The Webinar Leader below says he works on these sorts of things, and related, from Chattanooga TN, which he says right off the bat is a city that averages one GB of bandwidth for, he says, $70/ month. It’s one of the few municipal type networks that have managed to survive “Boss Telecom” pushback at state legislatures everywhere.
Also shows what still could be the case in hundreds more US cities, but that would require a dramatic change of the politics at the FCC and elsewhere.
Way back in Fall 2006, and Spring of 2007, Gary and I and others supported a project floated for municipal broadband in Las Cruces. The plan got a real look by powers that be, but the business plan was shaky and required a huge input of funding from City of Las Cruces way beyond the scale of what seemed plausible to decision makers. To some it did seem a “too risky” use of city funds, and it did have risk involved of course… and it didn’t garner enough support and faded away. The city did initiate a committee to explore municipal broadband further, which again Gary and I served on, but the city IT person at the time didn’t support city involvement in further initiatives.)
••••••••PSA also supported the Broadband portion of the Obama Stimulus package a few years later which had both infrastructure and organizational components; Kris and I took the lead on weaving together all the shareholders in the Borderlands community to present a unified grant application which, for various reasons, didn’t succeed. Although some portions were funded in El Paso and at various state libraries. (Failed in Dona Ana County partly because one local entity wanted to take over the application, and partly because push back at the national level from “Boss Telecoms” narrowed the possible grant winners.)•••••••••
But though the Las Cruces “Utopia” proposal didn’t gain city traction in 2006-7, we can see today that something along the proposed municipal network would have been a boon, eventually, and would have avoided the ongoing lack of affordable highest-speed access here.
Today, 14 years later…many things in the broadband equation have changed, but the necessity of municipal ownership of the local access ISP has proved prescient. And those who claimed if we left it up to Monopoly Telecom, they would build out to wealthier neighborhoods, and charge what the market would bear there, leaving the have-not neighborhoods out of the game… without affordable high speed access…were proved prophetical.
Now today, that mistake has come home to roost when suddenly ALL students need quality and affordable access to LFH, and it’s not there. Now what?
This below has an Apple flavor, and a bit of evangelism of that platform… so here’s also many apologies to those who “don’t speak Apple” by choice and/or enjoy any platform evangelism at all.
But perhaps still a worthwhile quality discussion of today’s challenges such as we have as a nation been wading into abruptly,.And that we will continue to explore with much urgency in the days ahead.