Broadband War & an Interactive Municipal Map 231
Ant writes "Broadband Reports mentions a CNET News.com story on the U.S.'s growing debate over municipal broadband. Across the country, acrimonious conflicts have erupted as local governments attempt to create publicly funded broadband services with faster connections and cheaper rates for all citizens, narrowing the so-called digital divide. The Bells and cable companies, for their part, argue that government intervention in their business is not justified and say they are far better equipped to operate complex and far-flung data networks.
There is also an interactive municipal broadband legislative map that details the major battlegrounds on the issue. At stake is the fate of high-speed Internet access for millions of Americans, hinging on a fundamental question of civics and economics--whether the government or private industries should take the leading role in building out what's considered this generation's critical infrastructure challenge. Its map shows a breakdown of muni-projects in each state, which have or are developing fiber or Wi-Fi projects, and are facing (existing or pending) legal barriers to doing business."
Unbelievable... (Score:3, Interesting)
(Hint: saying 'bribery' might be true, but it ain't the kind of answer I'm after!)
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Re:Unbelievable... (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody with a garage sale PC or Mac from ten years ago can get on the net at a decent speed for less than the cost of cable TV.
For that matter, any laptop with a PCMCIA slot and a $10 802.11 card will let you access the Internet from any of dozens of free wireless hotspots in every major city.
The total monthly cost of being connected is far less than the total montly cost of owning a car, and plenty of low-income folk manage to own cars, even if
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:3, Insightful)
That is a GREAT point. I don't see this municipal broadband existing in larger communities, there is too much competition and the current ISPs are too well entrenched. Where this is really going to be a great thing is in all of the small towns across America. There are so many small communities all across the midwest that are in the exact situation you describe. If those communities can use ta
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:2, Insightful)
You know what? You can't get really good live opera or chinese food out in most rural communities either.
Part of moving out into the sticks is making the choice of giving up certain big-city advantage
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification _Act_Amendments [wikipedia.org]
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is great, but only if you live in a major city.
What if you live in Bumf*ck Iowa, where the only communications infrastructure you have are the brittle old telephone lines that were erected 80 years ago? The local baby-Bell won't spend a cent on upgrades because there's not enough users to make it profitable.
Where's your opportunity
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:2, Interesting)
Where's your opportunity to get online now?
Des Moines.
If you want the ammenities of a city, move to one.
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Re:Unbelievable... (Score:2)
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:2)
I don't know who you've been listening to but... My computer is sitting at home on a cable connection running a web server and VNC and I can access it from outside the cable network. I'm using Cox Cable, one of the big guys. I had to change hte port for the webserver, but that is it. I'm looking at adding an FTP server too, just need to figure out what port to put it
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Re:Unbelievable... (Score:3)
Actually, many people believe that the government is not our parents and is not here to give us everything we want. The government is not here to feed us, clothe us, or to wipe our bottoms after we poop. It has a specific set of responsibilities, and "wireless internet" is not one of them.
Unfortunately, those who think the government IS our parents and should give us our every want and desire are getting their way right now, because they whine about how awf
I'm pro business but Verizon's position is crazy (Score:3)
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:2)
That said, high speed internet access is rapidly becoming as essential to the growth and development of the mind as public education. Kids with high speed net access preform better in schools. That's not necessarily a causal relationship, but it's something worth investigating.
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Re:Unbelievable... (Score:4, Insightful)
As $1000 toys, what could they be other than a distraction? And how could they be anything else, when you had them locked down tighter than OS/2 at an ATM kiosk?
These kids sure as hell couldn't learn anything from an IT standpoint, which arguably might be their most useful function. Terminal was locked out, which means all the unix tools, period. Did you bother to have the Apple developer tools on them (forget what Apple calls the damn things, not an OSX geek, I'm just typecast as one). Again, no. So they can't learn programming at all, either.
And while I never stepped foot in a classroom, I put the odds at 100 to 1 that more than one teacher in the entire school district quit giving out paper handouts. And assuming that is the case, you can't even claim to have saved money on xerox costs.
No Macromedia Flash, they weren't going to learn animation.
No 3d tools, they weren't going to learn that.
No MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Filemaker. Guess they weren't going to learn DB skills.
Did you have some G4 towers and firewire camcorders in a lab that I never heard of? No? Then they weren't going to learn video editing.
So, you turn a $1000 laptop into essentially what is a piece of paper and a pencil, and you wonder why it's nothing more than a distraction? Oh, the new Dells won't do any better, btw. Not to mention the virus, spyware and general windows crashiness problems you'll soon have.
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Re:Unbelievable... (Score:2)
$1000 could have went far for supplementary textbooks, known/proven teaching extras, tutoring for slow students (oh wait, they're all in RPS, not the wealthy burbs) and lord knows what else.
No wonder schools are such a mess. First off, what if you did teach kids to be geeks? What would be so horrible about that? Instead of a boring as shit geometry class that they'll never use (I've use trig twice in my adult life, and the one instance I can remember the detai
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:2)
As an engineer, do you still work with your slide rule sitting in front of the drafting table? Could an elementary school afford to put a drafting table in front of every 3rd grader? No.
But with these iBooks, they did. There's gotta be something possible there, that wasn't possible before. Admittedly, I only see
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:5, Interesting)
But in the city I live in (you can see my link if you care) the 'city officials' are just regular Joes off the street. People you know, live near, and work with.
They are not some sort of over-arching group bent on X-Files type conspiracies to get into our personal lives.
Just as I trust the sys admins at work to not give a damn what I am doing (since I am one of the sys admins, I know this to be true) I don't believe the city would give a crap either.
Maybe it's because my tin-foil-hat blew away, and I never bothered looking for it...but I truly do not think that anyone really cares what sites I visit.
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah... just imagine what Einstein could have accomplished if he had been able to receive 50,000 ads for p3515 pills and lots and lots of juicy pr0n.
As for good, quality ejucashun with computers, there have been articles written from time to time about how teachers, tired of grading 15 page papers for the 45 chillun's in their classes have assigned a 15 slide powerpoint presentatio
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:3, Insightful)
But access at home? Suddenly there's a host of resources open to them. And yes, some kids will discover the great joy of internet pr0n. Many of them will spend a lot of time playing games
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Are you sure your privately owned ISP wouldn't just roll over if the government (or the RIAA for that matter) asked them about your surfing habits?It's not something to be taken for granted.
3. If we're talking about something like Echelon or Carnivore, then the government already knows everything you do online anyway. Might as well cut out the middle
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, 'effective monopolies' are not necessarily a Bad Thing(tm). Imagine a world where electricity and landline telephone service still had the 'last mile' problem that current high speed internet service has. When an endeavor is not profitable on its own merit, sometimes the government does have to get involved for the benefit of the people. For that matter, many places electricity is still a regulated industry, because it's such a fundamental ser
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only is it unwise to let private monopolies in broadband develop because of the excess costs to support lobbiests and bribes to elected officials, it's also unwise to institutionalize private monopolies as the gatekeepers to our information. Democracy may be cranky and ineffient, but the alternatives are much worse.
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:2)
The Bells having monopolies? Anywhere the Bells are able to provide DSL, Cable Networks are already there. And the cable networks are already providing broadband. Kind of blows away your Bell internet monopoly theory.
Campaign funding and a split white working class (Score:2)
1. racial guilt and r
What the Bells et al don't tell you is... (Score:5, Insightful)
They appear to be suggesting that the municipal will compete unfairly; in truth, they simply fear a large buyer with the clout to get a better deal from them for the end consumer.
Re:What the Bells et al don't tell you is... (Score:5, Informative)
How can that be? (Score:5, Funny)
What you say is simply not possible.
Bureaucracy (Score:2)
Efficiency is a result of process, not incentives, although incentives are sometimes required so that the process changes take hold. Whoever the municipal hire to supply access will want to keep their own costs down, so the incentives are still there. Competition is still activ
Needs to move through the courts (Score:4, Insightful)
This will eventually (hopefully) be tested at the Supreme Court level. Cities that want to provide this service, as they do any other utility, ought to be allowed to do so.
