Verizon-Pushed WiFi Bill Becomes Law in PA

Cryofan writes "A Wall Street Journal article (via freepress) tells the sad tale of how legislation barring PA municipalities from offering paid telecom services was signed into law. 'Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell said late Tuesday night that he had signed into law a large telecommunications bill placing severe restrictions on the ability of cities and towns to offer telecommunications services, an item that was heavily lobbied by Verizon Communications Inc. and other big telephone companies in similar legislation across the country.'" (Also mentioned last week.)

Comments

Re:Quite right, it's anti competitive & monopo

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes,

Well, before wireless, it was wired. In 1995, the State of Texas passed a bill that prevented the City of Austin from string fiber optic between its high-schools, libraries, fire stations, police stations, and power substations.

Seems that Southwestern Bell though it mighty uncompetitive of the City of Austin to replace old crappy 9600 baud modems with something that would be faster *and* cheaper! Of course, the Texas Leg voted was anti-people back then too.

Re:Big Ed

[Doc Ruby]

You sure are naive about telecom. The tariff lets all the "competitors" avoid competing on new features, by specifying all the features and their prices. It also prices starting new telcos in the $BILLIONS, keeping out any new competition. When something new comes along, like DSL, they tweak the tariff to kill new competitors, like they did with DSL. The only orgs foolhardy enough to start competing with telcos on something disruptive like WiFi are local governments, and now they're slapped down (at least in Pennsylvania). Even though the limited bandwidth of WiFi in a given area makes it most effective for municipal communications, like emergency services, sanitation and other state communications. If Verizon were able to compete, it would let towns and cities educate the market with WiFi, while rolling out WiMax or even (gasp) 3G, or maybe even finishing the phased-array tech that effectively unlimits bandwidth spectrum constraints (never). A competitive telco would actually see the lengths to which cities and towns are going to get wireless coverage, and *sell it to them*. Instead, they've just outlawed any possible competitive motivation to deliver this hotly desired service to their market. So no one gets it. And they've got legions of people hooting about "the market" when no such dynamic exists in this industry. I'm glad you're satisfied with your wired status quo.