Does Municipal Broadband Save Jobs?
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The Ups And Downs Of Municipal Broadband
The Ups And Downs Of Municipal Broadband
04/14/2004 11:51 AMFollowing last month's Supreme Court ruling stating that
state
s could outlaw municipal broadband, ZDNet has an interesting
interview with
Jim Ballmer, one of the lawyers fighting to let municipalities offer
broadband, should they want to. Meanwhile, the very large UTOPIA
municipal broadband (offering fiber to the home) project in Utah was
dealt a huge setback last night when Salt Lake City
decided
not to support the project, after a fairly intense fight over the
issue. Qwest is rejoicing, as they've been complaining about UTOPIA
ever since it was first conceived. However, the folks behind UTOPIA
are clearing trying to push ahead, and hope that they'll be signing up
a few other cities to help out soon. The big questions now are
whether or not the other cities involved are willing to foot the
larger part of the bill and whether or not they'll be able to find
enough subscribers to make AT&T still be interested in being a service
provider on the network. Once again, we return to the
example
of Burlington, Vermont, where a municipal fiber connection with
ownership by its own users means much more opportunity for everyone
except companies who previously had the local monopoly on
providing (much slower) broadband access. A municipal solution that
allows companies to sign on as providers builds on the idea of a
natural monopoly while still allowing true competitive market
pressures to provide people with better services.
Municipal Broadband at SXSW
Municipal Broadband at SXSW
02/07/2005 01:07 AM Events move so fast, my head spins: a few days after covering the
flurry of activity around the New Millennium Research Council's report
discouraging municipal broadband, I was asked to moderate a panel on
the discussion on March 14 during the South by Southwest (SXSW) music,
arts, and interactive festival and conference in Austin, Texas. Esme
Vos is also on the panel, from MuniWireless.com, and we should have a
rip, and might I add, roaring time. The interactive part of the event
runs March 11 to 15; the overall event is from March 11 to 20....
Senators back municipal broadband
Senators back municipal broadband
06/24/2005 03:32 PMIn the face of opposition from the telecom industry, some US senators
are supporting municipal broadband.
NRMC Report on Municipal Broadband Is
Out
NRMC Report on Municipal Broadband Is
Out
02/05/2005 09:27 PM I've read the report, and it's worth downloading and reviewing: The
report from the NMRC is called "Not In The Public Interest - The Myth
of Municipal Wi-Fi Networks -- Why Municial Schemes to Provide Wi-Fi
Broadband Services With Public Funds Are Ill-Advised." I've studied it
now and have some comments. Before reading my comments, you should
review that report and one that's a predecessor and cited in this
report and in some of the advance publicity from The Heartland
Institute, which co-produced the report--The Beacon Hill Institute at
Suffolk University's Municipal Broadband in Concord: An In-Depth
Analysis. (See also Karl Bode's more irate analysis of the report.)
I'm going to back in time to March 2004, when the Beacon Hill
Institute report was published because many elements of it are
embedded in the NMRC report. The Concord report from Beacon Hill
analyzes whether a proposed network in Concord, Mass., has any hopes
of producing a good return with low risk. The report looks at four
cities, including Tacoma, Wash., and Ashland, Ore., and also examines
RCN, a cable operator that tried to offer competitive broadband
services in areas with incumbent operators. Some financial details in
the report on Tacoma and Ashland date to 2001 partly because financial
information isn't readily broken out for these two projects. Based on
aspects of the Beacon Hill report, it was clearly primarily written in
late 2003 when full-year figures for 2002 were all that would have
been available. It's tricky to tease out where they got numbers for
Ashland and Tacoma even after studying and following the footnotes and
reading reports at the various project sites. For instance, a citation
on Ashland borrowing as much as $20 million from other city agencies
to make up revenue shortfalls in their fiber network is attribute to a
site called Dynacorp-sucks.com that was "last accessed January 28,
2003" in the footnote reference. There is no record of this site at
Archive.org, either, which doesn't mean it didn't exist, but means I
cannot research what used to be there. On the Ashland Fiber Network
site and City of Ashland's site, I cannot find recent numbers on cost
and capital expenses, except that in the 2003-2004 budget, income from
AFN outstrips expense by about 15 percent ($2.67 million in versus
$2.33 million out). There appears to be no primary research in the
Beacon Hill report, such as...
