Applications for the second round of U.S. broadband stimulus funding are starting to become publicly available on a federal website.Approximately 870 applications had been posted to the database as of Saturday, according to Stimulating Broadband, a website dedicated to tracking broadband stimulus funding.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture in March announced $150 million in grants for 12 projects extending access to rural broadband Internet - including four that affect North Dakota users. Overall, such projects have received $1.05 billion in public and private funding.

A far-reaching grant proposal for federal stimulus funds to link the Santa Cruz, San Benito and Monterey area via a broadband high-speed Internet network was submitted last week by the Central Coast Broadband Consortium, a diverse coalition of public and private entities that see high-speed Internet as critical to the future of the region.

And an annual population survey in 2009 by the Census Bureau found only 55 percent of Mississippians use the Internet, whether at home, at work, at school or elsewhere.That's low. The lowest in the country. The next lowest is Alabama, and it's five percentage points higher than Mississippi.

Managers at the Peñasco Valley Telecommunications Cooperative in Artesia joke that it’s cheaper to relocate rural families to cities than it is to bring high-speed Internet to the desert.

BOISE, Idaho — A central Idaho Internet company will use $2.4 million in federal stimulus money to build eight broadband towers that will deliver high-speed Internet access to businesses, hospitals, schools and homes in five rural counties.

I've written many times on the Whiteness Of Wi-Fi, and how we as a people need to use technology to our own benefit--not corporate Americas. Now Black business in the city of Inglewood CA have moved forward to create their own Dot.com stimulus plan. Manchester:One a small business collaborative project of the non-profit Manchester Community Technologies (MCT), has install a FREE public Wi-Fi network along the Manchester Blvd business corridor.

In a lot of ways, the executive summary of the National Broadband Plan released last week, like the health care bill that just became law, boils down to “who gets what,” and “who pays for it.” I recently spoke with Shirley Franklin, former mayor of Atlanta, and the role of advocacy organizations in helping to answer these questions. Franklin has joined the Alliance for Digital Equality (ADE) earlier this year as a senior advisor.

Twenty-five years ago, the World Wide Web did not exist. Very few Americans had even seen a mobile phone, and broadband networks were available only to a few businesses and research institutions.

WASHINGTON, April 2, 2010 – Chapter Four of the plan focuses on broadband competition and innovation policy. It’s one of the most far-reaching sections in the entire 360-page document. It starts by addressing various mobile and fixed networks and moves on to discuss specific devices, privacy and identity theft. It concludes with discussion about the need for innovating and changing the current network.