I’m at David Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect conference this morning. The first speaker was Jim Douglas, governor of Vermont, sharing the stage with notable Vermont citizen Tom Evslin.
Jim isn’t waiting for the federal government or the fcc to do anything about ubiquitious broadband. Vermont has proposed an initiative to attain 100% broadband coverage for all of it’s citizens by 2010. They are defining broadband as symmetric 3 Mbps. Their 2013 goal is symmetric 20 Mbps. For *everyone*.
They initiative $40mm committed to this, and are approaching the problem with wireless technology.
Here’s a state governor that gets it. He invites anyone who wants to get out of the rat race to move to Vermont. You’ll be able to open your laptop anywhere and get signal 
Hey, we just had a ball skiing there the last two weeks, maybe it’s something to think about ?!
PS Some folks here are making a point to use Gbps as a unit of measure, to highlight how bad that state of affairs is in this country. E.g. the 6Mbps i get at home is .006 Gbps. My upload speed is .0005 Gbps. In Japan you can easily get .1 Gbps symmetric service.
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