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Uh, no. It was over 200 billion dollars. http://muniwireless.com/2006/01/31/the-200-billion-broadband-scandal-aka-wheres-the-45mb-s-i-already-paid-for/

What happened to the USA that WE don't seem to have many people like this anymore?

We do.

True, it's not giving away wifi to a major metro area like New York, but the Google guys don't count as entrepreneurs that kick the establishment's ass and, er, have testicles? Because while Virgin is giving away free internet, and that's nice, Google is giving me free maps and free* e-mail that's much better than the e-mail service I had before.

Market leader?

HTC 18 Billion in April
http://www.worldtech24.com/phones/htc-sales-hit-record-figures-april-reports-reuters

Apple 10 Billion in a quarter

http://www.muniwireless.com/2009/01/22/apple-defies-financial-crisis-quarterly-sales-surpass-10-billion/

Try again on who is leading the market, because it sure does not appear to be Apple.

"Because in general, a public anything ends up bullying the private sector by effectively forcing them to conform to their methods or by requiring the public to pay a tax even if they don't use it they still pay for it."

Define "bullying the private sector" - because from your incredibly vague claims there, I'd say it's a good thing.

"The problem is, there is no major public thing that I know of that does not either bully the private sector or require payment by those who don't use it and funding it purely with a use tax."

Roads. Mail (see below). Internet. Yes, internet. Municipal internet has on many occasions proven cheaper and more reliable than private. See here or here for a list. I personally know people who use these services and will tell you how superior they are to the private internet in the same towns. Oh, did I mention how private interests like to sue cities for providing these? Yes, we can hand over out infrastructure to privates...

"Yeah thats because the government gave the USPS a legal monopoly on first class letters. So USPS can't send letters if it wanted to because the government fucked with the free market. Now how does that help your point?"

You just made my point, sir. A public organization has control of a market and has service and price that is as good as or better than the majority of the world's. NOT some kind of hell on earth, totally inefficient, money-bleeding, Soviet-like organization that libertarians go about claiming will result from nationalizing businesses. It proves that nationalized infrastructure works. So why don't we try with internet?

Did you download a distro a day? Watch one movie every day at DVD compression?

Glossing over the fact that it doesn't matter because they agreed to sell us the bandwidth to use as we see fit (barring illegal activities, etc.), there are also uploads to factor in. We watch a lot of streaming video, and we're about to watch more. But I also regularly send large files to my friends and coworkers, and my job will soon require that I send them more often (Citrix FTW). What YOU do with YOUR bandwidth may differ.

Speaking of greedy bastards, what about all the loser subscribers that want 100 Mbps of dedicated content for 1/10th what it actually costs the providers to buy it themselves?

I won't stoop to feces-flinging, but I will point out that if ISP's offer to sell a certain thing for a certain price, they are obligated to deliver that thing at that price. If it really costs them so much, then they can't really afford to sell it for so little, can they? I guess not. Of course, Charter is in financial trouble, isn't it? Another case of over-leveraging, trying to sell what you don't have.

This reminds me of the Long Island Wi-Fi project. It's pretty much dead.

that depends on which European country you're talking about.

and it's not just an issue of advertised speed. it's an issue of quality of service--bandwidth caps, overselling, traffic throttling/shaping, packet monitoring & other usage restrictions. and all of these ultimately tie to _value_, which is what we need to compare.

we don't need to be faster than everyone else or as fast as Japan and Korea. that's not what i'm arguing. but we shouldn't be paying more for less. Japan is far and ahead of the U.S. because their government has focused on developing this vital infrastructure through government subsidies and technology initiative. in the U.S., we tax payers are still subsidizing the ISPs & telecoms but we're not getting anything out of it because our government cares only about business interests.

even BusinessWeek puts us at #16 out 46 surveyed countries. even countries like Lithuania, Latvia, and Slovenia are doing better than U.S. in terms of broadband quality. but more importantly, if we are to be a technology leader, or just continue to be relevant in the information age, we need more competitive broadband pricing. the current business model used by U.S. ISPs is basically preventing our broadband infrastructure from being upgraded in step with growing demand.