Model Anti-Municipal Broadband Bill
Model Anti-Municipal Broadband Bill
12/22/2004 01:27 AM Esme Vos has uncovered (and has available for download) the model
bill for state legislatures to ban municipal broadband: The
inestimable Vos has emerged as a firebrand for fighting back the
rhetoric of incumbent teleopolies that have put out the meme that
there are unfair tax breaks and unfair advantages that a municipal
operation has over private enterprise. This ignores the subsidies
provided--estimated at over $700 per person in Pennsylvania over the
last 10 years of a failed Verizon development plan,
non-refundable--and "taxes" that telcos and cable companies are often
able to collect for their own coffers. Vos now posts the bill that
someone--she'd like to know the individual--wrote to distribute to
various legislatures under the guise of competition. Competition means
not taking money from taxpayers, charging them by overpriced tariffs
defended to the death, collecting and keeping funds intended for rural
or impoverished citizens to have universal access, and fighting for
the right to squeeze the pipes to prevent interesting competitive
services from rising. Competition does mean building neutral
infrastructure paid for by access fees that allow all comers to
compete on a level playing field to let the market determine the best
use of resources. It's strange how businesses that hate regulation in
theory love how it supports their business models. Also strange how
many folks who claim to want real markets only really want big
businesses to be able to dictate to their markets what things cost. I
looked at the innards of the Word doc that Esme posted, but the only
secret information it contains is about her computer, not any previous
computers. On Monday morning, she posted the list of board members of
the American Legislative Exchange Council, the group behind the model
legislation. Update: Sascha Meinrath calls astroturf on three
organizations, including ALEC, that are behind anti-municipal
telco/cable/telecom service bills, pointing out that their boards'
members are mostly made up of folks that more likely have their own
companies' interests at heart despite the mission statements....
Podcast: Municipal Broadband Panel
Discussion
Podcast: Municipal Broadband Panel
Discussion
03/17/2005 03:44 AM Listen to an hour of discussion at South by Southwest Interactive
(SXSWi) on municipal broadband: Deep in the heart of Texas, mere
blocks from the State House where a bill is under consideration to ban
all forms of municipal networking, I led a panel discussion at SXSWi
with three people well poised to discuss the issues: Esme Vos of
muniwireless.com, Rich MacKinnon of Austin Wireless, and David
Isenberg of the SMART Letter. The conversation was fairly focused, and
you'll hear the same themes over and over again: disruptive technology
is threatening incumbents who are trying to prevent all forms of
experimentation and innovation by municipalities because any success
on these fronts could produce competitive private businesses. All
three panelists agreed the innovation and competition were good, and
all four of us at various times agreed that utilities should probably
not have anything to do with broadband except in facilitating
competition by removing barriers to access to poles and conduits, or
by contracting private firms to build neutral networks onto which any
provider can roam. The audio quality is mixed: you can hear the
panelists quite well, but questioners and commenters from the
audience--including well-known quantities like Jock Gill, Dewayne
Hendricks, Cliff Skolnick, and Jon Lebovsky--are a little faint. You
can download the audio in MP3 format either directly as MP3 [31 MB] or
as a ZIP archive [24 MB]. An article in yesterday's Austin Business
Journal--in which publication my picture will appear in about two
weeks in an unrelated story--points out that even airport-based Wi-Fi
and broadband could be threatened because the contract that the
Austin-Bergstrom International Airport has with Wayport would be
banned under the first form of the house bill....
