Com Net, Inc., Horizon Telcom and OneCommunity, collectively awarded a total of $141.3 million in federal stimulus funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, have received the go-ahead to break ground on their projects. The awarded projects will add more than 3,600 new miles of broadband fiber throughout Ohio.

Full Article:

http://www.oar.net/press/releases/2011/2011_ommc_construction.shtml

20+ BTOP Grants for Quilt Community

Quilt participants or their members were involved in 20 successful funding grants under the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) over the past year or two. And many more BTOP grants received funding thanks to technical expertise and support provided by Quilt participants. This impressive result testifies to the critical role regional networks and their “middle mile” fiber routes play in realizing the goal of the National Broadband Plan that every American community should have affordable access to at least 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) broadband service.

These new BTOP funds will enable regional networks to improve existing broadband infrastructure to currently connected community anchor institutions and to extend their networks to reach more institutions within their own geographic area. And with lower fiber acquisition costs, regionals will be able to serve additional community anchors at only the incremental costs of reaching them.

Perhaps just as significantly, these new BTOP grants provide the opportunity for new conversations between regional networks and new partners, or to revive conversations with existing partners, and to think of private/public partnerships in entirely new ways to achieve improved broadband to a growing number of participants who are becoming part of these networking communities.

For a directory of BTOP awards received by regional networks, see:

Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP)

Pittsburgh—April 15, 2011

Over a hundred guests, including students, representatives of government and industry, joined the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) staff today at PSC’s 25th anniversary observance and Discover 11 Open House. Also present were participants from the TeraGrid/Blue Waters Symposium in Data Intensive Analysis, Analytics, and Informatics, held in Pittsburgh, which concluded at noon on April 15.

Full Article:

http://www.psc.edu/publicinfo/news/2011/041511_25yrfeature.php