the blind greed of corporations is not driving technology forward. it's ever-growing consumer demand that is usually the driving force behind technological progress. but now ISPs are trying to suppress that demand by villanizing power users and manipulating internet usage. not only that, but the lack of industry regulation means ISPs can abuse their monopoly to artificially inflate broadband prices, thereby further manipulating bandwidth usage/demand economically.

ah... sorry. i didn't mean to imply that amsterdam was its own country. i was just citing the cheapest places on this this list, and Amsterdam just happens to be on there at the top of that chart. i don't know why it's listed there by itself while all the other names are of countries.

or do what smart businesses have done all throughout history: increase supply to satisfy demand. we have some of the slowest and simultaneously most expensive internet service in the world. as the richest nation in the world, and the global leader in science and technology, this should not be occurring.

check out this chart of broadband prices around the world. then take a look at this map of broadband speeds around the globe.

i refuse to believe that South-Korea, Sweden, and Japan have fewer "power users" per capita than the U.S. or that they don't have file sharing in those countries. blaming the problem on consumers to try and divert blame ignores the most obvious and logical solution.

perhaps ISPs should spend less money and energy on packet shaping technology and trying to curb p2p file sharing, and spend more resources on what we're actually paying them for: internet access. i'm not paying $50/month for them to tell me what i can or can't use my bandwidth for, or how i should be using my bandwidth. if they want customers to only use their connection for web access, then they should just call themselves "Web Access Providers."

And let's say that you own every bit of arable land in the state, so that a competitor would have to buy up high rises and demolish them to get enough arable land to grow their own daisies.

Idiot. This is nothing like growing daisies. The ILEC owns the only line into my building. A line which, by the way, should have been at least upgraded to fiber with the $200 billion "infrastructure upgrade" windfall we paid for. That gives them a natural monopoly, and the only way to bring in competition (besides having the government take over the infrastructure) is to force the ILEC to open up their lines to CLECs.

With universal access fees and grants the telco companies are private companies that were funded in a large part by government fees. I've seen estimates of 200 billion http://www.muniwireless.com/article/articleview/5011 and more being given to develop universal high speed coverage that never materialized.

The '96 telco deregulation act was a step in the right direction stating that they had to share their facilities and lines because they were in fact developed with public funds. This was an 'at cost' sort of setup but was still hokey. DSL wholesale cost to another ISP was often times more than the phone company retail cost to the client - but it was at least an attempt at equity. They were glad to take the public money but were sure against having to do anything because of that.

Then Powell's son was put in charge of the FCC and the pro business/pro monopoly rulings made deregulation go away. Now we're back to the baby bells being larger than AT&T ever was, our infrastructure being sub par compared to the rest of the industrialized world, and consumers who paid taxes for a better system still being locked in to a monopoly, or a duopoly at best.

This decision isn't about business - this is about lobbying at its finest.

Well, actually,,,,

Here in Vermont there are a number of startups using wireless for remote localtions. Here's a random sample. Here's another. There are more. It's the sort of thing that self-styled entrepreneurs can do for not much investment, and that often gets good support from local governments that see it as key to economic development. So find some kids with a little bit of money to play with, who'd like to run their own business and build their resume for bigger things later, and encourage them to get entrepreneurial on you. If you can find a few dozen neighbors who also like the idea of buying the service, so much the better.

Here, In Winston-Salem, the Municipal WiFi project is getting off the ground and into testing as of this very week.
http://www.muniwireless.com/article/articleview/63 31/1/23/

Who is the someone you think should fix the problem? If you're advocating federal government subsidies or mandates, I disagree.