Re:Needs to move through the courts (Score:2, Interesting)
If the municipality wanted to provide cable/DSL broadband, there is an issue of the municipality commandeering the local cable provider's wires for public purposes. I can't see a municipality laying down hundreds/thousands of miles of its own wires. A court would need to decide if emminent domain would apply.
Re:Needs to move through the courts (Score:4, Insightful)
This is politicians buying votes with taxpayer money, plain and simple and boring as that.
If I want "free" wireless broadband, I can get it from my local coffee shop. I see no reason whatsoever why the old lady next door to me who doesn't even own a computer should be forced to pay for me to have free wireless in my house.
Re:Needs to move through the courts (Score:3, Interesting)
Except when her house catches on fire, and she wants the firemen to be able to communicate. Or she wants her water meter read without having to have someone visit every house in the county. Or she wants automated signs on the highway telling her where the next accident is
Re:Needs to move through the courts (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does a couple with no children, who have never had children, and never intend on having children pay local taxes which, to a large extent, go directly to the public schools?
Look, I'm not saying free internet access is nearly as important educating our children; the point is that there is precedence for taxes to be used to support services for which the tax payer is not a direct beneficiary.
Personally, I'm somewhat indifferent about this topic; I believe communities have a right to govern themselves. If my local government recommended a move to free wifi internet access, I'm not so sure I'd support it. If they could demonstrate that it truely would help the community by providing broadband to those who can truly not afford it, I think that would be a good thing. At the same time, I fear that the design and implementation would be mismanaged, at the money would be better spent paying $15/mo for a NetZero account for each of those folks. [Yes, I know that NetZero is not broadband; I'm saying that a poor WiFi installation could easily result in sub-dialup speeds for the citizens.] Geez, a $40/mo cable broadband connection for those who cannot afford my still be cheaper. (I live in a relatively small town, ~10,000 citizens. It's very hilly with lots of forest. WiFi would be difficult. I'd say the majority of the citizens are 'doing okay' and could afford cable internet if they wanted it. If we had to support 100 homes with taxpayer supported cable and paid full-price, that's $4000/mo. I could easily see an appropriate 'free' WiFi solution costing substantially more. The necessary head-end bandwidth alone could easily cost that much.)
Re:Needs to move through the courts (Score:2)
Re:Needs to move through the courts (Score:2)
Re:Needs to move through the courts (Score:2, Insightful)
If every town in America becomes a direct customer of Qwest or Verison, there's really not much room for a small ISP (with their better service & support, more reasonable billing practices, etc.) to operate.
If you want your favorite geek-run ISP to go away forever, then getting your city to spend public funds on MSN or RoadRunner access for everybody is just about the most certain way to go about killing them.
Why wait for goverment/corporations to build it? (Score:5, Insightful)
We could do it ourselves [66.173.232.178] if we really wanted to.
Re:Why wait for goverment/corporations to build it (Score:2)
Same machine, cable modem though. Lord help me that I don't have to dialup in and put up a third link...
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Re:I believe it... (Score:2)
Some people can't afford access to high speed internet. Tough luck? Oh wait, municipal government is willing to take a cost to provide these people with access.
Corporations have a problem with this because it will cost their shareholders money. Should shareholder rights be held in higher regard than those who need a leg up?
17/16 of a word! (Score:2, Insightful)
Yep, rather than the municipalities doing the WiFi stuff and fighting with the, gramdma in her rocking chair bring me my bedpan dammit old-fat-cats, they might fund a cooperative research foundation or some other animal, that's a political hot potato and legally difficult for the big companies to deal with, that will eventually become self supporting and do for net-comms what open source has doem for SW.
If you want to talk models reply and if it gets out of hand for
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Re:Analogy (Score:2, Informative)
How this relates to municipal broadband? The systems being proposed would be as good, if not better than existing DSL systems in rural areas and a boat-load better than the dial-up most of the current bell customers are stu
Re:Analogy (Score:2)
No, that's not a good analogy, because bookstores are not a monopoly public utility. All the major types of broadband -- cable, dsl and wireless -- require exclusive use of limited resources, specifically the physical cable plant or specific radio frequencies. There is effectively no limit to the number of bookstores one can build in a town, while the
Re:Analogy (Score:2)
Seems like your points of contention completely miss his point.
