership in the 21st century global information economy requires leadership in broadband networks, which is why Congress provided $4 billion to NTIA to invest in broadband projects nationwide," said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Lawrence E. Strickling. "Seattle’s announcement today will give it a strategic bandwidth advantage, and we look forward to watching the city leverage its innovation-ripe environment for economic growth."

In a world with hundreds of cable channels and thousands of websites, it must sound as quaint as talk about VHS players and Walkmans to worry about how many media outlets any one company gets to own. But even in a media landscape with countless options, the nation's biggest media companies also control our biggest TV stations, radio outlets and online destinations, wielding an influence that can be magnified far beyond the actual platforms they own.

In the Tampa Bay market, just three companies — Clear Channel, CBS Radio and Cox Radio — own 20 radio stations, including the top 16 outlets reaching more than 80 percent of people listening in November's ratings period. And some of media's biggest websites, from the Huffington Post to the Drudge Report, are built around "aggregating" stories already reported by other news outlets, allowing the New York Times or Wall Street Journal to echo across a wider swath of the Internet than you might imagine.

A jury found that Apple's iPhone infringed three patents owned by holding company MobileMedia Ideas, though damages have not yet been determined. The verdict was delivered after a week-long trial in Delaware federal court, said Larry Horn, chief executive of MobileMedia. The three patents, which cover features like camera phone technology, were acquired from Nokia and Sony Corp in 2010, Horn said. Those two companies hold a minority interest in MobileMedia, he said. The trial only concerned liability, and a damages proceeding has not yet been scheduled, Horn said.

T-Mobile officially activated its overhauled HSPA+ systems in five more regions of the country, including the greater Chicago area, bringing it that much closer to fielding a nationwide network that can fully support Apple’s iPhone.

The launch in Chicago; Reno; Fresno and Sacramento; and the region surrounding Los Angeles (though not in LA itself) – coupled with activations on earlier in Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis – bring its total upgraded footprint to 23 markets covering more than 100 million people. While T-Mobile doesn’t sell the device yet, customers with unlocked iPhones can use them on the carrier’s network. But only in areas where the upgrade is complete will they get anything beyond a 2G connection.