Evidence Shows: Muni Broadband Doesn't Always Fail

from the well,-duh... dept

Mon, Apr 11th 2005 12:46pm — Mike Masnick

In the last few months, with all the hype over incumbent broadband service providers wasting all sorts of money (that could have gone towards deploying actual broadband) trying to convince everyone that muni broadband is the first step towards communism, one of the popular tactics used by those against muni-broadband is the claim that it always fails. They like to roll out a long list of places where it's been attempted and failed. Of course, this is a misleading argument, as there are plenty of examples where muni-broadband has been a huge success. If something is mismanaged, then it's no surprise it will fail. No one has ever said that muni-broadband should be allowed in all cases without a good plan and good management to make it work. However, to make the anti-muni crowd's arguments even weaker, some researchers have gone out and checked out the various muni-broadband implementations cited as failures and discovered that many appear to be clear success stories, rather than failures.

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sly squirrel, 11 Apr 2005 @ 2:39pm

Public Free broadband
I think that one of the fundamental things lost today is one of the things that was so important that the writers of the Constitution put it in an obscure and much abused clause in Article 1. That is that the congress (government) is to " To establish Post Offices and post Roads". This was put in there to make the congress's job the protection of the interchange of political ideas and speach, other than just getting up on a soap box and yelling.

It seems a reasonable thing to do the same for the some of the current means of exchanging the same.

I don't see that is has to be free, but it should be available to everyone, and having a public entity provide this, rather than just money hungry idiots like the phone company or cable companies is a welcome thing.
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m0nk3y, 11 Apr 2005 @ 6:23pm

competition
I love it when government sponsored monopolies complain about unfair competition.

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Spencer Hoyt, 12 Apr 2005 @ 7:52am

Government just bringing what other companies won'
You can go on for days about unfair government competition, but is it really compitetion if Bell South and Cox have no plans to bring the service? Lafayette, LA will get fiber, it's just a matter of how much more will it cost because of the roadblocks that the above throw in their way.
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