An omnibus telecom bill in Texas is seeking, among other things, to ban municipalities from offering wireless services. Currently, Austin has a project to provide wireless in public places.
The attempt to forbid cities and towns from offering wireless services is seriously misguided.
Public wireless is like roads and street lights. Like roads, public wireless access enables economic development. When a road is paved, houses and businesses spring up around it. When an urban area has street lighting, business and civic life continues into the night.
Most streets aren’t toll roads, and street lights don’t have a fee per block. These services are generally accepted to provide public benefit above and beyond the revenue they would bring if they relied on fee-for-service funding.
Networking is in an early stage, like street lights were a long time ago. Cities and towns ought to be able to make their own decisions about what will bring economic development to their area. Each municipality makes its own decisions about roads and public transportation. Similarly, the decision about whether and how to provide wireless services should be a local decision. We don’t want to *prevent* cities and towns from choosing to provide wireless as a service that will incent additional economic activity. We don’t want to mandate one model, for the whole state, in an early stage of development.
So basically, these guys are against new public transport systems? That’s just peachy.
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Welcome to the “Save Muni Wireless” web site. A number of organizations and concerned citizens are coming together to support municipal networks in Texas. Please watch this site for information on the effort and what you can do to help….
Basically it’s the Telcos being greedy, they say it can’t be done. What they are really saying is that they are not able to return an profit to their shareholders. So along come the muni’s who will deploy the systems at cost and instead of letting them do it the telco’s would rather block them.
With thinking like that, we are all in trouble.
Basically it’s the Telcos being greedy, they say it can’t be done. What they are really saying is that they are not able to return an profit to their shareholders. So along come the muni’s who will deploy the systems at cost and instead of letting them do it the telco’s would rather block them.
With thinking like that, we are all in trouble.
Obviously it can be done, other localities are having great sucess. I have never seen rapacious “capitalism” openly bribing, er.. I mean lobbying, for monopolies.
Until I moved to Austin I lived in an area with privately owned utiities, so I was quite concerned with Austin’s publicly owned ones. After living here 5.5 years I must say most are doing a great job at a very reasonable rate.
Done properly, wireless will be a great addition to our city. If the telco’s die the death of the dinosaurs, well, to bad.