Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Fiber is your friend

In more ways than one, really.  I am not talking about bran muffins, I am talking about fiber optic cable in this case, although if you are eating something with whole grains right now, more power to you!  Anyway, the library system where I worked prior to the wonderful Hutchinson Public Library was part of a county government.  To their credit, they realized that as their county grew and data demand soared they needed a solution that would get them ahead of the curve.  So about 5 years ago in 2004-5, they started building their own 100Mb (megabit) fiber network.  For comparison, the average home connection speed in Kansas in 2009 was 4.9Mb, not quite 1/20th of what they built.  So this was a pretty progressive and aggressive plan at the time.  In fact, when I left that library system the slowest connection in the county system was the 10Mb pipe to the Internet.

Why am I carrying on about data and pipes and megabits?  Because of this article.  The National Broadband Plan could wire "anchor institutions" such as schools, community centers, colleges and libraries such as good ol' HPL, with 1Gb fiber connections.  A gigabit represents 1 billion bits or 1,000 megabits.  In other words, this FCC proposal would create connection points in communities 10 times faster than the network my old employers built.  The implications are enormous.  A plan of this type could leapfrog the US back into the top tier of nations in the area of Internet connection speed.  Since we currently rank 28th in the world, I think this plan is worth attempting on the basis of lowering our international "Embarrassment-to-Prestige Ratio" alone.

More importantly, it could create the possibility in virtually every rural town for solid, high-speed Internet access.  This quote, from the ArsTechnica article above sums it up for me:  Bob Bocher, who works as a consultant with the Wisconsin State Library, says, "The more than 16,000 public libraries across the country are often the only places in their communities that offer no-fee Internet access to all residents.

This is certainly the case, for better or worse, at HPL.  As our bandwidth needs have grown, an ever-larger chunk of our limited funds have gone toward maintaining a tolerable usability level connecting to the Internet and the library's many paid digital services.  So I am excited about this change.  I wonder if the funding will be found to make it a reality?

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