Of Municipal Broadband, Astroturfing And
Figuring Out What The Real Story Is
Of Municipal Broadband, Astroturfing And
Figuring Out What The Real Story Is
02/05/2005 09:49 PMIt's been pretty fascinating to watch this story develop over the past
few days. Of course, it's nothing new to find out that supposedly
"objective" research was actually carried out to favor a specific
interest, but congratulations should go out to Glenn Fleishman for
focusing the attention on the real story here. The background is that
an organization called the New Millennium Research Council came out
with a report which seemed to suggest that all municipal broadband was
pure evil (well, not exactly, but that's how the pre-release info made
it sound). Glenn took it upon himself to
pull back some of
the curtain on the folks who were behind the report. eWeek then
took
that a step further, and suddenly the "story" was no longer about
the evils of municipal broadband -- but the sketchy connections
between powerful telco interests who have been fighting as hard as
they can against any kind of competition and the group that wrote the
study. Glenn later gave a
thorough review
of the actual report, where he notes it's not nearly as bad as it had
appeared from the initial leaks, and that it does raise some valid
points. However, the real story is the
underhanded way in
which this report was written, with money being funnelled from a
group supported by the big telcos to what appears to be nothing more
than a front organization to write up reports that favor its funders.
Now, others are
picking up on the astroturf attempt, rather than the
study itself.
US senators offer bill to protect
municipal broadband
US senators offer bill to protect
municipal broadband
06/24/2005 06:54 PMWASHINGTON - Two U.S. senators have jumped into a growing debate
about whether cities should be allowed to create tax-funded broadband
services, with the two introducing a bill that would prevent states
from outlawing municipal broadband projects.
Fourteen U.S. states have passed laws limiting municipal broadband
services, with large Internet providers lobbying against city-offered
services.
The Community Broadband Act of 2005, introduced Thursday by
Senators John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Frank Lautenberg, a
New Jersey Democrat, would prevent states from outlawing municipal
broadband service while requiring cities to regulate their own
broadband services the same as they regulate competitors. For example,
a municipal broadband service would have to pay the same franchise
fees as other providers.
Several cities, including Philadelphia, have explored offering
municipal broadband, typically using Wi-Fi technology, in recent
months. Late last year, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell signed
legislation preventing further municipal broadband projects, but along
with the bill came an agreement between the city of Philadelphia and
Verizon Communicatons Inc. over a city-run Wi-Fi network.
The Community Broadband Act is needed to meet President George
Bush's goal of universally available broadband in the U.S. by 2007,
McCain said in a speech Thursday. McCain noted that the U.S. ranks
16th among nations in broadband penetration.
"This is unacceptable for a country that should lead the world in
technical innovation, economic development and international
competitiveness," McCain said. "As a country, we cannot afford to cut
off any successful strategy if we want to remain internationally
competitive."
Private investment in the Internet should be protected and
continued, he added. "However, when private industry does not answer
the call because of market failures or other obstacles, it is
appropriate and even commendable, for the people acting through their
local governments to improve their lives by investing in their own
future," McCain said. "In many rural towns, the local government?s
high speed Internet offering may be its citizens only option to access
the World Wide Web."
Verizon and SBC Communications Inc., which both offer DSL (Digital
Subscriber Line) services, have opposed municipal broadband, as has
Time Warner Cable, saying tax-funded services should not be allowed to
compete against existing commercial services. A spokesman for Verizon
said Friday the company had not reviewed the McCain/Lautenberg bill
and had no comment on it. An SBC spokesman didn't immediately respond
to a request for comments.
The two telecom giants, however, helped fund a study released in
February that said municipal Wi-Fi networks could have "grave
flaws."
The New Millennium Research Council study suggested municipal
broadband services could dedicate tax dollars to rapidly outdated
technology. The study also noted that municipal broadband networks
could be expensive to maintain. "Municipal Wi-Fi networks present a
number of serious problems that are being overlooked as cities rush
into committing millions in taxpayer dollars to pay for network
development and expansion," the study said.
The McCain/Lautenberg legislation stands in contrast to a bill
introduced in May by Representative Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican
and former SBC employee. The Sessions bill, the Preserving Innovation
in Telecom Act of 2005, would outlaw municipal broadband services in
areas where competing commercial services exist. The bill has been
referred to a House subcommittee.
Sessions introduced the bill to ?discourage local governments from
wasting taxpayer funds on building duplicative infrastructure while at
the same time encouraging private-sector companies to offer
continually innovating service in underserved areas by removing the
specter of government competition" he said in a statement when the
bill was introduced.
