Telcos Love Muni Broadband -- When They Provide It

from the take-that dept

Tue, May 2nd 2006 11:41am — Carlo Longino

Telcos' doublespeak on municipal broadband projects is pretty staggering. Time and time again, they've raised their objections to muni projects, then turned around and bid on them. The latest occurance is in Silicon Valley, where AT&T plans to bid on the wireless network several local governments there are planning, despite its long-running opposition to muni projects. But, have no fear, AT&T's getting a taste of its own medicine, no matter how small: a few small cities in Illinois wanted to build their own fiber network a few years back, but SBC then derided fiber as an "unproven technology" and saying that 20 Mbps was more bandwidth than anybody could need... Only to turn around and decide it wanted to roll out its fiber-to-the-home service in the area. Now, a couple of the cities have blocked the plans, citing some legitimate concerns about the rollout skipping their local franchise rules with cable operators. One alderman, though, calls AT&T out for its flop-flop on fiber, but don't expect the company to be too forthcoming with anything but more doubletalk.

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Patrick Mullen, 2 May 2006 @ 12:03pm

A few years ago, 20 Mbps was more bandwidth than anybody could need. Times change.
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Jeremiah, 2 May 2006 @ 12:18pm

Taxes
Would be really interesting to see a breakout of how much muni's gave to telcos in the form of tax breaks, shelters, cash, etc to roll out fiber to residents, and how many muni's actually got fiber/DSL..broadband rolled out to customers.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's less than 10 cities in California alone....
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808813, 2 May 2006 @ 1:45pm

Re: ::giggles::
640K ought to be enough for anybody." or "No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer."

Two variants of the same quote, often misattributed as said by Bill Gates in 1981. Gates has repeatedly denied ever saying this, and he points out that it has never been attributed to him with a proper source. In fact, the memory limitation was due to the hardware architecture of the IBM PC.
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