Aurora's Nonprofit Approach with Muni Fiber Community Broadband Bits Episode 123
Aurora, Illinois, has been named one of the "Smart 21" most intelligent communities of 2015 according to the Intelligent Community Forum. We have been tracking Aurora for a few years and wrote about OnLight, its nonprofit ISP, that we wrote about earlier this year.\n\nWith some 200,000 people, it is the second largest city in Illinois but it has one of the most interesting hybrids of municipal fiber and nonprofit partnerships we have come across. For this week's Community Broadband [no-glossary]Bits[/no-glossary] podcast, Lisa Gonzalez takes the reins and interviews Rick Mervine, Alderman of the 8th Ward in Aurora.\n\nAlderman Mervine explains why the city first invested in the fiber network and why they later decided to create OnLight to serve community anchor institutions as well as others in the community. \n\nRead the transcript of this episode here.\n\nWe want your feedback and suggestions for the show - please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.\n\nThis show is 20 minutes long and can be played below on this page or via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed. \n\nListen to previous episodes here. You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here.\n\nFind more episodes in our podcast index.\n\nThanks to Jessie Evans for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is "Is it Fire?"