Can a municipality such as Chanute offer broadband fiber Internet service to its citizens and businesses? Appar?ently so, based upon the recommendations of a Kan?sas Corporation Commis?sion panel.
The city of Chanute is planning to offer 1-gigabit download service similar to what Google is offering in Kansas City, Kan. And for the reasonable price of $40 per month. We pay way more than that both at home and at the office without the ability to even watch video from YouTube.
Can you imagine what that will do for their town going forward?
Chanute already has a phone company and a cable company, but they are not willing to offer fiber to the town because there is no guarantee they can make a profit. With a municipality, the poles are already owned by them and they already have the right-of-ways to accomplish running the fiber either overhead or underground without any additional red tape.
This move by Chanute is what I call economic development.
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It?s always a good experience when the local Cub Scouts come to tour the office like they did last Tuesday evening for their regular meeting. My hat is off to Scout?master Russell Bennett for agreeing to serve in this role and for trying to hold their attention for an hour or so each meeting. I barely was able to get them to stand still long enough for a photo. So here they are: (from left) Colby Suder?man, Gavin Bennett, Evan Jones, Zane Mader.
I told them the photo would be in my column this week, so they should be sure to look for it. Colby?s mom, Nicole, also was here and showed three of them their birth announcements, which appeared in our newspaper in 2007-08.
I gave them each a paper and suggested they take a page and circle all of the words they knew?an idea for anyone who has kids with cabin fever this winter and need to hone their reading skills.
What they seemed to be most interested in was the neat stuff we can do with the Internet. For example, I called my cell phone from Google Hangouts on my computer, then gave Colby my phone and asked him to go to the other side of our building and talk to us. They also got a kick out of FaceTime.
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I remember being a Cub Scout in both Mountain Lake and Hillsboro. We got to do really neat stuff and also learned many things to make us the responsible adults we hope to be now.
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I?don?t know if you have thought about this, but it seems to me that Mother Nature is the hardest one to deal with, ever.
If you wish to share your comments or ideas, my e-mail address is joel@
hillsborofreepress.com.