The telcos and cablecos already got billions of dollars to built out infrastructure but they did a halfass job and didn't finish it. Such as the "The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal." . They should be held accountable for the taxpayer dollars they already received. But whether they can or not they should not have a government granted monopoly Government created the problem by giving both monopolies and subsidies to businesses, now it's government's responsibility to clean up the mess. Allowing open access to the 700 MHz band is a start to that, small start but a start.

on how much a session of congress costs. Keep in mind you'll be bidding against ma bell.

They're getting a pretty sweet deal right now so a few hundred million in lobbyists, campaign contributions and other misc bribes is nothing.

The cost of the actual wires vanishes when compared to the munny-munny-munny nonsense of the political side.

"jams the network in ways we're not compensated for. He said AT&T is spending about $18 billion on network maintenance, a significant chunk of which is required just to keep up with tremendous growth of traffic on its backbone."

They were compensated.

The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal

New investigative ebook offers micro-history of Verizon, SBC, Qwest, and BellSouth's (the Bell companies) fiber optic broadband promises and the consequence harms to America's economic growth because they never delivered and kept most of the money, about $200 billion.

This is one of the largest scandals in American history. America is 16th in the world in broadband and the US DSL current offerings are 100 times slower than other countries such has Japan and Korea. How did we go from Number 1 in the web to 16th in broadband and falling?

Starting in the early 1990's, with a push from the Clinton-Gore Administration's "Information Superhighway", every Bell company -- SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest -- made commitments to rewire America, state by state. Fiber optic wires would replace the 100-year old copper wiring. The push caused techno-frenzy of major proportions. By 2006, 86 million households should have had a service capable of 45 Mbps in both directions, (to and from the customer) could handle over 500 channels of high quality video and be deployed in rural, urban and suburban areas equally. And these networks were open to ALL competition.

In order to pay for these upgrades, in state after state, the public service commissions and state legislatures acquiesced to the Bells' promises by removing the constraints on the Bells' profits as well as gave other financial perks. They were able to print money -- billions of dollars per state -- all collected in the form of higher phone rates and tax perks. (Note: each state is different.)

* ADSL is not what was promised and paid for. It goes over the old copper wiring, can't achieve the speed, has problems in rural areas and is mostly one-way.
* 0% of the Bell companies' customers have 45 Mbps residential services.

The fiber optic infrastructure you paid for was never delivered.

http://www.muniwireless.com/article/articleview/50 11

I have to agree with this assessment. I live in Cambridge, MA, less than 500 feet from MIT's big, new computer science building, and the absolute fastest connection I can get to my apartment (and the only connection over 1.5 mbps down) is Comcast's 6m/768k cable service. As far as population density goes, we are pretty far up there with about 15,766 people per square mile (NYC is about 26,710/sq mile).

Compare this to my parents' house in the wealthy suburb of Newton, MA where the population density is only 4,644 people per square mile, but the median income is nearly twice as much, at $86,052. There, RCN, Comcast, and Verizon all offer services of at least 20M down and 5M up. This is still pretty meager compared to the offerings in South Korea and Japan, but it's definitely way better than you can get in the city.

I'd like to think this is an isolated incident, but in my personal experience it is mirrored all across the country. My service offerings in Chicago were similarly poor, while my girlfriends' parents offerings in the far off and fairly sparsely populated Tinley Park were both better and cheaper. People tell me that things in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston (median income: $29,825, density: 21,507 people/mi^2) are not significantly better than they are in Cambridge.

Related to denisty? Probably not.
Related to income? Probably.
Fair? Not at all.

Over the years the bells have been given about $200 billion in subsidies to bring fiber optics to everyone and close the "digital divide" by bringing broadband to the inner cities. Instead they've worsened the divide and a substantial portion of us *still* don't have access.

Here is a brief article on the subject. For more in depth information on the current subsidies in place and the economics of them, check out "Internet Economics" By Lee W. Macknight and Joseph P. Bailey. There are a number of other books, but this one has better references and avoids sensationalism.

I can assure you, that has not been the case. A whole lot of the dark fiber in the ground was laid by the US government and then sold at much less than cost, to hide the subsidy. In fact, we've paid more per citizen than other countries that completely funded government owned infrastructure and have similar or worse population densities.

