Please join us for our November 2014 meeting at the SC State Museum's Gervais St Room (2nd Floor). The SC State Museum is located at 301 Gervais Street in Columbia.
The October meeting is sponsored by ITPSC.
The presentation will be by USC Telecommunications Management students
Connect South Carolina is part of a national broadband initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce to advance the developing high-speed Internet access, adoption, and use by citizens and businesses within South Carolina. Currently, only two “Connected Communities” have been certified in South Carolina – Abbeville and Anderson Counties. This fall semester, USC students in the Integrated Information Technology’s advanced technology elective course – Telecommunications Management – are working to get two more “Connect Communities” certified before the end of the year when the initiative ends . In four teams, the students are canvassing the Downtown, Dutch Fork, and Lower Richland County areas in Richland County and Lexington County as a whole. They are documenting how many public PCs are available for how many hours and how many residents have graduated from “Digital Literacy” education programs within the two counties. They are also verifying the broadband access speeds provided by broadband service providers within the two counties. All of this information is being mapped on a National Broadband map of the United States.
At the November ITP-SC meeting, USC students will talk about the Connect South Carolina and national broadband initiatives, their own experiences as a team collecting the broadband data, and what they have learned about the impact of broadband telecommunications services on the economies of Richland and Lexington Counties. The students, under direction of Dr. Karen Patten, are working with Ms. Leslie Callison, Community Technology Advisor, and Mr. Jim Stritzinger, Director, Connect South Carolina as well as County Telecommunications managers in both Richland and Lexington Counties.
