As it continues to deploy in secondary markets, Verizon is lighting up Western Kentucky with over 1400 square miles of broadband coverage. This includes Paducah, Mayfield, Murray and Benton.

“Western Kentucky is a vital market with dynamic, tech-savvy business people, consumers, students, and faculty who want to stay connected,” said Greg Haller, president–Kentucky, Indiana, and Michigan region, Verizon Wireless in a release. “The expansion of our broadband network here provides customers with access to the very latest wireless technology.”

With BroadbandAccess, business customers, residents and visitors can expect average download speeds of 600 kilobits per second (kbps) to 1.4 megabits per second and average upload speeds of 500 kbps to 800 kbps. This service is based on EV-DO Rev A.

Verizon Wireless was the first national wireless provider to commercially launch a high-speed wireless broadband network in the United States, which is available to more than 210 million people across the country. In Kentucky, Verizon Wireless’ broadband network is also available in Louisville Metro, Lexington and Owensboro.

Murray State University students will surely be one major beneficiary of this setup.

In a related bit, it looks like Verizon and AT&T will be converging on the 3GPP LTE technology for 4G connectivity (100Mbps wireless.) Nokia is running tests now. Expected retail availability 2012.

A cool picture of the different technologies is here.

The Sacramento Regional Transit District (RT) operates 97 bus routes and 36.87 miles of light rail covering a 418 square-mile service area. Buses and light rail run 365 days a year using 76 light rail vehicles, 254 buses powered by compressed natural gas (CNG) and 17 shuttle vans. Riders can now use Google Transit to plan their mass transit routes.

While the SRTD already had a route planning system, Google Transit offers directions on Google Maps, making for a very simple way to get around.

....Annual ridership has steadily increased on both the bus and light rail systems from 14 million passengers in 1987 to more than 30 million passengers in FY 2005. Weekday light rail ridership averages about 43,600, which accounts for approximately 40% of the total system ridership. Bus weekday ridership has reached an average of 67,000 passengers per day…..

See also the Friends of the Light Rail and Transit site.

Well, it’s WiMax World Week in Chicago, and from news reports, the attendance has almost doubled. WiMax (802.16) is a technology that works a lot like Wi-Fi Wireless Networks but has much greater range since it uses empty frequencies to provide wireless Internet just about anywhere. WiMax speeds are 4Mbit/sec at their best right now. Sprint/Nextel is setting up a service with Clearwire that will cover 100 million people by the end of next year, and demos of WiMax seem to be going better and better.

Wimax World had some buzz about demos of new technology - mostly related to compatibility and backhaul issues. I’m looking forward to hearing more about the end-devices of course. I’ll go out on a limb to say if Apple produces a Newton 2, it will natively support WiMax, and that WiMax will drive a revolution in mobile device simplification (tablets, thin clients) as well as mobile application (video, dynamic news, conferencing.) Intel showed an integrated WiMax card on a laptop at WiMax World. One thing that Sprint said was that the costs of WiMax devices and services will be like using 3G, but they won’t give out SLAs.

WiMax deployments can’t come soon enough for Municiple Wi-Fi projects, because many seem to be sinking.

USA Today provided this list…

•Cincinnati shelved its plan last week for a citywide network because the market is too unstable.

•The Silicon Valley plan for free Wi-Fi is at risk after providers decided local governments must be “anchor tenants” for the service.

•Springfield, Ill., is looking for another partner after AT&T dropped Wi-Fi plans last month.

•St. Louis is trying to figure out how to power Wi-Fi transmitters on 1,700 street lights when they’re not illuminated without spending millions of dollars.

Until then I guess we’ll need to hover around hotspots.

 

Google Transit appears to have expanded this morning to include Hampton Roads Transit (HRT).

HRT in SouthEastern VA currently serves 1.2 million people within its 369 square mile service area. Its service area consists of eight cities: Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Hampton, Newport News, the town of Smithfield and the city of Williamsburg (Colonial Williamsburg). There have been proposals for light rail in the past.

photo: Hampton Roads Transit

What’s cool, is that HRT was suggested in this post back in Feb 2006. Nice to see a suggestion go to fruition. In January of 2007, Google began discussions with HRT, and shortly thereafter, HRT began using GPS systems to monitor bus positions.

With increasing competition from a swarm of inexpensive stock photography shops and changing patterns in image purchasing, Getty , the market leader in stock images in the world, is offering its entire collection of photography with flat-fee $49 licensing.

• Royalty-free images may be used multiple times for multiple projects.
• Rights-ready images may be used in web or electronic media for commercial or editorial projects such as websites or email for three months.
• Rights-managed images may be used in one commercial or editorial website, email or mobile project for three months.

This makes it possible for web developers, email marketers, and bloggers to use the best stock in the world in their work at very good pricing. Landing pages can be tested at affordable rates without spending a fortune on the images, and if a particular image scores a home run, a longer term license can be negotiated.

Photographers are not very happy about this. Such price changes, while here limited to web resolution images, will have a trickle-up effect on the higher resolution marketplace as buyers get used to the model. Acceptable license fees last year will now seem exorbitant, specially as x-gen media buyers begin to make decisions.

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CBS will use 144 radio and its 212 TV affiliates to put more local content on sites in its CBS Audience Network. Furthermore, the local partnerships will bring new online opportunities to local advertisers while offering national advertisers the ability to target specific geographical areas.

Locally produced affiliate clips and other media will now be able to seep into the social media sphere via� utomattic, Brightcove, Clearspring, DAVE Networks, Goowy Media, meebo, MeeVee, Musestorm, Ning, RockYou!, Slide, VideoEgg, Voxant and vSocial.� These profiles widgets, wikis and other community pages will become more localized and hopefully colorful as a result.� CBS will then be able to sell, of course, more targeted advertising with that media distribution and increase the amount of time spent with the CBS Brand.

It remains to be seen what kind of material will be produced for distribution on the networks, or if these local media outlets will simply open up their existing streams to the network.� Local advertisers, however, will probably be able to find some new audiences via this mechanism - though I’m not yet sure what the media buy will look like.

blog readers: Note new category.