Digital Expansion

The Digital Expansion video team, which includes students from City-As-School and a video teacher from CUP, explains different Internet connection speeds in language you can understand.

If you like this video, please consider making a donation to support the video so they can continue working through the summer and into the fall semester. Check out what else the team has been doing.

On August 14, People's Production House, Common Cause/New York, Consumers Union and NYPIRG called on the NYS Public Service Commission to reconsider it's decision to grant Verizon a cable franchise with the City of New York.

See our official request for reconsideration (pdf). (Kudos to Chris Keeley at Common Cause for his work gathering the documents and drafting the letter.) To be reconsidered, we have to show that he decision was based on new or false information or that the decision was made in an arbitrary and capricious manner.

People's Production House recently participated in a great panel on the digital television (DTV) transition, hosted by Devorah Hill from Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Our co-panelists were Glen Ford from Black Agenda Report, Joel Kelsey from Consumers Union, and Lawrence Carter-Long from the Disabilities Network of New York City.

Joshua Breitbart and I just published an article on Gotham Gazette titled "Lost in the PDFs: Getting City Data." The article is about how New York City's government uses (or doesn't use) technology to share information with the public.

A team from Google visited the PPH offices today to learn how access to the unused spectrum in between digital TV channels could benefit our members. Access to these open channels, known as "white spaces," would help close the digital divides in rural and urban areas.

In rural areas, it would allow us to use wireless signals to cover much larger areas than we can with currently-available spectrum. In urban areas, it would create competition for mobile phone service, which is many people's primary – and many more people's potential – path to the Internet.