Acerage - ever hear of "right of way" the amount of potential storefronts in a town is orders of magnitude greater than the amount of available right-of-way space for secondary cable plants. So yeah, he's right, bookstores EFFECTIVELY unlimited, cables strung across town, LIMITED.
do you know how much data fiber can move?
Yeah, exactly 0bps if you can't lay the fibre in the first place. How many cablecos
Re:Analogy (Score:2)
However if Libraries started giving away books, I'd be willing to bet the bookstores would have a real problem with that.
So no, I don't think your analogy is accurate.
How the PUDs went wrong in Washington State (Score:5, Interesting)
In this state the PUDs are treated as municipalities under the law and are given a set of rules under which they can operate. Broadband and electrical power are different services so it took an act of the Legislature to allow them to enter the market. The legislature, under some pressure from the big telecoms who were afraid that the PUDs would "cherry pick" the larger communities and leave the rural people to fend for themselves, allowed the PUDs to be "wholesale" only. The first thing Grant County PUD did was ignore that law.
Grant County PUD had first partnered up with two local ISPs which charged $20 to $25 per month for the broadband servoces back at the inception of the project in 1999. But at the same time the Manager of that PUD was trying to attract an outside competitor, also a utility provider, to enter the market in this county at a subsidized rate of $8 per month.
The PUD did attract that utility but only by entering into secret (and illegal) agreements to subsidize the program at cost plus 10%. So the new provider would risk nothing and could make 10% on the rate-payer's money even if they gave away their services for free. Then the PUD employees threw as many of the new customers to this new competitor as possible while their managers used their position as investors to pressure prices to a point where the commercial ISPs could no longer compete profitably.
It was only after the PUD had spent several million dollars propping up this outside provider that the story became known. Meanwhile, the PUD had raised the electrical rates to cover the $100 Million cost of fibering only 1/3 of the County but lied when asked about it. The Commissioners and Managers claimed that the rate increases were due to other factors. However their own emails, obtained under the State's public disclosure act, showed this to be untrue.
Agricultural interests were incensed because they use a lot of that electrical power. A large farm might have a $500k yearly power bill for their irrigation pumps. While 4% isn't much for my house, it's a chunk of money on a half-million dollars.
It took almost a year after the discovery of the secret contracts and a State Auditor's report which also found illegal and improper actions, to rid ourselves of the management team that led us into this debacle. The largest ISPs in the area, including the first two to partner up with the PUD, went out of business and were gobbled up by another outside competitor; costing jobs and an economic drain on the communities' resources. The Commissioners who were supposed to keep a rein on the PUD managers are now up for re-election and facing some tough questions.
The problem with bureaucrats going into business is that, essentially, they don't understand profit and loss. It's all other people's money and if they make a mistake they just raise the rates to cover it. We could have fibered this County up for the money they spent, had they spent that money wisely. Instead they created a NOC they thought they could make profitable (not at $3 million a year to operate they couldn't), they installed fiber to the areas where their managers lived regardless of population density (it turns out the telecoms fears of "cherry picking" were well-founded, but the managers weren't smart enough to do it that way), and they drove jobs and money out of the area.
Had they simply created the infrastructure for the product instead of getting involved in creating subsidies for favored businesses we would have been ok. But that's the problem. Bureaucrats don't make good business people.
So if you don't want to see jobs go away, money disappear and your power rates rise, treat the entrance of government into business with caution. These things are run by politicians, not business people. And it's not their money.
Re:How the PUDs went wrong in Washington State (Score:3, Insightful)
These things are run by politicians, not business people. And it's not their money.
Yeah, Dennis Kozlowski, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andy Fastow, the Adelphia guys, the bond traders in NYC, the NYSE, Halliburton.. they all proved that businesspeople always do best, even when it's not their money, right?
the question (Score:3, Insightful)
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Exactly! When? (Score:2)
And before some would say the telecomms did the hard part, dark fiber and equipment as some kind of visionaries, they were just chasing the already lucrative telecomm dollar and the p
They are (Score:2)
http://www.networkingpipeline.com/showArticle.jhtm l?articleID=23902991 [networkingpipeline.com]
You seem to think it is possible to lay several million miles of fibre in one year. Maybe if you have an infinite budget you could, but the telcos don't. It takes time to dig out the old copper and lay in the new fibre, along with all the rest of the infrastructure, and do it properly.
