County-wide Wireless Broadband

An anonymous submitter sent in this story about a Maryland county providing wireless broadband to everyone, well, almost everyone, anyway. The article doesn't mention how much the service costs, and I don't see anything on the network's website either. There is a good page of information about the network, though.

Comments

Looks like costs are covered by taxes

[hillct]

My reading of their website is that the costs of network operations are covered in county taxes. This is a great way to encourage those who may not have broadband access to make use of the service, since they're paying for it anyway. Granted this is the position of the technically inclined. Those less technically inclined might take umbrage at paying taxes to facilitate a service that they may not choose to use. Of course, the same argument has been made by senior citizens and those without childrand regarding town and county taxes fupporting schools, where they may not have any children in attendance, but since in that case, the arguments have been easily rebuffed, I suppose the arguments against county taxes going toward provision of network access, could be just as easily if not more easily rebuffed.

--CTH

Rural Broadband == Government?

[bill_mcgonigle]

This looks like a fabulous technical setup, and I must admit I'm a bit envious. Up here in rural New Hampshire, I can't get broadband either (besides high-latency satellites) and wireless looks like the best solution.

There doesn't appear to be any commercial interest in doing so, despite sputterings from several companies. I'm assuming this is what happened in Allegany County also, then someone at the government took the bull by then horns.

When the government decided everyone should have electricity, a different situation emerged - they incentivized private industry to get it done, through tax incentives. However, when the government decided everyone should have books, they opened libraries. When they thought everyone should have better TV they granted short-term monopolies. When they thought everyone should have telephones, they granted long-term monopolies.

This project has many qualities of the above examples, and I'm not sure it's going the right way. Electrical transmission systems and libraries can afford to evolve as quickly as most government buracracies move, and that's not a problem. With the Internet, it might be a problem down the road. For a historical example, in some locales, governments did grand those long-term telephone monopolies to small companies, effectively paragovernments, and many people in those small towns are just now getting service reasonable enough to use with a modem. Will a government-run agency be able ot adapt fast enough when they next big thing comes along?