The idea of the free market is a good one and one that works, but extremists take it too far. It is not a panacea and it does not work well in some situations. Healthcare, for example, is a situation where the buyer is under extreme duress with impending death and pain and that does not make for a logical, self-interested transaction between equals. A true free market cannot persist because of the wealth condensation principal. As wealth disparity becomes greater and greater we move to feudalism and eventually most people are born poor and a few are born rich and make money by lending to the poor. This disparity of station due to birth leads to justified anger and eventually violent revolt and the system is destroyed (as it always has been historically).

Network operators are a special case. In exchange for being impartial common carriers, they are less regulated than even private citizens (in some ways). If I transmit child porn or make copies of disney films, I'm subject to a lengthy jail sentence, while ISPs are protected from such because they are providing a common good. Without net neutrality, they are no longer providing that common good, so why should they be more protected than I am?

Try googling for "Broadband Scandal" The first on my list when I did is here. If I recall correctly, the telecoms have received $200 billion in tax breaks &/or subsidies. We were promised 45Mbps fiber service for [most] everyone by last year. HaHa. You get yours? Me neither. The book Broadband Scandal was available as a free pdf for a week or so last year.

Its expensive because you buy a T1 circuit (point to point) from your telco for some large amount per month. Typically you pay an amount that covers BOTH endpoints.

I thought it was because the telco was charging for services they never delivered, charging outrageous fees for the services they do provide and putting the money in their pockets, you know, robbing everyone blind.

The RIAA almost always has a very strong case.

No they don't. They have an IP address and an accusation, many of which have been proved false. What they have is the strength of bad laws that allow them to take everything you own or waste it all with court motions, both of which are better called "judicial extortion" than justice.

1) Sending someone else's creative work to ten thousand of your best friends is not speech.

Keeping me from publishing my own work on the network I pay for is a violation of free speech.

If you want to publish your own content via p2p, go ahead and do so on a network that isn't subsidized by the rest of your community.

First, because the networks are highly regulated all of them are publically subsidized. The network operators may not be living up to their obligations and might have wasted two hundred billion of your dollars, but they are ultimately yours and can be ordered to perform.

Second, how can I share by P2P when idiot operators block my traffic? I can buy all the hardware and service I want, but I won't be able to use it if it's censored at the receiving end.

Make no mistake, the big publishers want to make the internet look like cable TV and they are almost there. Unless you fight for your rights, you will play no further part than as a "consumer" and others will continue to own your culture.

Vacuum tubes are expensive because its hard to make a vacuum tube that has any degree of reliability. The fact that transistors do the same job and cost dirt has little impact on the difficulty or cost of making vacuum tubes.

So that's why just about every American house had a vacuum tube radio or three before they were obsoleted by transistors? Vacuum tubes were not expensive.

T1s are expensive for the same reason. The 15 meg FiOS service at my house actually costs Verizon a lot less to build and maintain than the multiply repeated 1.5 meg T1 that preceeded it.

A false reason and analogy is as good as any for Verizon and friends. They've already spent $200,000,000 of your money without delivering what they promissed.

As someone who has worked in Telecom for Cisco Systems I know that the
number one road block is poor infrastruture, and 90%+ of all fiber in
the ground in most areas is dark fiber.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fiber

The capacity is more than there, and eurpoe and japan already have
bi-directional 100Mb connections, and here is the REAL kicker.

The US tax payer already paid to upgrade the internet to the tune of $200 billion,
and it was SQUANDERED !

http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm
http://www.muniwireless.com/community/1023

My uncle worked for Southwestern Bell for over 20 yrs, they are greed driven
cold hearted bastards of the worst kind.

We are 16th in the world in broadband and falling rapidly, 3rd world countries
are even passing us up, its fricking pathetic and SOLELY due to corporate greed and fear.

They KNOW that if broadband is cheap and ubiquitous it is the end of
their long distance phone call money train due to VoIP, and piracy will
skyrocket in terms of video, audio, and other.