On Thursday, 40 groups representing local governments, the IT
industry and consumers sent a letter to members of Congress asking
lawmakers to support pro-municipal broadband legislation. Among the
groups signing the letter were the League of California Cities, Public
Knowledge, the Rural Broadband Coalition, Consumers Union and the
Fiber to the Home Council.
SEE ALSO:
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ta privacy gets a hearing
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revenue
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Heavy-Hitters Join Pro-Municipal
Broadband Legislative Battle
Heavy-Hitters Join Pro-Municipal
Broadband Legislative Battle
06/24/2005 10:01 PM Dell, Intel, Texas Instruments, and others want more broadband to
sell more gear to consumers: They've increasingly gotten involved in
the ongoing debate over whether incumbent monopolies and duopolies
deserve right of first refusal for broadband deployment in their
service areas over municipalities because of incumbents' investments,
municipalities' tax-free and bond-raising abilities, and the role of
government in competing with private enterprise. The Wall Street
Journal walks through the issue, starting with a small town in Texas
that's building broadband because SBC can't or won't. The Texas
legislature was considering a telecom "reform" bill--a bill which
removed many public service and oversight controls on telcos--that
would also have banned municipalities from participating in broadband.
The original bill was so broad it would have banned virtually all
private-public partnerships that the FCC and the Bush Administration
have stressed for extending broadband into the furthest reaches of the
country. The backlash is now coming since Texas's bill hit defeat for
a variety of reasons, partly including Dell's founder picking up the
phone and calling legislators. You see, computer makers would enjoy
selling more equipment and one way to do that is broadband. (Homes
with broadband connections tend to buy newer equipment and more
computers, among other reasons.) Pete Sessions (R-Texas) has
introduced a bill at the national level to pre-empt local legislation
(there's that anti-federalism again) governing municipal operation of
broadband. Sessions is the representative from SBC: a former employee
with huge stock and stock options held directly (not in trust) with a
spouse who currently works there. His chief of staff told the Wall
Street Journal that "the congressman's ties to SBC do not present a
conflict of interest." Except in that he has millions of dollars at
stake over SBC's continued performance in the market....
Ricochet Offers Broadband Portable
Internet to Municipal & Public Safety
Workers
Ricochet Offers Broadband Portable
Internet to Municipal & Public Safety
Workers
05/12/2004 05:28 AMdBusinessNews.com May 12 2004 9:41AM GMT
New group urges public/private sector
partnership to facilitate municipal
broadband
New group urges public/private sector
partnership to facilitate municipal
broadband
04/16/2005 05:07 AMA group called the High Tech Broadband Coalition is encouraging public
and private sector partnership to facilitate municipal broadband.
SOS for IT Jobs? Save Yourself With SOA
SOS for IT Jobs? Save Yourself With SOA
04/09/2004 04:06 PMInternet News Apr 9 2004 8:20PM GMT
Save TV From/With Broadband
Save TV From/With Broadband
06/08/2004 03:49 PMA recent survey in Europe has suggested that the rise of broadband use
is causing people to watch less TV. And if the trend continues, TV
networks will probably have to adapt by
using
broadband connections to make TV more engaging to audiences. The
ground has already been broken with people
voting for
contestants in reality shows like American Idol. So it's just a
matter of making TV even more interactive, and incorporating the
creative use of digital communication (email, IM, video capture, etc)
is just around the corner.
Attempts go on to save Rover jobs
Attempts go on to save Rover jobs
04/09/2005 05:52 AMAdministrators are examining the books of car maker MG Rover in a bid
to save some of the 6,000 jobs at risk.
Can Linux Save IT Jobs in America
Can Linux Save IT Jobs in America
01/26/2004 01:51 PMhttp://www.thenetworkadministrator.com/CanLinuxSaveUSJobs.htm
As computer jobs have been diluted in the U.S. with lay-offs and
being sent away to other countries, the implementation of Linux has
hardly slowed down. Linux, originally of foreign origins, is quickly
becoming the operating system to keep jobs in America.
