Telco Sues City For Plan To Roll Out Own Broadband 681
Syngularity writes 'MaximumPC is featuring an article about one broadband provider's decision to sue the city of Monticello, Minnesota after residents passed a referendum to roll out their own fiber optic system. TDS Telecommunications had earlier denied the city's request for the company to provide fiber optic service. During the ensuing legal battle, which prevented the citizens from following through with their plans, TDS Telecommunications took the opportunity to roll out a fiber system.'
Ha! (Score:4, Informative)
My company actually did some of the design for this. Now I know why they wanted such a fast turn around time on it.
Re:Not government's job (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with this is that gas taxes do not even come close to covering the costs of building and maintaining the road network. Public roads are heavily subsidized.
Re:Not government's job (Score:2, Informative)
Gas taxes cover the costs on repairs, and the more expensive the fuel. The more expensive gas, the more the input revenue is. You know what the real problem is? All that money is put into general revenue, not for roads. So instead of paying directly for what it should be. That gas tax money is paying for in most cases education, or services.
Re:The People's Republic of Burlington, VT (Score:1, Informative)
has had a municipal fiber-to-the-premises system for the past two years. I doubt I would have been alive long enough to see FIOS rolled out, particularly since the outfit that Verizon dumped^H^H^H^H^H^H sold their landline infrastructure to, Fairpoint, has just filed bankruptcy. Comcast, the only other game in town, has been howling to the state regulators about the sheer UNFAIRNESS of a publically-owned body actually implementing something that they had no intention of providing (in their neverending quest at maximizing shareholder value).
Most recently, certain parties (first two guesses don't count) have been agitating to have the city shut down Burlington Telecom over perceived financial malfeasance. After all, it's downright UN-AMERICAN to have such an important piece of infrastructure exist without money flowing into corporate coffers!
Too bad Burlington telecom is $50million in debt and floundering so please don't point to it as a success agains the other bad guys. BT is as bad as they get. Bad as in "bad" not cool.
Re:Not government's job (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not government's job (Score:3, Informative)
Annual maintenance is only part of the cost of public roads. There is also the cost of building the roads, and many other associated costs. Gas taxes alone do not cover all of these costs.
Re:Why is this offtopic? (Score:2, Informative)
"By your logic food should be provided by the government."
Haha, wow bro, have I got some news for you...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_stamps [wikipedia.org]
We've covered this before (old news) (Score:3, Informative)
Greenlight (Score:4, Informative)
FTTP, up to 100 symmetric bandwidth, and the telecoms threw a freaking fit, and did their best to annihilate municipal broadband, and failed to stop it.
To All The Constitution Advocates (Score:5, Informative)
The Constitution defines the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. All other powers are reserved for the state. Nothing, even in looking at the founding father's writings imply that LOCAL GOVERNMENT cannot compete with private industry. The City of Monticello is not, despite the suprising ignorance shown here this topic, part of the Federal Government.
The City is more then capable of telling you what colors you can paint your house, where you can and cannot plant trees, and so forth. The issue building permits and license everything from the number of dogs you can have to how often you can water your lawn. They also can restrict businesses from opening from granting licenses to zoning requirements.
Cities and Counties and even States run and operate businesses as far back as the 13 colonies. We have Police Depts, Fire Depts, various inspectors (electrical (state), building (city), surveyors (county), assessors, DNR, etc... All of which can be hired in the capacity of a business in the form of permits and special services (Fire dept. will burn a building down for you, police can be hired for security for special events, etc.)
The sheer ignorance and lack of understanding of what the Constitution of the United States actually does is astonishing. The fact that when I was in high school and we were required in social studies to actually read the federalist papers compared to the teachers now that, "that stuff is nothing but a bunch of lies" thank you teachers union in district 622 here in MN speaks on how much misinformation exists on the purpose.
Of course I expect little from my home state now, we've elected a wrestler and now a bad comedian. Perhaps Louie Anderson can run against Frankin... Hell I'd be happy to have KKKKAAAAAHHHHHNNNNNN! KKKKKKKAAAAAHHHHHNNNNNN!!!! tossed out...
For those that do understand the Constitution, kudos for keeping the arguments rooted in reality.
Re:raise taxes to pay for the fiber backbone insta (Score:2, Informative)
The article is about a city, Monticello, that did exactly what you claim that there is "no way on Earth" a city would do.
Re:Not government's job (Score:4, Informative)
Do you ride the bus? Buses run on Diesel (mostly.) which pays road tax.
No they don't. Special pumps owned by the city, filled with gas on which the taxes are not paid, same for all other city vehicles.
