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The city of Tacoma has their own fiber network. Put in by their power company for the purpose of controlling their substations, it turned out to have some extra capacity. Some Eastern Washington State power PUDs, awash in cash from their hydro power sales have strung fiber around their largely rural, agricultural service territories as well.

Since then, the telcoms have sought legislative injunctions against public utilities implementing new systems. And the private utility I used to work for was scared sh*tless about their wrath to the point of never putting in fiber even restricted to their own internal requirements.

First, hit up people involved in the creation of a successful project: Click Network, Chelan Fiber, or UTOPIA.

Figure out the goals of the community leaders in the area in question. Gather the pros and cons, and write them up in a way that satisfies as many points of view as possible. Try to approach it in a manner which incorporates the typical talking points of local groups who might oppose it.

Lastly, get out and talk to people. Local politicians are usually very sensitive to pressure from within their electoral districts, much more so than state or national politicians.

I've long proposed that Municipalities build their own networks,

And the Big Operators have fought that. A few early adopters have slipped by them. Tacoma, WA built the Click Network through their power PUD. But the commercial operators have put legislation in place in many jurisdictions to prevent the further spread of public networks. Where this hasn't been possible, they have recruited astroturfers to scream about the horrors of public infrastructure to frighten the public away from supporting such projects.

http://www.click-network.com/AboutUs/tabid/88/Default.aspxNot always.

The Scientific Atlanta (now Cisco) box that Cox uses is pretty amazing imho. Tivo might be slightly better in somethings, but I would not pay a pennie more for it. It could be worst, you could be stack with Comcast and their awful Motorola box. Boy, do those suck or what! Comcast inhereted AT&T's obsession with Motorola boxes for some reason. Every Motorola (formally known as General Instument I believe) digital box I have ever encountered was a miserable failure. Motorola should do all of us a favor and close their cable box division down.

Keep in mind that there are many boxes offered by Motorola... and you might just be thinking of the 68000 based ones which were the first to be released to support Digital Cable. The newer ones sport cable modems, support hard drives, and of corse firewire... though not having HDTV I can't say I have met one with firewire onboard. Here is an advert for the Motorola DVR box service.

While I appricate the opinion that Sci-Atlanta boxes are better than their Motorola counterparts... it would be nice to know how they are better. Those like me who have never met a Sci-Atlanta box would be most interested.

Besides, in theory you can buy your own damn cablebox and jack it into your cable network.

It's a big bit of puffed smoke.

The seperation of church and state is not the exclustion of all religion from the public space, it is the avoidance of sponsoring or establishng a state religion.

In you public grounds example, if a local government were to allow a christian group to hold a christmas pagent, then they legally would be oblidged to allow the local pagans to celebrate the soltice on the same or comparable grounds.

For TV, that's another thing, because religion on TV is a private enterprise function, not a government function. A municiple cable company most likely would be governed by the same FCC statutes that corporate cable companies must follow. These statutes include a provision called "must carry" which allows any TV Station over a certain signal strengh to request and recieve carriage on the cable network.

For non-broadcast cable relgious stations, that would be a business, as opposed to a legal decision I think. The Click Network is Tacoma, Washington's municiple network, run by the city-owned power company. A quick perusal of their cabler offering includes many local channels, some no doubt religious, as well as several cable religious channels. Tacoma isn't exactly the bible-belt, so if there were going to be challenges to the programming content they most likely would have occured there, than in the heart of the south.

No offence to the Libertarians, but check out Click! cable which is owned by the power company in Tacoma, WA. If they'd offer service this far north I'd gladly buy my broadband and cable from their "low quality service". People in Tacoma love the fact that their government competes with Comcast.

Government doesn't have to be inefficient just as business doesn't have to be corrupt. Just because there's not an Enron and a Worldcom and a Tyco on your block doesn't mean that Verizon (to use your example) isn't spawned of Satan.

i live here in Tacoma, WA, and we have our own city-wide fiber optic network provided by Click-Network.. i must say, i love it MUCH better than comcast or any of the DSL providers around here. we have had the network ground layed out for several years, and everything seems to work just fine. the city doesnt offer the ISP themselves tho, currently there are three seperate companies offering internet access via this network. i'm guessing this fiber-op network is probably why the city has recieved the nickname "The Wired City"

It's basically city-subsidized bandwidth. I got 2048x256 Mbit cable for $25/month, and later bumped it up to 4096x512 (basically uncapped) for $80. When I had to move up to Seattle for work reasons, this was one of the hardest things to give up (since I'm now paying the same price for 768x384 DSL - granted, Speakeasy encourages their customers to run web servers, etc, and I get 2 static IP's).