Microsoft's plan to save jobs is both
futile and dangerous
Microsoft's plan to save jobs is both
futile and dangerous
12/29/2003 02:55 PMThanks Chris. "Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, has an
idea on how to stop the US from losing computer software jobs to
India: produce more engineers.
"People focus often times on the labour rate differential. But the
thing that's most troubling is the graduation rate of technical
graduates," Ballmer lamented at a conference in NewYork last month.
"In the US, we have fewer computer science graduates today than we did
five years ago."
President touts broadband, high-tech
jobs of future
President touts broadband, high-tech
jobs of future
04/26/2004 11:34 AMSan Francisco Chronicle Apr 26 2004 3:24PM GMT
Save time, save effort, save money
Save time, save effort, save money
05/28/2004 04:57 PMCNET Asia May 28 2004 9:16PM GMT
[f2c] Municipal wifi
[f2c] Municipal wifi
03/31/2005 02:36 PM(After a morning with no women speakers or questioners, we now have a
panel with a woman on it. Yay.) J.H. Snider moderates. [Sketchy
coverage follows...] Varinia Robinson is in charge of Philadelphia's
municipal wifi project. You have to get your muni wifi in by Jan. 1,
2006, or else you have go to your local provider. This was done to
protect "competition." The city thinks it'll cost $10.5M to build it
and $1.5M annually to maintain it. It will cover 45 square miles and
provide a mnimum of 1mb up and down. It's an ubiquitous indoor
network. To break...
How to Pay for Municipal Networks
How to Pay for Municipal Networks
09/21/2004 02:46 PMSome municipalities may have already learned some lessons about
offering telecom services that they can consider when deciding to
build Wi-Fi networks: Some of the most successful municipal offerings
of wired telecom services started out with small trial networks and
were offered by municipalities that already offer utility services to
customers. But beyond whether a municipality has experience with
billing and marketing a service, Wi-Fi presents a bunch of additional
uncertainties. In the wired example, in many cases the market doesn't
have any other option for broadband Internet access and customers
definitely pay for the access. In the case of Wi-Fi, in many cases
other service providers may already offer wireless access. Plus,
cities have to decide whether they want to offer access for free or
for a fee. If they want to deliver free networks, they have to decide
how to fund it, considering both the initial outlay and ongoing
support costs. Ultimately, citizens of communities may end up
deciding. In St. Cloud, Fla., the city is trying to decide how to pay
for the ongoing maintenance of the network and will likely ask
residents to decide on a ballot referendum. If municipalities decide
to ask residents to pay for access, they have to hope they can cover
their costs. At this stage in the market, based on the experiences of
commercial Wi-Fi providers, it's not clear that an operator can make
money from for-fee networks....
New Twist on Municipal Hotspots
New Twist on Municipal Hotspots
06/28/2004 02:42 PMManchester, New Hampshire, plans to announce in mid-July that a
hotspot will be available downtown for anyone to use free for one
hour: It appears that the city decided it wanted a network and put out
a request for proposal. Signull Technologies offered to fund and build
the network and then offer one free hour per day per user. An hour a
day might be useful for folks who may want to check email during their
lunch break or for visitors to town. The agreement sounds like a good
way for Signull to pull in potential customers and for the city to
offer a useful service for visitors and residents....
Ohio Tries to Suppress Municipal-Fi
Ohio Tries to Suppress Municipal-Fi
12/19/2004 03:18 PM Esme Vos dissects the latest state bill that caters to incumbent
operators: Existing law prevents municipalities--with their tremendous
tax-free advantages as opposed to the massive subsidization of telcos
and cable operators--from running their own cable TV systems. A
modified bill, introduced by a graduate of the colleges of Zig Zigler
and Dale Carnegie, adds telecom services to that mix. Esme would like
to know which companies are behind this particular emendation to
Ohio's law. [link indirectly via GigaOm]...
Los Angeles Looks to Build Municipal
Wi-Fi
Los Angeles Looks to Build Municipal
Wi-Fi
06/24/2004 09:36 AMThe Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Project is looking for
proposals to build a free Wi-Fi zone in downtown: MuniWireless.com has
the RFP (request for proposal)....
