The New York Broadband Advisory Committee held its fourth Public Hearing on Monday Mar 3rd 2008 at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. ISOC-NY videotaped the meeting and the audio has been posted on the ISOC-NY wiki.

The hearing was attended by Senator Larry Pressler – author of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that, amongst other things, established the E-Rate system.

There was plenty of talk about gigabit rates in Finland and the far east.  A bunch of charming schoolkids talked about how broadband (provided for free by Computers For Youth http://www.cfy.org  ) helped them with their homework.

An impressive speaker was Bruce Lincoln. He presented an outline of an access system called  Metroscale Regional Cyberspace Initiatives (MERCI) – a hybrid of fiber and wireless run by community based organizations. Pilot projects are underway in several places including Harlem.

Also speaking was Tom Lowenhaupt , who outlined progress on his campaign to establish a .nyc top level domain. A number of other cities are now interested in obtaining TLDs and Tom will attend the June ICANN meeting in Paris to meet with them and jointly present their case. http://www.connectingnyc.org/

A forceful speaker was Barbara Colwell, exec. director of ThinkQuest  http://www.tqnyc.org– a well-funded organization that provides tech training for educators and runs digital media competitions for kids.  Barbara argued that every schoolkid should have broadband access at home.