So when the Telcos bemoan how it can't be done, they know they can DWDN multiple
SONET lines down fiber, and hit 200+ channels of SONET DWDM, but they won't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWDM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_n etworking

NONE of this is very new, its been around for a fairly long while,
in fact.... SONET FAQ...Last updated January 24, 1998 .....

So again, when they decry it can't be done, do not hesitate to SCREAM "BULLSHIT"
at the top of your lungs.

these projects are state run. There was no bidding.

Well, there was the Houston one ( http://www.govtech.net/digitalcommunities/story.ph p?id=98722 ) that had a competitive bid that was very nearly killed by a state law whose language originally banned such partnerships http://www.stc-houston.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t= 874&sid=c5fcdcc14f97b926ebd1bbdf38549e1c

Remember the big hubbub about Philadelphia's municipal wireless program and how communism was going to take over the world? It's run by Earthlink http://simianbrain.atlblogs.com/archives/006656.ht ml

Most other cities also contract out their "municipal" wireless, for instance, the wireless network in Burleson, TX is run by Chevron. http://muniwireless.com/municipal/1121/
More: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22municipal+wirele ss%22+contract

I'm not sure what point you're making.

So yes, my point. Mayors recognize that they are not capable of running a wireless network all by themselves, but if a major telco player does not want to bother with their community, then the mayor is going to find someone who will. This scares the major telco players because someday they might want to provide service to that community, only to face an uphill battle against an incumbent that had secured choice transmitter locations from the city, so they push for laws to ensure that those communities will remain open for the day that they deign to provide their services.

How does this relate to this story? If AT&T decides to roll out fiber to only the "richest" homes due to "cost concerns", you can be sure that they have something up their sleeve to prevent other companies from deciding that they can provide the same service at a lower capital cost to the remaining neighborhoods, and subsequently make a profit at lower rates. This no doubt would scare AT&T shitless, after all they'd face that same uphill battle if a Company X ran fiber to the rest of the city, while their "wealthy" customers are dropping AT&T's higher-priced service in hopes that Company X will roll out their lower-priced service to their neighborhood.

As I recall, all of these projects were state/city run.

You apparently recall wrong.

Here

Well, yeah, though more likely to be the case if the harms are prevented rather than allowed to occur

In general I am opposed to preventive actions. They may, just may, "solve" one problem but they tend to create more problems than they solve. More laws and regulations aren't needed, instead many of them need to be stricken from the lawbooks. And we need a true freemarket. Get rid of many of these government created or backed monopolies. They may of been needed in the beginning but now they are stiffling. The breakup of ATT was a good start but more needs to be done. What we need now is more competition not less. And many laws and regs only make it harder for people to start their own business, because of the high cost of meeting regs and staying inside the laws, only big businesses can afford it. Admittedly it's easier to start a business in the US than in many countries but it could still be made easier.

Your points about broadband wireless are well-taken, but its not yet established as a viable competitor, and its not clear that it will be any time soon.

It depends on what "viable competitor" means. A quick look through MuniWireless shows that many cities or localities are either putting up wireless or are thinking of it, both in the US and internationally. In Both South Korea and Japan millions of people have broadband wireless. In Malaysia there are 600,000 people with WiMax and they are expecting it to be 2,000,000 by the end of the year. I think that because the US already is hardwired, there are many who don't want to see WiMax or any other broadband wireless become popular or widely available as they've already sunk a lot of money into those wires or fibers, and being entrenched they don't want wireless so they work to prevent it from becoming popular.

http://muniwireless.com/community/1023
http://saveaccess.org/node/288
http://www.newnetworks.com/scandalquotes.htm
http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000267073488 /
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/2021240_ F.shtml

Two Hundred Billion Dollars were set aside for exactly this purpose. To charge people TWICE is just a way of getting more money.

Come on. Where did the money go?!