Let's Ban Municipal Networks Nationwide
Let's Ban Municipal Networks Nationwide
06/05/2005 10:56 PM Anti-Federalism rears its ugly head with Rep. Sessions's bill: The
bill would ban municipal networks where any competitive service
existed in the municipal area of governance. A grandfather clause
allows existing services to proceed. The language of the "Preserving
Innovation in Telecom Act of 2005" is so hilariously broad and
ill-defined that it could kill all kinds of projects that the
incumbent carriers this is meant to protect would support or are
involved in deploying. It has such a broad grandfather clause that it
could allow massive projects to continue if even a tiny portion of the
service was in use. I doubt it will go anywhere because in its current
form, it's a shotgun full of buckshot, not a surgical weapon. A broad
consortium of businesses and public policy groups will certainly try
to get it killed. I doubt it will get many supporters because of its
broad sweep. For instance, this bill would kill all future airport
Wi-Fi that's not already built out because government entities would
be unable to "provide" services if Wi-Fi were operating anywhere else
in the airport authority's municipality's domain. It's pretty easy to
read that interpretation....
World warms to municipal Wi-Fi
World warms to municipal Wi-Fi
06/25/2004 04:11 AMFrom Taipei to New York, it's wireless a-go-go
America's Man in the White House
Continues to Lie Like a Thief and Our
Soldiers Continue to Die: When Will the
Spoiled, Lying, Rich Kid Be Held
Accountable? Save the Nation. Save Our
Soldiers. Impeach and Prosecute Bush and
Cheney for High Crimes
America's Man in the White House
Continues to Lie Like a Thief and Our
Soldiers Continue to Die: When Will the
Spoiled, Lying, Rich Kid Be Held
Accountable? Save the Nation. Save Our
Soldiers. Impeach and Prosecute Bush and
Cheney for High Crimes
11/02/2003 06:30 AMstory.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&e=1&u=/ap/20031101/ap_
on_re_mi_ea/iraq
track this
site | 3 links
Free municipal WiFi in Jerusalem
Free municipal WiFi in Jerusalem
09/05/2004 11:56 PM
Xeni Jardin:
Following up on
last week's post about the city of Philadelphia considering free
wireless 'net access for all, BoingBoing reader
cyphunk says, "Pfff. Jerusalem
(Israel) is already rolling out free wifi for the ENTIRE city --
starting with major commercial areas."
Link to news story.
Xpress Municipal & Utility Clearance
Xpress Municipal & Utility Clearance
11/03/2003 11:13 AM11/03/03 - Server Ready
Is free municipal wifi good?
Is free municipal wifi good?
09/02/2004 08:06 AMPhiladelphia is considering investing $10M to blanket 135 square miles
with wifi coverage. Some people for whom I have the highest respect,
and from whom I've learned a lot, I anticipate are going to denounce
this. Their argument is that the government is exactly the wrong
entity to make decisions best made by the market. Why? Because:
Government agencies are ill-equipped to make technical decisions.
Governments are corrupt. The incumbents have too much influence. Even
if Philadelphia makes the right decision, it will lock the city into
one technology that will be hard to displace. There is no such
thing...
State of Municipal Wireless Report
State of Municipal Wireless Report
03/14/2005 05:47 PM Esme Vos at Muniwireless.com has published her regular comprehensive
report: This free report is invaluable because it contains the detail
that's often hard to pull together about deployed municipal wireless
networks. It should be ammunition for any debate in which the question
of whether there are successful networks out there is raised. This is
also a good thing because most of the anti-municipal broadband folks,
both the reasonable ones and the ones who are acting by proxy for
incumbents, keep citing fiber-optic network costs and failures. (Even
though most of those networks were or are successful, which is an
entirely different topic of discussion.) The report also covers the
state of legislation to prohibit or limit municipal broadband....