For businesses, Click! offers extremely competetive rates on connections up to an OC-48, and you can get one just about anywhere in the city. They're also expanding (slowly) into nearby cities, too (Tacoma has had a lot of internal neighborhoods become incorporated, so it's unfortunately not like they're expanding very far).

Maybe other cities should hop on Tacoma Washington's bandwagon. Here the City of Tacoma is competing directly with other broadband providers, AT&T and Qwest. They layed down their own fiber optic lines and allow local ISP's to distribute broadband cable connections to consumers via the Click! Network. I myself pay $30.30/month for a 2mps download and 256kbps upload. I have had maybe 2 outages, that I know of, in the year that I have been with them, one was for 4 hours and the other was for 20 minutes. I have loved the connection and I think it is a great way for the city of Tacoma to bring in a little extra revenue. I used to be with AT&T and I was paying around $60/month after all the misc. charges. I was also part of Qwest DSL and was paying around $50 after all their fees. Click here for more information about Click!. Maybe your hometown can help disrupt the broadband monopoly!

yeah, but i can get a cable provider other than time-warner, i can use an isp other than aol, and i can watch news on a channel that isn't cnn.

if i buy a (x86) computer, there is a 98% chance that it will come with windows, and there is a lot of pressure to use windows on that computer in the first place; pressure from friends & co-workers who use it, pressure from employers who use it, pressure from the salespeople selling me the computer. pressure from people on the 'net, who use windows media to give away audio & video clips, or word to present documentation. i don't think that kind of pressure to use aol/tw/cnn exists, at least not yet.

while i agree that aol/tw/cnn/netscape/sun/whatever has the potential to become a much larger, more powerful, and more evil empire than msft, the fact of the matter is that msft has an illegal monopoly, which they extend every day. if aol/tw/cnn/sun/netscape/whatever want to combat that, fine. frankly, the u.s. government seems incapable of bringing msft down, so if it has to come to corporate warfare- so be it. i want to go to a store and buy a pc that runs linux, or freebsd, or openbsd. or whatever other os i want.

When TCI (now a part of AT&T) stalled on upgrading cable service a few years ago, Tacoma got fed up and started their own cable/broadband Internet service Click Network. Ironically, by doing that they got TCI to actually upgrade and USWest hurried along DSL in the area as well.

I agree, "Digital Cable(TM)" is nothing more than an MPEG-2 (DVD quality) encoded stream of the existing channels that run on the same copper. The bandwidth required by these signals is at a higher frequency, therefore more channels are able to get pushed down the pipe. I would not expect them to look any better than regular cable on an HDTV box. Maybe less noise, but not better picture quality.

However I have not seen or heard of a Digital Cable service--the local offerings are AT&T Broadband or Click! Network--that has any HDTV channels, since IIRC the required bandwidth of one 1080i encoded channel is approx 4 analog channels.

This is not to say that they don't pipe them in by copper in your own city, or have them beamed in by DirectTV or Dish Network (I know one of those services offers HDTV programming)

I live in Tacoma, WA, USA, where the residents were so sick of the local cable franchise (TCI, now AT&T) they empowered the local electric utility to install and operate an alternative cable infrastructure, the Click! Network.

The utility provides digital cable television service (and bills for it, across the hall from where you pay your light bill if you do it in person) but has stayed out of the ISP business, instead leasing the lines to local ISPs (basic consumer service starts at ~1MB down/128K up, goes on from there) at VERY competitive rates.

I don't know what the effect of redundant wires is on the big-picture costs, but eliminating the monopoly on cable access (and building a network that can actually support the advertised bandwidth usage rather than overselling it by a factor of 10 makes it competitive with DSL in terms of consistent QOS too) has had a predictably positive effect on the cost and quality of local TV and broadband net service.