Here is the map of all the applicants. Each large, orange dot represents an area that had over 1,000 residential submissions.

Thanks to everyone for all your help and support. Please do one last thing for us: Go to our Facebook page and leave us a comment whether or not you submitted a nomination for Clinton. Please state whether you made one for your self or for your organization and the name of the organization.

Fingers crossed!

Fewer than 27 out of every 100 Americans have broadband service, compared with 33 in South Korea and 38 in the Netherlands. The average advertised download speed is 8 megabits per second; in France, it is 51. And according to a study by the F.C.C., the average download in the United States occurs at about half the advertised speed. Meanwhile, the poor, the elderly and other vulnerable groups remain cut off from broadband technology, and therefore from such things as online government services, medical advice and jobs.

The F.C.C.’s blueprint offers a feasible path to address these lacunae, unleash investment in the broadband network and foster competition among service providers. The core goal is to bring broadband to 100 million homes at download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second by 2020, and to vastly expand broadband over the airwaves.

The ambitious plan is likely to attract hostility from corporations — like TV broadcasters and telecommunications companies. They have legitimate concerns, but, in general, Congress should provide all the assistance the F.C.C. needs to achieve its goals.

The article is kind of tech-heavy but its still a good read to get a handle on the organizational challenges. One of the biggest ones is, what to do when you get the fiber to the house? That’s actually the start of a whole nest of different problems.

The investigations regarding the position of the modem showed how people wrestle with their in-house network. FTTH is not the cause of the problem, but the availability of a lot of capacity brings visibility to the issue.

The architects who designed the buildings never considered the demand for broadband and HDTV, did not consider the required wiring, and still don’t. It’s up to the people who live there to try to find a solution to string wires and connect all their gear.

Why not without wires? All “free band” wireless solutions like TV-over-wireless or Wifi are great inventions, but in a densely populated MDU, the limitations become apparent. Reinforced concrete walls or plasterboard with metal insulation sheeting block radio signals. If everybody around you uses the same solution, chances are you disturb each other’s connections. Wideband N-type Wifi is fast but uses more spectrum.

In fact, one of the most popular items sold in Amsterdam are range extenders for Wifi—not to connect over a longer distance, but to drown out your neighbors’ access points. High speed Homeplug adapters (data over power lines) are not cheap but are a last resort when everything else fails.

Most likely, the next innovation will be a fiber for an in-house network that can be drawn alongside electrical wires in their ducts to all the rooms in the house. Ultra high speed wireless links will most likely be the preferred choice for short distances, i.e. within the room itself.

The FCC launched a consumer broadband test on their blog, broadband.gov, yesterday. Internet speeds in the US are often 50% to 80% lower than advertised and its vital consumers have reliable information on the actual performance of their connections. One of the two tools the FCC is using is the Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT), an open source tool hosted on MeasurementLab.net (M-Lab). The validity of NDT can be independently verified, and all data is publicly released. M-Lab hosts other test as wells, such as a test to see if bit torrent is being throttled, or how much bandwidth is available.

So use this bad-boy before filling out your application. Bookmark it and use it to keep your ISP honest.

H/T BoingBoing

But before we can talk about where we are and where we are going we need to understand where we’ve been. So this first post will be: A Brief History of the Internet.

The Internet was born from the Defense Department’s need to have a reliable way to maintain command, control and communications over its continental-sized nuclear weapons forces. It was found in the late 1970’s that Ma Bell’s (remember, THE Phone Company?) telecommunications infrastructure was not very robust. If Chicago, for example, was vaporized it would cut the nation in two communications-wise.

Thus was born the idea of breaking communications into little chunks, called packets. Each packet would be like taking a very long letter and cutting it up, putting parts of the letter in separate, numbered envelopes. The envelopes would then be put in the mail. All envelopes/packets would find their own way to the destination and be re-assembled in the proper order once received. Ideally, they would use the shortest, most efficient route. However, if some part of the network was a glowing hole in the ground (vis. Chicago) a network of routers of packets for a message originating in Washington, DC destined for the ballistic submarine pens in Washington State could find an alternative route, say through St. Louis or Dallas and eventually all the packets/envelopes would reach their destination.

This network was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and later the National Science Foundation and was used and further developed by the military and research institutions through the mid-1980’s. The usefulness of the networking protocols of DARPA-/NSF-net were soon picked up on and early commercial networks hooked into the Internet in the late 1980’s such as UUNET and Compuserve.

The 1970’s and 1980’s saw the creation of the fist protocols for delivering e-mail, transferring files and collective message boards. But until the early 1990’s the Internet was the pretty much the private domain of scientific researchers, the Defense Department and computer hobbyists.

In 1991 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the idea was developed of building documents that used structured sets of tags which would allow users to embed links in documents. This was because so much of their type of research depended upon hundreds and hundreds of supporting documents and data sets. Think: a footnote that would take you straight to the referenced resource. This sounds blindingly obvious to us today, but this was truly groundbreaking then.

This hyper linking technology would allow complex research ideas and papers to be linked together in a “web” of related information. Not long after the CERN developents, in 1993, a couple of graduate students at the University of Illinois developed a bit of software for “browsing” these kinds of documents, a web viewer called Mosaic. Thus were born web pages and the modern conception of the Internet.

With the advent of the World Wide Web, use of the Internet took off. Control (and responsibility) of the physical backbone of the Internet was given over to the seven regional bell operating companies and other private networks in 1992. From 1993 to the early 2000’s it was estimated that the use of the Internet grew by over 100 percent per year. By late 2009 it is estimated that there are 1.67 billion Internet users; roughly one in four human beings. From a few thousand to one quarter of the planet in about sixteen years. That’s how fast this has happened.

But at no time since the DoD gave up control has anyone ever “owned” the Internet. The wires are controlled by the indvidual, regional operators. But they are useless without the structure of the internet; the names, number and protocols it runs on.

The regulations for domains and addresses are governed by an International committee, the International Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). The basic operating rules, or protocols that govern how packets are routed and how various programs should work are also governed by open international committees such as the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), which governs the network hardware side and the World Wide Web Consortium (WWWC), on the software side. All these rules are transparent and accessible by anyone.

During the period of explosive growth in the Dot-Com era right through to today the one thing that makes the Internet special is its blind simplicity. At the end of the day, all it is is a network of very fast little virtual mail-room clerks shifting packets to and from their destinations. The network does not care at all what is inside that packet. It can be part of a credit card transaction, a video, a love letter, a chat text, a blog post, literally anything that can be reduced to digital bits can be moved over the Internet.

The Internet’s strength and its value as a tremendous generator of innovation, progress and freedom in the world is directly linked to its OPENNESS. The fact that it is a dumb network that just moves packets means that anyone who can think of an interesting thing to do by moving little chunks of information, can go right ahead and do it, EVEN IF ITS NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE. THEY DON’T NEED PERMISSION. IF IT FOLLOWS THE PROTOCOLS IT GETS ACCEPTED.

It is that incredible openness to innovation that has taken us in a mere sixteen years from the very first, text-only web pages on dial-up modems to our modern TV-on-the-computer, Revolution will be Tweeted live, interconnected-as-never-before world. The Internet has been quite simply the most important invention since the printed word.

What is crucial now is to maintain this physical and logical “web” and to continue to extend it so that new uses can be found in order to continue the human and economic development that the Internet has enabled.

Next Episode: Why Your Internet Sucks.