Municipal Wireless Goes Beyond Internet
Access
Municipal Wireless Goes Beyond Internet
Access
07/29/2004 05:22 PMWi-Fi Planet Jul 29 2004 8:18PM GMT
Disputing Municipal Network Failures
Disputing Municipal Network Failures
03/19/2005 02:24 AM
The
folks at Tricitybroadband.com have a page that refutes
failures: Many of the anti-municipal networking foes have
released misinformation about what they describe as financially flawed
or failed networks around the U.S. Unfortunately, although there are
certainly municipal services that haven't worked out--there have to be
some failures--the ones that are bandied about are typically
misrepresented. Tricitybroadband.com has a regularly updated page that
provides the official response and financial details refuting this
misinformation.
The point here would be to work with facts: if the facts that the
utilities, cities, or Tricitybroadband is presenting are incorrect,
then other facts could refute them. We could have, say, a real debate
going in which real information was presented, examined, and
conclusions reached.
Bill would thwart municipal Internet
Bill would thwart municipal Internet
02/01/2005 09:14 PMIndystar.com - Tue Feb 1, 08:50 am GMT
Gurley and Ellison on Municipal Rights
Gurley and Ellison on Municipal Rights
03/19/2005 02:24 AM
Bill Gurley of
Benchmark Capital offers a fantastic, capitalist, classically
conservative essay on municipal telecom/broadband:
Benchmark is an investor in Tropos, disclosed in Gurley's essay, but
his essay is one that should make those that favor self-determination
in government and true competition cheer. He peels back in six points
the problems with the rash of laws sparked by a March 2004 Supreme
Court ruling to restrict municipal involvement in telecommunications
infrastructure and service.
In brief, these laws: favor incumbents by eliminating competition,
enforce the idea that oligopolies are competition, restricts American
innovation, restricts leverage for municipalities over incumbent
development, eliminates community service aspects of broadband, and
removes self-determination. I call this classically conservative
because he's in favor of competition, although many conservatives
would exclude municipalities from being involved as competitors.
"In what is ostensibly the cornerstone "democracy" on the planet, one
would think that the citizens in each of America's cities could simply
"vote" on the services they believe make sense for their city to
provide."
Carol
Ellison writes about the tale of two companies interested in the muni
space: Ellison runs through the issues facing Tropos, a
Wi-Fi metropolitan mesh provider, and DynamicCity, which offers fiber
to the premises (FTTP). "The anti-muni bills present a scenario where
their companies aren't submitting bids to win the business. They're
forced into negotiations with a competitor, the incumbent carrier,
which understandably will want to protect the market and keep its
competition out."
PA incumbents get to veto municipal wifi
PA incumbents get to veto municipal wifi
02/01/2005 09:09 PMFrom an article by Wes Simonds at Wifi Planet: The terms of the bill
essentially give Verizon and other local carriers the right to veto
all citywide hotspot plans similar to Philadelphia's in the state of
Pennsylvania beginning Jan. 1, 2006. As Jock Gill suggests, we could
use some model legislation to preempt this type of anti-user,
corporate welfare in other states. [Thanks to Dewayne Hendricks for
the link.]...
Verizon CEO Calls Municipal Wi-Fi 'a
Dumb Idea'
Verizon CEO Calls Municipal Wi-Fi 'a
Dumb Idea'
04/16/2005 08:41 PMThree Municipal Wireless Networks
Foreshadow Future
Three Municipal Wireless Networks
Foreshadow Future
06/24/2004 06:11 PMBob Brewin dives into three cities that are deploying large-area Wi-Fi
networks for public-safety-only and mixed-use purposes: Spokane has
unwired 100 city blocks, Rio Rancho claims over a 100 square miles,
and Cook County ultimately expects nearly 1,000 square miles of
coverage for public safety in Chicago and surrounding areas. The
movement shows that municipal Wi-Fi has moved from a curiosity
explored without many concrete goals--let's bring more people into
downtown and see what happens, for instance--into a critical part in
managing emergency response for fire, police, and medical personnel.
When major incidents hit, the critical question is how well these
networks perform, especially compared to cellular, landline, and
proprietary (and expensive) public-safety band equipment. Spokane and
Rio Rancho will offer public access to the network, while Cook County
is focusing purely on public safety. Cook County's routers can switch
to cellular or satellite networks as needed....
