Telcos Love Muni Broadband -- When They Provide It
from the take-that dept
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.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: ::giggles::
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.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Taxes
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's less than 10 cities in California alone....
[ link to this | view in chronology ]