Verizon Seeks To Nix Fee-Based Municipal Wireless Grids

millermp writes "It looks like Verizon has succeeded in banning municipal WiFi networks in Pennsylvania. Since Verizon is looking to broadband service to fuel its growth, it calls municipal WiFi 'unfair competition.' This bill is following similar legislation earlier this year in Utah, Louisiana, and Florida." The bill has yet to be signed by Pennsylvania's governor, and as the story says, does not ban municipal wireless per se, but would place great restrictions on how it could be funded.

Comments

See, this is the government on the one side...

[Dancin_Santa]

Just about any service offered by a government is going to put some private enterprise in a pinch by undercutting the private company's prices. Doesn't this show that the government can, in some rare cases, beat the market in pricing? How much more is Verizon planning on gouging customers than the market can bear?

It sounds more like Verizon can't beat the competition with market prices, so they seek to put the competition out of business. Of course, the competition is actually the government, so Verizon is going to have a hell of a time trying to beat them.

At the Federal level, the government should be responsible for very little. Protection of citizens, regulation of interstate/international commerce/etc. But on the local level, it is nice to have the community band together to solve local problems. Go Pennsylvania!

What's worse

[John Seminal]

Often the places that don't get broadband are the poorest. When @home started offering broadband service in my area, a pal who lived 15 miles away saw how much better it was then dial-up so he called to get it too. They said it was not available in his area. Years have passed and they have not offered it.

I love the idea of a town saying we want to provide this service, and we can do it for a fraction of the cost. It reminds me of my college housing, where the collective purchase power of all the apartments was leveraged by the owner of the property to get us satelite tv for a few bucks a month, something like 80% off the normal price.

Re:Why not compete?

[Charcharodon]

Yeah that is true, but that's the problem the private industry doesn't always want to provide the service. Most of these towns doing this are small podunk towns that won't see broadband within the next decade in any shape or form.

The privates shouldn't have any say in what people want to do locally especially when economic growth hinges on being able to provide some sort of broadband access these days.

It's like saying to the locals "no you can't have cars because Mobile doesn't want to put in a gas station in their town."

delaying the inevitable?

[tloh]

Over the years, as Internet use has become ubiquidous, I have the erie sense of deja vu as I recall learing about how, in 1800's, the city of London was supplied by several different private water utilities. In 1849, Dr. John Snow published a landmark theory that implicated contaminated water supplies as the source of frequent cholera outbreaks. In hindsight, we can say the reason London (as well as other metro areas of the world at the time) was ravaged by epidemics like this has as much do to with the lack of public oversight over a public consumable as with medical/sanitation ignorance. To return to the subject at hand, how many problems would we solve by turning internet access into a public utility? I suppose some would chaf at such a thing out of concerns for privacy or freedom. But wouldn't it be great if *all* spammers and other net abusers are hit with penalties and fines as they would be if municipal laws are violated?

Re:Verizon wants to have their cake and eat it too

[bofkentucky]

And telephone as well, hundreds of Rural Telephone Co-ops are in the US because Ma Bell and/or GTE didn't want to provide service to small rural markets, like mine. Government subsidized loans to start, co-operative ownership, and now, the very best in services. We have a DSL, video, and Dial tone service that covers most of our service area (and we are expanding, dropping DSL heads every 12000' takes time), 80/month for 768/384, digital cable and landline phone is pretty good, plus you get a dividend check on any profits made by the phone company, I love it.

plan killed here in Illinois

[ckolar]

We're familiar with that type of game here in the Fox Valley area west of Chicago. We had three communities try to pull together to get municipal broadband through and it was fought tooth and nail by SBC. It is pretty pathetic that we are still waiting for complete broadband services out here given that Fermilab is in Batavia (one of the three cities). SBC resorted to scary, misleading ads and other dirty tricks and managed to keep the plan suppressed.