Philadelphia Considering Municipal Wi-Fi

sebFlyte writes "The row over Muni Wi-Fi continues as cities and other municipal authorities consider building massive Wi-Fi networks to give lots of people low-cost wireless net access. CNET is running an article written by the CIO for the city of Philadelphia, explaining why she thinks it's time to break the telcos de-facto monopoly and for public agencies to start offering public services." We have previous covered Taipei's efforts along these lines to create a for-pay service

Comments

What To Look Forward To?

[ackthpt]

If Philadelphia suceeds you can count on the following:

People winging about how poor the service is.

Talkshow hosts berating the government for more give-aways of taxpayer dollars (sponsored by some telco)

Saturation and further complaints (my taxdollars pay for, won't stand for it, etc)

Ultimately it'll actually be pretty good service.

Why is this a good idea anyway? Look at the stranglehold Cable TV has on communities. (oh, sure you can go satellite, but it's still not price competitive because they're pricing to compete with near monopolies) If municipalities insisted cable could be laid under the condition a cable company will sell, at a reasonable price, bandwidth on their cable to competitors, would we be paying such huge prices?

Potholes

[bsd4me]

I would prefer them to fix all of the potholes first...

Ramifications

[popo]

The ramifications of free wi-fi are greater than just web access... The upshot is of course, free telephone service as well.

This IMHO is where the real problems are going to begin. The telco's aren't just going to lose their internet business over this, they'd lose their businesses.

Not that we'd be sorry to see them go, but it should be acknowleged that we're talking about more than web browsing here.