Pennsylvania (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds an awful lots like laws against municipal projects to me.
Censorship and old technology (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, Wi-Fi is old technology (in terms of providing wireless-anywhere service, as opposed to providing wireless-in-your-own-building service), to be replaced by EVDO.
Re:Censorship and old technology (Score:2)
If you're so concerned, why not push for the requirement that law enforcement acquires a warrant before tapping your connection?
Right now, there's nothing stopping Comcast or Verizon or SBC from monitoring your traffic and eliminating ads for competition or unpopular political viewpoints. All they'd have to do is put a revision into their TOS and there's nothin
Re:Censorship and old technology (Score:2)
Well, better shut down all those public libraries, then. Can't have the government controlling (and by "controlling" I mean "providing") access to any type of information.
Self organizing (Score:4, Insightful)
For me, this (and any other subject of public services) is not a problem of government vs businesses. It's a matter of small, economically efficient distributed units providing goods required by their clients, versus bloated and highly centralized institutions.
If the efficient providers are managed by a transparent and public process instead of the power of the dollars in a few hands, so better for them.
Re:Self organizing (Score:2, Insightful)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Democracy my "friend" is nothing but two wolves and a lamb voting on whats for dinner.
The goram governments allready have too damn much of my money as taxes - let's come out and call it the theft that it is - why should they get another cent?
FUCK THAT.
And then once they have these glorious and utopic nets of the citizens, by the citizens, etc, wh
Repeating an old mistake? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not allow private companies and governments both to setup wireless networks? Whichever one can do it more efficiently and effectively will win the business. I do not agree that everyone will automatically flock to the "free" wireless networks provided by municipalities, which are just paid for with taxes or even by charging fees. Most people are very willing to pay for superior services, and this kind of competition would only drive the offering of such services.
To me, it sounds like the private companies want to repeat the cable scenario. Namely, they want to be granted an effective monopoly in a municipality to avoid any competition whatsoever. The difference now being that the capital investment of implementing a wireless network is getting cheaper and cheaper, thereby eliminating the high cost of entry (and capital investment) that has been such a barrier in other network access methods. Competition, therefore, has less obstacles on the technical and business side. It seems that the only obstacle left to build up is a governmental restriction.
Re:Repeating an old mistake? (Score:2)
Cable companies provide Internet, TV and are looking at phone. Telcos provide Phone, some Internet (and are trying to expand that) and are looking at TV once the internet is upgraded to fibre from copper. Those two are already competing in areas with DSL, and as the fibre rolls out, they will be competing in even more.
Re:Repeating an old mistake? (Score:2)
Meanwhile we'll still lag behind second-world Asia, and the excuses for the situation will still sound just as lame.
Re:Repeating an old mistake? (Score:2)
Actually, they didn't. Virtually no local cable franchises have exclusivity provisions. Cable is an _effective_ monopoly, since building a second network in an area where one already exists rarely makes economic sense; witness RCN's bankruptcy. Companies _choose_ not to overbuild each other, but they could if they wanted to.
Biggest Challenge? (Score:3, Insightful)
Critical infrastructure challenge is lobbing Wi-Fi in cities? Exactly how for the vast majority of people is this a more important issue than roads, rail and airline infrastructure? Even for the techo-geek community there are options like 3G that are delivering this in most civilised countries already. How the hell does Wi-Fi bridge the digitial divide? If you don't have a computer it hardly helps, and if you do have a computer its liable to be in your house, not travelling around a city. And if its in a house in a city (these efforts are NOT aiming at remote communities for the most part) then you can get relatively cheap Cable or DSL. Wi-Fi, WiMax etc etc will do nothing to bridge the digitial divide, and in many cases would just help the digitially mobile increase their advantage.
This isn't a big challenge, its not even a big issue. In the question of what tends to deliver the most cost effective infrastructure its always the private sector. Goverments get involved when those companies go bust due to commoditisation and errosion of profit margins.
Biggest Challenge ? A sense of perspective for where Wi-Fi access sits in the list of important issues in America today.
