Colorado May Allow Cities To Provide Wifi 311
miguelitof writes "According to the TheDenverChannel.com, Colorado cities may soon be able to provide wireless internet service to their citizens. The state Senate will vote today (April 5th) on Colorado Senate Bill 152, which would allow cities to provide wireless internet access. The only proviso would be that cities would have to get approval from voters to use tax dollars. The cost to provide internet access to a 16 square mile area is about $600k. A city could charge as little as $16 a month and cover expenses."
You could use 3 channels in a grid pattern (Score:4, Informative)
Re:$16 / month? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.internest.com/city/milwaukeewi.asp [internest.com]
http://www.internest.com/city/denverco.asp [internest.com]
So Denver would be $2/person. I actually think the population density of the states would be similar, given the fact that the upper half of Wisconsin is very midly populated (it's all forest) and the lower half just has a few bigger cities (Milwaukee, Madison) with the rest being farmland and glacial land.
SB 152 restricts municipal wifi you twit (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.freepress.net/communityinternet/=CO [freepress.net]
SB 152 was a POS legislation from the get-go, and many of us Coloradoans have been actively lobbying against it. State senator Jennifer Viega threw this gem together to pay back the telcos that financed her campaign. While the revised bill passed is better than the original, it's still bad news for municipal services.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/arti cle/0,1299,DRMN_38_3545616,00.html [rockymountainnews.com]
Qwest says "we have better service" -- right! (Score:1, Informative)
For those of us in the Qwest "service" area, this statement borders on hilarious. They are, without question, one of the worst service providers in existence. I'd gladly put my internet connection in the hands of a local government before Qwest any day.
Re:Allow Cities? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So is Amtrak (Score:3, Informative)
Amtrak is the result of the Federal Government stepping in to keep service from dying. Amtrak was created because the passenger rail service couldn't compete on a for-profit basis between expanding air travel and post-interstate road travel. The idea was to preserve a service for the citizens of this country and keep at least the spectre of competetion in the medium and long distance mass transit, to keep the airlines semi-honest.
Amtrak has its problems and many are self-imposed, but some of its biggest are external. Amtrak actually makes a profit, while providing decent service, in an area know as the "Northeast Corridor". This is because of two important considerations not found in other parts of the country.
First, Amtrak OWNS most of the track it uses here. Most of the railroad tracks are owned by various heavy freight companies, who charge usage fees for other trains to run on. While the fees add to Amtraks operating costs, the real problem is that of priority. For obvious reasons, the company that owns track has priority over anyone renting access. So sometimes Amtrak trains are delayed because they must wait for a long a slow freight train that is using part of the route.
This is also a major obstacle for upgrading Amtrak's rolling stock as well. Newer trains (like those in Europe or Japan) are simply too fast for the most of the current rails. Since it doesn't most of the track it uses Amtrak can't force the neccesary upgrades, and the only alternative is building new track. New track would not only be expensive to lay, it would also require additional "right-of-ways". In many places that would ultimately require use of eminent domian. So that option looks to be untenably costly, both in finicial and political senses.
Second, there is a high volume of travelers and even before 9-11 traveling by train took a comparable amount of time for less money. In fact, many Amtrak stops were also local subway stations, so it would often be easier and quicker to get to your final destination. In other words, Amtrak is competative here.
On a final note, Amtrak was not ment to be a profit making venture. It was intended to preserve an option for traveling throughout the country for people that couldn't afford to fly or drive everywhere. In summary without Amtrak, there would be no passenger rail service in most of the USA. You can argue whether or not that is worthwhile, but there is no alternative.
Muni Competition (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can somebody explain why cities do this? (Score:3, Informative)
By wording this now in newspaper articles as "cities will now be able to offer Wifi if they first do X, Y, and Z" makes the bill sound as though it's going to help roll-out cool public services, when in fact the cities don't presently need to do the X, Y or Z.
And really, this has not as much to do with allowing some place like Boulder to get cool public WiFi but rather to prevent small rural areas from creating their own standard broadband offering (probably like broadband over power lines or WiMax) if the existing telcos and cable companies leave them behind.
I was actually trying to help a small mountain community in Colorado figure out how to get broadband because there were NO options. The telco said it would be too expensive (and the existing copper in the area sucked too much for DSL). This legislation is intended to make sure that little communities never get broadband service until the existing monopolistic communications corporations decide to do it themselves.
Colorado Telecom Bill (SB 05-152) IS POOPY... (Score:3, Informative)