WASHINGTON, March 16, 2010 – President Obama said today, “America today is on the verge of a broadband-driven Internet era that will unleash innovation, create new jobs and industries, provide consumers with new powerful sources of information, enhance American safety and security, and connect communities in ways that strengthen our democracy. Just as past generations of Americans met the great infrastructure challenges of the day, such as building the Transcontinental railroad and the Interstate highways, so too must we harness the potential of the Internet.”

WASHINGTON, March 15, 2010 – Blair Levin, head of the Federal Communications Commission’s national broadband plan and the “national purposes” team at the agency previewed key points from the upcoming national broadband plan.

The object of the plan, they said, is not just to expand broadband networks, but to enable the creation of applications and innovations built upon that network. The six primary objective areas presented were healthcare, education, energy, civic engagement, economic expansion, and public safety.

SPRINGFIELD, Illinois, and WASHINGTON, February 25, 2010 – Connect Illinois, a non-profit organization that includes partnerships with Southern Illinois University, Man-Tra-Con, and Connected Nation, on Thursday announced Drew Clark as its new Executive Director.

Clark, the founder of BroadbandCensus.com and an experienced, independent telecom industry analyst, brings a unique public interest perspective to broadband data collection, which is vital to the effective deployment of high-speed internet networks throughout the United States.

“I’m glad that our team of broadband experts is moving forward to help achieve the ambitious vision for a public, transparent map of technology infrastructure that President Obama and I share,” said Governor Pat Quinn. A long-time advocate of improving broadband access in Illinois, Governor Quinn has worked with public and private partners over many years to ensure connectivity in all areas.

WASHINGTON, February 18, 2010 – NBC-Universal Vice President Richard Cotton on Wednesday called upon internet service providers to be permitted to filter content over their pipes for copyright violations, and compared copyright filtering to filtering for computer viruses.

Cotton’s statement was part of a briefing outlining the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s top 2010 intellectual property priorities.

WASHINGTON, February 10, 2010 – Google shook up the broadband world on Wednesday with the announcement, on its blog, that it plans to offer super-fast broadband, at speeds of up to 1 Gigabit per second, to up to 500,000 homes.

Google framed its entrance into the marketplace to deploy fiber-optic services as a “testbed” to understand more about the way that consumers and businesses use internet applications when truly high-speed services are available.

“We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections,” said Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly, project managers at Google. “We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.”

WASHINGTON February 1, 2010 – As a follow-up to President Obama’s State of the Union Speech last week, Obama sat down with YouTube’s news and political director Steve Grove to answer questions submitted and voted on by users of YouTube, which is owned by Google. The total number of votes cast were 774,450, on 14,476 questions, from nearly 65,000 users.

The number one question in the “jobs and economy” category came from James Earlywine of Indianapolis, who asked: “An open internet is a powerful engine for economic growth and new jobs. Letting large companies block and filter online content and services would stifle needed growth. What is your commitment to keeping the Internet open and neutral in America?”

“I’m a big believer in Net Neutrality,” said Obama.

GERMANTOWN, Md., January 31, 2010 – Two of the biggest challenges facing the expansion of wireless broadband in this country include the disparate number of rural and remaote wireless carriers, and how to ensure that stimulus funding goes to wireless carriers.

The Wireless Internet Service Provider Directory lists 1,860 WISPs in the U.S., while another directory includes over 2,500. Notwithstanding, there exist numerous other WISPs that are simply not contained in these directories.

WASHINGTON, January 14, 2010 – The federal government must embrace the type of technological innovation and experimentation that has borne fruit in the private sector, President Obama said Thursday at a White House forum on modernizing government.

Bringing the government into the 21st Century is critical, he said, and the “technology revolution that has transformed society over the last decade has yet to reach government offices.”

WASHINGTON, January 8, 2010 –President Obama on Wednesday expanded upon his “Educate to Innovate” campaign and announced an increase in funding for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

“Our future is on the line. The nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow,” Obama said at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House.

WASHINGTON, January 5, 2010 – BroadbandBreakfast.com has been actively covering the workshops of the Federal Communications Commission as the agency prepares its national broadband plan. We have covered all of the workshops since late August. In preparation for assembling the complete collection of articles, BroadbandBreakfast.com reporters are returning to the beginning of the workshops, on August 6, 2009. To see the complete collection of articles, click on http://broadbandbreakfast.com/category/fcc-workshops.