National Broadband Plan

As I did growing up as a kid, there are millions of people that live in rural areas where broadband Internet coverage is simply not available (I know about HughesNET, but just sayin'). As part of the economic recovery act this year a plan is being developed to expand the broadband footprint into many of these rural areas. According to FastCompany magazine, the FCC launched a new crowd-sourcing platform to try to generate some consensus on the direction of the agency's National Broadband Plan. Built by IdeaScale in the style of Digg and Reddit, popular voting-based social news sites, the new Broadband.gov presents users with a list of ideas to vote up or down.

I personally think that my life would be very different without broadband. Granted I could still send email and do basic web browsing and the occasional 12-hour download session of updates, but having a fast Internet connection pretty much everywhere I go allows me to do more, experience more, create more than I could ever imagine in the days of the ole' dial-up.

How would your life be different if you were still using dial-up Internet to connect?

A link to the FastCompany article here. Visit broadband.gov to read and participate in the discussion.