Re:I wish the system could do something good for o (Score:2, Informative)
The reasons against capital punishments are far simpler than you think:
1) The way it is done usually is far more costly (and that does not even count wasting the massive investment a society puts just getting someone to adulthood, particularly with a good education)
2) All methods seem to be rather cruel, despite claims to the contrary
3) You _will_ end up killing innocents. Lots of them. A government that is routinely involved in killing innocents in my eyes has very little justification for judging others. Few people would support murders as judges, but that's essentially what death sentences imply in a non-perfect world.
Link to the Decision (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.lawlibrary.state.mn.us/archive/ctappub/0906/opa081928-0602.pdf [state.mn.us]
Re:Privitization (Score:4, Informative)
I used to live near one of those in suburban Chicago. It was still called Plank Road. An excerpt from a local paper (http://www.ledgersentinel.com/article.asp?a=5946).
"The roads were financed by private, state chartered corporations, in which stockholders expected to make a profit. Tolls, generally a penny a mile for a one-horse buggy or wagon and an additional half-cent for every other animal providing the power. Up in Wisconsin, driving from Milwaukee to Green Bay via the plank turnpike cost $3.78—a not inconsiderable sum when government land was selling for $1.25 per acre.
Here in Kendall County, Oswego was the target for two plank road ventures. According to “A History of the County of DuPage Illinois” published in 1857: “The Naperville and Oswego plank road was laid through the central part of this town [Naperville]. The projectors of this road thought to facilitate the communication between Oswego, Naperville and Chicago...The road was completed from Chicago to Naperville, but no farther. The project was a failure; the stock was worthless, for people would travel by railroad. The material of which the road was constructed is now being torn up and converted to other uses.”"
Re:I wish the system could do something good for o (Score:5, Informative)
TFA sucks and sucks hard. Ars Technica has a far better article [arstechnica.com]. The suit is over, it started two years ago and the telco lost.
Re:Not government's job (Score:3, Informative)
Once you total up gas costs, parking fees, aggravation from driving down there... the train makes a hell of a lot more sense.
I agree! in Chicago I use the train almost exclusively. The problem is that most people from around here freak when I say that.. One mother of a friend of my daughters said, "The train? and have to be around all those icky poor people?"
Most people here in the USA are bred to be against public transportation. They think it's "icky" and they see them belching black smoke so it's "dirty"...
It's heavy training from TV that you must own the biggest car you can get, and that public transportation is BAD!. Hell the Tv show Seinfeld. They lived in New York, What idiot drives everywhere in New york? Most people in reality use public transportation in NYC. you NEVER saw them on a subway, always in jerry's or kramers car.
Re:Revoke TDS' exclusive license (Score:3, Informative)
>>>there are constitutional and other laws in place to ensure that whatever the government does in terms of snooping or investigating is available to public scrutiny.
>>>
Those constitutional guarantees didn't help this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMB6L487LHM [youtube.com]
Or this guy (note this happened *nowhere near* the border): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUzd7G875Hc [youtube.com]
Actual footage of INNOCENT citizen being beaten: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgejD6c-9YA&feature=related [youtube.com]
Re:It would be awesome if... (Score:3, Informative)
I think they're just thankful to have the service at all - I recall many of the monopolies in Minnesota are not terribly competitive. You have Comcast, the cable monopoly that aggressively goes after the high speed network market and offers high priced TV packages (compared to satellite) and anyone that uses the Qwest or Covad backbones and neither of those providers sees any reason to keep up with Comcast. Nearly everyone I know in Minnesota uses Comcast for high speed internet, and last time I checked Broadband Reports it was the cheapest and fastest overall (but from experience I know that is iffy and their TV packages are much worse than competing satellite).
And since when is Montecello a suburb of Minneapolis? Its like more than half way to St Cloud. In fact, I used to meet my boss there when I lived near the University of Minnesota and telecommuted to his business in St Cloud.
Re:Corporate welfare state (Score:2, Informative)
Wow, I'm impressed a quote from Heinlein that I agree with strongly, usually I find him to have been a bit dumb and a bit far to the right. Granted, according to wikiquote, he made it in 1939 in "Life-Line", when he was a fairly left-wing socialist. It took Heinlein until his third marriage in 1947 for him to become the wacky right-winger I question the sanity of. Heinlein wrote "Starship Troopers" in support of the actions of the rabidly anti-communist Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, and the whole affair with HUAC obviously looks pretty bad today.
Re:Corporate welfare state (Score:5, Informative)
Your Google-fu is weak my son. Apparently the quote really is from Heinlein's first published story, "Life-Line" [nielsenhayden.com], written in 1939.
Re:Can someone explain... (Score:1, Informative)
They sued them for using public bonds to build the network, essentially competing with a private business that cannot create its own bonds the same way. The city did use its own money to get started on the fiber network for public services (gov't etc) while the suit was ongoing.