“One key to strengthening education, entrepreneurship, and innovation in communities.is to harness the full power of the Internet, and that means faster and more widely available broadband,” said President Barack Obama on September 21, 2009.  It’s great to see this vision continuing to move forward with great momentum. 

Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden announced an initial $183 million investment in 18 broadband projects benefiting 17 states including Georgia, Maine, New York, Massachusetts and Washington, among others.  The awards were split up into four different categories including: Middle Mile Awards designed to build and improve connections to communities lacking sufficient broadband access; Last Mile Awards designed to connect users to the communities broadband infrastructure (the middle mile); Public Computing Awards designed to expand computer center capacity for public use in libraries, community colleges and other such public venues; and Sustainable Adoption Awards designed to fund innovative projects that promote broadband demand.  This initial investment has already been matched by over $46 million in public and private funding.

Those projects who will receive funding are of course the first in the $7.2 billion total program split between the Department of Commerce’s NTIA (4.7 billion) and the Department of Agriculture’s RUS (2.5 billion).  Today’s awards are expected to ‘help bridge the digital divide’ and boost economic development for communities with little or no broadband access as well as provide significant job opportunities in infrastructure and manufacturing. 

We continue to applaud the work of the NTIA and RUS as they diligently work to ensure American communities have both a pipeline to job creation and access to the world’s most promising technologies. 

In other news, there was an extremely interesting story in this week’s Wireless Week titled, “Wi-Fi Helps Operators Manage Data Hogs.”  In the story, reporter Maisie Ramsay takes a look at how and why mobile providers are increasingly giving away WiFi for free – especially to users of their mobile broadband offerings. 

Obviously because of iPhones and the like, current mobile networks have never been more congested as they are today.  Just ask anyone with an iPhone in New York City.  Add to that the idea of net neutrality and what would happen if the FCC decides to make it difficult or illegal for carriers to block bandwidth-intensive applications, like video streaming. The answer seems to be embrace Wifi like never before.  I see lots of interesting business models spurring from this very theme.

Can you think of any such business models?  I’m interested to hear what you think!

Happy Holidays.