A “Public Meeting”….at 7 tonight, at Olbrich Gardens, in a room that holds about 200 people? That’s IT? That’s what you’ve got, Madison? Oh, and “Google Fiber Ice Cream” from the folks at Babcock Hall at the UW.
Not to mention a Facebook fan page for Madison/Google Fiber, and a website, madfiber.net, asking people with “skills” to help figure out how to help the city land Google Fiber.
That’s how you’re going to convince the folks at Google that they should select Madison to be the city where they’ll make a 97-million-dollar investment in the infrastructure necessary to deliver the ultra-high-speed internet service, and create “X” number of new jobs in the process?
By the way, the city says the “X” number of jobs is a thousand, so, given what the city said about how many jobs the renovated Edgewater Hotel would create, the actual number is probably around a hundred.
A little less than a month ago, Google set a March 26th deadline for cities to apply for consideration as a test-site for their fiber internet service, which will deliver speeds almost unimaginably fast. I have Charter’s 10-meg high-speed broadband service, which is as fast as it gets around here, and Google’s fiber-net will deliver 1 GIGABITE speed.
Let’s hope the “Public Meeting” tonight will give the Mayor some ideas. But still….how Madison. A “Public Meeting”. This city has to deliberate everything to death. Every ox must be protected from goring; no person, institution, or memory of same can be offended in any way; and the impact on the poor and disenfranchised must be given due consideration.
And before we proceed with the application to Google, we’d better have the Landmarks Commission and the Urban Design Commission and every single Neighborhood Association weigh in on what kind of structure(s) Google might want to build to deliver this technical knockout punch.
How Madison. How boring.
There’s no Topeka, Kansas right now. It’s Google, Kansas. The city changed its name for the month of March as part of its attempt to lure Google.
Duluth made a humorous video proclaiming that every first-born would be renamed Google Fiber or Googlette Fiber. The mayor of Duluth jumped into frigid Lake Superior in another video made to appeal to Google.
We can do better than that! Let’s get those Chad Vader guys, Aaron Yonda and Matt Sloan, to do a video! And call on some other local production and video geniuses like John Roach and John Urban and Dan Presser and Sandy Kowal and Katy Sai and Jay Olsen and on an on and on to lend a hand! We’ve got more talent here than ANY of those other cities!
Or, we could have a “Public Meeting” and talk about it.
Although I live just a couple miles out of town,Charter won't run cable out to my subdivision. I can only get satellite broadband with a top speed of 1.5 Meg, plus it's more expensive. I hope the Perpetually Offended don't kill off Madison's chances forever. Google is much better off financially than Charter and perhaps in the future they'd run their fiber network out to us. I'd be happy to pay more than I do now for reliability and 1 GB speed.
ReplyDeleteI think you're missing the point about the meeting tonight. It is to get input from people outside of government to put together a better application, not to deliberate it to death. (Trust me, I'm no fan of govt entities.) I hope you go, you probably have some great ideas.
ReplyDeleteStop being mister negative and help out, the request for help is genuine and needed since everyone (outside of the Mayor's office) is doing this with their "free time".