Community Broadband Series: Broadband in America - The House that Jack Built

With lessons learned over five years of experimentation, Community Broadband and Digital Transitions are teed up and ready to go to work - all that's missing is the orientation to help civic leaders recognize the opportunity at hand and realize that our society is at the dawn of a new era, where creativity and the harnessing of human resources offer hope to all of America's communities. The ABCs of Community Broadband provides the orientation. There's also the will to embrace the future - that challenge lies ahead for our local community leaders. But with this book, which we offer here in serial format over the coming year, leaders who become readers have a new tool to help educate themselves and their constituencies.

So enjoy this series here on this website, and should you get impatient and want to buy the book, it's as easy as hopping over to the MetroNetIQ eStore, and buying a copy. To make it even easier, we're offering a standing 15% discount for our Digital Communities readers - just use this code when you make your purchase: QXXXDLXW.

This is the farmer sowing his corn,
That kept the cock that crowed in the morn,
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
Mother Goose rhyme

Like the Mother Goose rhyme The House that Jack Built, we enjoy broadband today only because of a myriad of interconnecting activities over the years led us to where we are now. In order to understand this complex equation, the only place to start is with the original communications network pioneered and built by AT&T - the old "Ma Bell," ancestor of any number of telecommunications companies and holder of any number of telecommunications patents.

But it's not all telecommunications - we also have broadband because of the foresight of cable companies that realized they could improve on the dial-up experience of early internet users by repurposing their existing TV networks.

And there is no internet without switching and fiber, so thanks to Cisco, Nortel, Corning and other equipment pioneers for their work in putting together the nuts and bolts that enable the internet.

And finally, we have broadband because of the inspiration of DARPA, the Defense Department research arm that sponsored the internetworking of research networks in the 1970s and 1980s, which would ultimately turn into the internet.

The list of broadband antecedents goes on and on, because broadband today comes in many shapes and sizes and is an emergent network springing up from any number of innovative sources and it continues to evolve. It's like those thank you speeches at the Academy Awards that go on and on - one can't help but fail to mention important contributors.

There's also the old phrase, "Success has a thousand fathers. Failure is a motherless child." Not soon after we get over marveling about what we can do with broadband and how fast it came upon us, familiarity breeds contempt: we start to see broadband for its many flaws, not the least of which is that broadband access is not there whenever we want to use it.

There is still much work to do in making broadband work for everyone, as Broadband in America is still a very new, but significant phenomenon. Of course, some critics point to statistics that show US