Verizon Seeks To Nix Fee-Based Municipal Wireless Grids 286
millermp writes "It looks like Verizon has succeeded in banning municipal WiFi networks in Pennsylvania. Since Verizon is looking to broadband service to fuel its growth, it calls municipal WiFi 'unfair competition.' This bill is following similar legislation earlier this year in Utah, Louisiana, and Florida." The bill has yet to be signed by Pennsylvania's governor, and as the story says, does not ban municipal wireless per se, but would place great restrictions on how it could be funded.
Fiber to the home (Score:5, Informative)
Verizon is just a 500lb gorilla that can't see more than 2inches infront of its face!
Fee based services (Score:2, Informative)
bill does not prevent wifi as public good (Score:3, Informative)
Nowhere does it prevent municipalities from offering public networks such as the one already deployed in Altoona, PA.
Re:Other unfair government services (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, Phoenix has one of the best fire companies in the nation and it's private by subscription. Also, don't forget all those volunteer fire companies in suburbs, small towns and rural areas. Their high level of service for the negligible price negates the need for most local governments to fund a fire company. Also, private security officers outnumber local police by five to one in this country. So, there is competition in providing police and fire services.
My point here is not to make you "wrong" for saying that Verizon is a crybaby. It's just to show that even for services that are usually thought of as government functions, when a private company comes along and provides that service, it's often better than the government. When you need to send a package overnight, guaranteed, do you choose FedEx/UPS or the Post Office?
Philly's wifi service must be paid for by the people of Philadelphia. If the gov't provides the service, there's no incentive to excell and it costs everyone more. Even if you fund it with a tax on businesses or the rich, every tax dollar you take from a business or a rich person eventually comes out of the pocket of a poorer person. Where do you think that business/rich person will go to replenish the money the gov't just took from them? They'll charge higher prices or more interest or donate less to charity, etc.
If you let the businesses compete for the wifi customers, then there's competition to drive down prices and drive up quality. Eventually, the service becomes affordable to poorer people and everyone ends up paying less in the end. Example: I park in a low-income neighborhood every day and see plenty of cell phones around me. That happened without gov't subsidies or gov't-run cell phone companies. It can happen for wifi, too, if we're patient and give the free market a chance. Sometimes the most compassionate thing we can do is let the "heartless capitalists" do what they do best: produce good products at low prices.
They can't even provide DSL to all their customers (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why not compete? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is going to get me lynched (Score:4, Informative)
Some people think that having broadband helps economic prospects. If that is true, and that Verizon and the other ISPs can't provide it, why let that be an excuse to hold back other parts of economic progress?
There are cities that provide utilities and happen to do them better than a for-profit company can do.
Do you know anything about economics ? NO ..... (Score:3, Informative)
Broadband is a communications network just like our government builds networks of roads that no private business would take on. Broadband and the internet should be public utilities.
By the way , our utilities are great and don't gouge us like the CRIMINAL broadband robber barrons.
People need to get organized and act (Score:1, Informative)
So, let's say that you live in a state that has severely restricted muni broadband. Is there a way around that? Sure. Just because a city can't build its own network, this isn't stopping a private, nonprofit organization from doing it.
Here's what I'd do:
1. It helps if you live in a small town because it'll be cheaper to cover it. A college town is best because you have a larger group of computer-savvy people to help you.
2. Set up your organization and get it tightly organized. Yes, working with free-thinking, forward-looking people can be like herding cats, but having an organization that runs like a well-oiled machine is key when you get to the later stages of the plan.
3. Decide what you want this proposed network to do. Will it deliver anything besides Internet traffic? Will it offer television? Phone service? What can your organization reasonably do without overextending itself? Think in terms of what you'll be able to afford to do, and keep thinking about the money as you move along.
4. Design your local network topology. Will you use Wi-Fi, mesh, fiber, dry copper? Affordability is key, but it does have to scale. Set a deadline to make the decision and stick to it. No religious wars, either. Get the damn thing designed.
