The long-term societal implications of reshaping access for individuals, communities, organisations, nations and regions across the world are of major significance, but are not predetermined by the technology. Instead, they will unfold over time through the complex interplay among the many...

Access to broadband is widely recognized as a prerequisite for a community's economic welfare and the delivery of local government services. In communities where the private sector is perceived as having failed to deliver adequate and affordable broadband services, municipal and county...

With the rapid diffusion of the Internet worldwide, there has been considerable interest in the e-potentials of developing countries giving rise to a 1st generation of e-Readiness studies. Moreover, e-Readiness means different things to different people, in different contexts, and for different...

The future for Internet access is broadband. Federal and state policymakers are exploring initiatives to promote the deployment and adoption of broadband services, and in recent years, an increasing number of local governments have joined them. While the first generation of narrowband dial-up...

A growing number of communities across the United States are adopting policies to promote advanced telecommunication services, including broadband access. This paper offers a taxonomy for classifying these local government initiatives and provides preliminary empirical results for a sample of...

Municipal electric utilities (MEUs) are increasingly expanding into telecommunications services. Such entry is interesting in several respects. First, MEUs marry two potential pathways for the growth of telecommunications access infrastructure and services: public ownership of last-mile...

Several factors suggest that meaningful network neutrality rules will not be enshrined in near-term U.S. telecommunications policy. These include disagreements over the need for such rules as well as their definition, efficacy and enforceability. However, as van Schewick (2005)1 has demonstrated...

The world is evolving from one in which almost all access to the Internet comes from personal computers (PCs) to one in which so-called Internet appliances (IAs) will make up a greater share of end-user equipment. Today's PC is a general-purpose, highly configurable and extensible device - an...

New radio technologies and public policies have, in many countries, allowed transmission on specific frequencies by individuals without a license. These license-exempt, or "unlicensed," bands (including 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz in the United States and much of Europe) are increasingly used for data and...