There is not only one but there are two military nets. NIPPERnet and SIPPERnet. Wach out that might blow his mind.
But on to my main responce. This whole net neutrality arguement should be a non issue. The main basis for the verizon and Bell's claim is that they own the "last mile". Which they don't. The last mile was largly constructed not by the present Bells, but the Bell System. When it was a government regulated monoploy, that wouldn't have been able to build that "last mile" without that government protection. Sence the break up of the Bells this is all shared property and can't be resold. The present Bells are stretching on a limb for ownership.
Over the years the government has poured money it to the telecoms through Tax breaks and partnerships. The ISP's should be giving me 45 MB/s before they ask for more. *SEE* http://muniwireless.com/community/1023
The government needs to stop taking it up the butt from the telcos. The U.S. is far behind other countries in bandwidth and it's not due to a lack of funding. Everytime I hear how the Telcos want to double or triple tap the costomer for money, it just makes me sick.
Write your representative... hopefully they know how to open an e-mail. Tell them to say no to the telcoms stealing more money from the American people.

This is one of the largest scandals in American history. America is 16th in the world in broadband and the US DSL current offerings are 100 times slower than other countries such has Japan and Korea....

(source: http://muniwireless.com/community/1023 )

It's strange how much we detest government regulation in televsion, radio and voice services, but suddenly we're begging for in on the internet.

Why isn't it reasonable that if a company is making money by using someone else's resources- they should have to pay for it? When send my customers packages, I have to pay UPS to deliver them. This isn't any different.

With the increase of bandwidth consumption by sites like google video and youtube, someone is eventually going to have to pay to upgrade the infrastructure. Why not charge the companies that are making money off of it? (as opposed to me, who is only wasting money on it)

Poor verizon. So unfair for them to invest their hard-earned money only to have the governments that granted them a geographic monopoly actually start enforcing the common-carrier rules that have been on the books for 30 years or so.

Oh wait: Was that our hard-earned money?

1. Incompetent telecoms burn $200 BILLION paid by consumers to provide high speed Internet to the homes.
2. Incompetent telecoms hide truth writing bullshit articles about how consumer "don't need what they want" and paying lobbyist "to keep the feds quiet".
3. ...
4. Profit! Fat paycheck to the executives! Brilliant!

Put these crooks in jail, before they kill the Internet completely. These guys really really hate innovation.

http://muniwireless.com/community/1023

If anyone has gotten a "free lunch" thus far, it's the telcos. Check out Bruce Kushnick's book, "The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal". By now, we should have fiber to every curb and 45mbps in both directions.

The following has a fairly decent synopsis of the book.
http://muniwireless.com/community/1023

I know it is unrealistic but as per the current verizon bs, about the only recourse we seem to have in the meantime is to form community trusts (since it is illegal in many states to set up municipal government) owned/operated networks. Then the community trust could buy in to a regional/national provider and have their own ISPs.

Part of me thinks this is the telcos following the RIAA/MPAA lead to desperately hold on to a system that is quickly being outdated. The difference here is that, should they actually push for this, the telcos will wind up speeding up their systems demise. Legislation regarding the municipal wireless/isp will quickly be rolled back (politicians are fickle, they're not stupid) and the telco will be fscked. I also wonder if they're scared shitless about BPL (even though it's unclear if/when that will happen).

All I can say is that corporate america is a bunch of greedy fucking bastards and that they and politicians are happily selling this country, its people and its ideals off - piece by piece.

Have you ever calculated what we in the U.S. have actually paid for internet access in the last twenty years? I don't mean "per month". I mean, draw back, and think.

Let's go for this year. Lemme see. Guess 20 million, figure from nowhere, with broadband. Just at home. Costs 45 a month on average. 45 X 12. 540 a year, for 20 million homes. 10,800,000,000 a year. Just one year. And it's probably a lot higher; please bear with me here. I'm just making a point.