Re:Biggest Challenge? (Score:2)
I have to disagree in terms of 802.16/802.20 WiMax. Unlike WiFi, WiMax can support thousands of users per antenna array, and putting up WiMax antenna arrays is vastly cheaper than hardwiring every residence and business to support xDSL, cable and T-1/T-3 broadband Internet access. With WiMax, we mostly avoid the messy Last Mile connection issue and this will
If the Bell's don't want to see municipal broadban (Score:3, Interesting)
But they are greedy and they will lobby.
Re:If the Bell's don't want to see municipal broad (Score:2)
Uh, hold it right there. COMCAST IS NOT A BELL. I will repeate that. COMCAST IS NOT A BELL. They are a cable company. There IS a difference.
Re:If the Bell's don't want to see municipal broad (Score:2)
Re:If the Bell's don't want to see municipal broad (Score:2)
And what is this cost of each phone line costing 40? Even when I did use dialup (and I did a couple of years ago because broadband was not installed in that area) it only costs 20/phone line for unlimi
Re:If the Bell's don't want to see municipal broad (Score:2)
So try
There is a solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not apply the same for internet access? These days, having access to global knowledge is as much as important as food and shelter.
Re:There is a solution (Score:2)
Tell me the last time someone died from lack of internet access. Tell me how someone who can not afford internet access even over a phone line can afford a computer. Tell me how that money couldn't be better spent on the sch
disguised argument (Score:4, Insightful)
Municipality (Score:2)
many things rely on the functions of tele-communication networks in one form or another to function.
Be it , Standard telephone , VOIP(soon enough) , internet , Mobile/cellular or otherwise
I strongly belive that these should be gouvernmentaly controlled and classed as a municiple service
Why.. well , you try to function without a telephone
Status Quo != Free Market (Score:4, Insightful)
It is apparent that many people here are disappointed with the quality of ISP services provided by market at this time. They think the government could provide better service. That may be true. But I am certain that government could not provide better service than a truly free, dynamic market in telecommunications, and that is what we geeks and nerds should push for.
Fiber to the premises (Score:2)
AL (Sylacauga)
FL (Quincy)
GA (Dalton)
IN (Auburn)
OK (Sallisaw)
PA (Kutztown)
TN (Jackson)
UT (Provo)
VA (Bristol)
WA (Chelan Co., Clallam Co., Douglas Co., Grant Co., Mason Co.)
WI (Reedsburg)
Vote With Your Remote (Score:2)
Competition is the answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Why should citizens have to suffer because the phone companies are slackers with an un-serviceable amount of debt?
Some of the cities here in Utah have 100 megabit service to their residents for dirt cheap...
seems like a "fucking duh" to me. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:seems like a "fucking duh" to me. (Score:2)
You want to close down the one avenue of free (to the user) reading and research material, in favor of broadband? The barrier to entry for the library is a library card. The barrier to entry to use broadband is having and maintaining a computer.
Kids don't read enough now, and you want to cut off the library? When was the last time you read a book on your PC?
Rural access (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm no politician, but what about this solution? (Score:4, Insightful)
Step 1: Have a vote in the municipality that wants to set up such a service, to determine that it is in line with the public interest.
Step 2: Let the companies in question have a crack at it. Find out how long it would take the government to roll it out, and how much it would cost, and give the companies that much time to get it rolled out at that price. If they won't or can't, tough noogies, let the local government do its job and perform the will of its people.
The telcos and cable companies ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Since they seem to be playing the 'the government shouldnt compete with us' card, I suggest that communities instead form co-ops (which would be greenlighted thru rights-of-way and other resources) that would own and operate the services. Basically the same thing, but it takes away the BS objection that the incumbents have.
Business OR Government != Efficiency (Score:2, Insightful)
So the point I
i thought ... (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought this generation's critical infrastructure challange was repairing our power grid. remember... that blackout in the summer of 2003.
Who paid for the internet to start with? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me get this straight. They think that they have a God-given right to profit from a publically-built system, and the public which funded it, must go through them for access.
Well, exCUSE the fuck out of me if my heart fails to bleed for them.
Re: (Score:2)