New Municipal Reports Debunk Network
Failures
New Municipal Reports Debunk Network
Failures
04/11/2005 01:03 PM Remember how the anti-municipal sock puppets and ideologues keep
citing the same failures? They're not failures. In fact, they're
generally successes. You hear Tacoma, Wash.; Ashland, Ore.; Braintree,
Mass.; Marietta, Georgia; and others bandied about as failures that
have drained taxpayer inputs and failed to live up to their financial
projects. As I discovered when starting down the research path on this
two months ago, those networks are successes: the numbers that "prove"
their failure are typically cherrypicked from early construction
stages or even take numbers that were planning figures and weren't
used during the approval stages by voters, city councils, or boards of
directors. The people at Free Press have released a comprehensive
report, "Telco Lies and the Truth about Municipal Broadband Networks,"
(PDF) that includes the first-hand research that the authors of the
reports that declare these networks failures never did. The Beacon
Hill Institute report last spring, for instance, cites a number of
cases using newspaper article, defunct Web sites, and early projects
and apparently never actually spoke to the network operators about
details. (I take the report apart in a post a few weeks ago.) All
academics will tell you that primary sources are how you do it. If you
talk to a primary source and they have publicly available
documentation to back up what they say, then you can confirm or reject
the contentions of that primary source. You can bring in other primary
sources who have opposing views and facts. But if you rely on second
or third hand reports, you will invariably produce conclusions that
are poorly founded. The Free Press counters the misinformation that's
been provided in two ways: first, by showing the fruit of the poisoned
tree, a several-year-old report that gets cited today as if the
information is contemporary (and it was bad back then, too); and,
second, by using primary sources to show how each of these networks is
producing the kinds of financial results that should encourage this
sort of local development. A second report, "Connecting People: The
Truth about Municipal Broadband," (PDF) handles the arguments about
whether municipal networks improperly take the role of private
enterprise in a new and unique way and suck the revenue and
development that comes from private infrastructure into a municipal
maw. This report also tries to address misinformation about the way in
which these networks operator, historical antecedents about
municipal...
Minister calls for computerising
municipal operations
Minister calls for computerising
municipal operations
12/30/2003 01:36 AMJordan Times Dec 30 2003 0:35AM ET
Grok Description matches for Does Municipal Broadband Save Jobs?
GrokA matches for Does Municipal Broadband Save Jobs?
StoneBridge Wireless Broadband Achieves
Key Milestones for Federal Access
Deployment Funding
StoneBridge Wireless Broadband Achieves
Key Milestones for Federal Access
Deployment Funding
03/23/2005 05:06 AMStoneBridge Wireless Broadband, one of the largest next-generation
broadband providers in the Midwest United States, has successfully
fulfilled the performance requirements of a $4.2 million federal loan
to spread broadband to 31 Minnesota communities. It has delivered
high-speed wireless access to more than 31 Minnesota communities since
2001. [PRWEB Mar 23, 2005]
Wireless broadband has developed into a
truly versatile broadband communications
medium while the national local loops
experience ongoing access problems
Wireless broadband has developed into a
truly versatile broadband communications
medium while the national local loops
experience ongoing access problems
07/08/2004 03:39 AMResearch and Markets are delighted to announce the addition of 2004
Global Wireless Broadband Report to their offering [PRWEB Jul 8, 2004]
Air2Access Announces Its 20th New
Contract For High-Speed Wireless
Internet Access at Great Lakes Marinas:
South Haven Municipal Marina Signs-On
Air2Access Announces Its 20th New
Contract For High-Speed Wireless
Internet Access at Great Lakes Marinas:
South Haven Municipal Marina Signs-On
06/17/2005 07:20 PMAir2Access, LLC announced today its 20th new contract to supply
high-speed wireless Internet access to marinas in the Great Lakes
region. South Haven Marina has become the 20th marina to offer its
boaters and guests access to high-speed wireless Internet on their
boats and throughout marina. [PRWEB Jun 9, 2005]
Does Municipal Broadband Save Jobs?