Ten billion, eleven billion. How much for the last twenty, in toto, business and residential, have we paid? Twenty? Thirty? Forty billion bucks? Keep the idea of the magnitude in mind as I add tens of billions in free money granted by federal and state and municipal governments, in tax breaks, in granted monopoly access to customers, in deregulation calulated to permit the telcos to bring fiber to the door.

HOW MUCH HAVE THEY SUCKED US FOR? A hundred billion? How about the lost opportunity costs because we've crap bandwidth for maximum profit?

And now we'll have two-three companies left after all the merging, in an easy-to-maintain price fixing circle.

Let's call it a hundred billion they've charged, with much more to come. And we've got what for connections? For how much each? How much will it take to pound home the point that the way we've gone about it has failed our people, our economy?

It would have been cheaper for the Federal government to have laid fiber to the home in an Apollo type project over the last 20 years. Private businesses are too fast, too well financed, for any sort of meaningful regulation. They pull simple stunts like placing their best lobbyist, Powell, at the head of the FCC under Bush, where he granted them their wettest wishes. He'll of course go back to work for them after he's done and become a squillionaire for his loyal efforts.

Sigh.

and then there's this: http://muniwireless.com/community/1023 Oy.

Another link http://muniwireless.com/community/1023 discusses the same author's book.

actually, their customers paid for it. in taxes, in rate hikes, and STILL don't get what they were charged for.

http://muniwireless.com/community/1023

It seems as though this is only a small part of a bigger issue that is only recently being examined:
http://muniwireless.com/community/1023

Some people would say that we paid for it.

Aren't they also offering nationwide WiFi too? If Macedonia kicks America's tech butt while we devolve into some medieval theocracy, I'm going to burn a flag or something.

Just for the record, Canada's internet is not government subsidized in general. But, a nice example of what is possible with government/private partnerships is the city of Fredericton, which, after realizing the problem with broadband access, created a non-profit entity to deal with it:

http://www.muniwireless.com/archives/municipal/694
"Because broadband service was priced too high and not readily available in all parts of the community however, the city formed its own telecommunications company, e-Novations ComNet, Inc., a not-for-profit municipally owned corporation licensed as a CRTC non-dominant carrier. In a co-op model supported by local business and university partners, e-Novations built a 22km fibre-optic community network interconnecting all partners with each other and with the Internet. Using this fibre ring as a backbone, e-Novations then proceeded to extend the reach of the broadband network to the rest of the community through the use of Motorola Canopy long-distance wireless technology deployed through access points hosted on seven towers distributed throughout the city."

And this is in a city of 80,000!

Not to mention that other companies would not be allowed to lay their own infrastructure by the local governments. And if a local government did allow it, the local telco would be all over them with lawsuits.

If cable wasn't already established along with the telephone infrastructure, we would not have cable today. They snuck in when they weren't seen as a threat. As it is, the telcos are suing governments who allow wireless setups.

http://www.muniwireless.com/archives/municipal/486

I couldn't find the link to the slashdot story specifically about the Pennsylvania bill - but, no, it's not overblown. Here is a muniwireless article about the bill (HB30) which really does ban municipalities in Pennsylvania from offering broadband to their citizens.

We're going through this in Indiana, as well. In fact, the bills look strikingly similar. Luckily, our bill died in committee.

This bill would even prohibit towns that the telcos won't serve (because it wouldn't be profitable enough) from building an infrastructure.

Check out Auckland NZ. Reach Wireless using RoamAD(metropolitan wi-fi) and Woosh using IP Wireless. That town is a hotbed of wireless progress. Auckland's Wi-Fi Hotzone. Interesting thing here is that the city gt behind the launch of the network and actively promotes it, but does not own it. See How the city got involved.

A few of us in Medford MA have just begun discussing how we would go about convincing the city to offer wireless. We've all been reading the reports at MuniWireless.com"

Adelaide, Australia is already using its' street light infrastructure to support a municipal wireless network ("citilan") in the central business district:

Community Broadband Networks:
"City of Adelaide to offer wireless broadband downtown"

MuniWireless.com:
"Adelaide hotzone is up and running"