5. Now comes the fun part: finding money. Donations are certainly a good idea, and they sure as hell worked for Firefox. Now, here's where you also get a little sneaky. Make friends with your local city officials and at least one good lawyer. Your city may be barred from building its own muni network, but get your city official and lawyer friends to figure out whether the city can fund you through a grant. There are many ways to get to money, so you need to find a way to skirt the offending law. If you have your city's government on your side, they'll likely figure out a way.
6. Build it. Be thorough, efficient, and, most of all, visible. Make damn sure that local residents not involved in the project know who you are when you're crawling all over the city setting up equipment. Printing up t-shirts for everyone to wear may sound frivolous, but people will notice them, they'll ask questions, and they'll get excited.
7. Assuming all this goes as planned, and you end up with a working network that's gaining users, other communities will notice, and they may decide they like what you did and want to emulate it. The big telecom companies will also notice and try every trick in the book to smear you. That's where publicity comes in...
One of the key aspects of what you do needs to be publicity. There are many groups out there who no one has heard of because they don't advertise. Conversely, the Firefox project shows just how much you can accomplish with some positive promotion. Your organization needs at least one PR person whose job it is to make damn sure that your message gets out and the FUD that will be churned out by the telecoms will be quickly rebuffed. This person will be the one who gets on the local news, speaks to the Chamber of Commerce, and tells the local church groups why this network won't spread porn any more than any other network.
If this effort succeeds in more than a few places, then orfinary people in other areas will start getting jealous, wondering why they can't do the same thing. And your response should be that you worked extremely hard to overcome the hurdles the big telecoms and their political allies have put in place, and doing this sort of thing will be so much easier if those unfair laws were repealed.
My point in this whole rambling post is that community-operated broadband networks are purely hypothetical to most people. They've never seen one or maybe not even heard of one, so it's easy for companies like Verizon, Cox, etc. to negatively portray them. If you can build
Re:Justification to not compete (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is a sign of the times (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to write down a convincing argument, argue using reason, not your own prejudices. "Comrade?" Give me a break. The fact is that Verizon has a monopoly, which they have because they were granted it by the government. Does the municipal WiFi project compete unfairly? We can't tell. It's hopeless to try to sort it out at this late date.
What we can tell is that Verizon is doing a *terrible* job of providing broadband to its customers. My father has been waiting for broadband from Verizon forever, and he's never going to get it, because it's not "cost effective." Meanwhile, I've done live internet broadcasts from a mud-walled hut twenty minutes outside of a town of 300, two hours from Tucson, over a DSL line that's costing $70/month.
I don't have anything against Verizon, but if they can't deliver the kind of service that's being proposed here at a competitive rate, I'm just not able to work up any sympathy. They are asking for a government-granted right to cherry-pick the most lucrative customers in the Philadelphia area. I don't see any reason why the legislature should have granted it to them, and I'm sorry to see that it did.
Your talk of "Comrade" and "it is not the job of government to blah blah blah" is just noise. Thank you for playing.
Answers from Pittsburgh (Score:4, Informative)
Here in Pittsburgh [pghwireles.net], there ain't much going on, 'cept at CMU [cmu.edu], and one of the local mom and pop shops [telerama.com]. There are a few players, but none who talkabout it -- it's taboo here, most people are happy with their dialup (Ugh!).
Re:More Harm (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Funding? (Score:3, Informative)
Public industury may be a bad idea, but the free market doesn't have any interest helping the poor, when I visit a poor neighbourhood I see betting shops, pawn brokers, check cachers, and the like, the free market at work, making a profit from those who really can't afford to be used as a profit making scheme.
Private enterprise needs to be regulated, after all the goverment is represnentive of the people, and as a representitive of the private sector's customers should have the right to demand a certain level of service for all customers, be they the poor, the sick or the internetless