Texas Wireless Ban Has Failed

chip rosenthal writes "The effort to ban municipal networks in Texas has failed. Texas House Bill 789 originally had provisions to ban muni wireless networks. The Senate passed a significantly rewritten version, without a ban. A conference committee failed to reach agreement, so the bill died when the Texas legislature adjourned this weekend."

Comments

Good.

[SatanicPuppy]

Last thing we need is more dumb telecom legislation.

Now if congress would get off their ass and put together a real bill that governed fiber bandwidth intelligently, we'd be in business.

Seriously, we need to pull the rug out from under the damn cable companies. They're making a mint prentending they're not in the same business as phone companies (moving info), and the laws support it.

Too bad...

[ebrandsberg]

802.11b is a very poor means of delivering bandwidth to anybody. Because of interference from cordless phones, even inches away from my AP, I can't get a clean connection through many times. This type of interference I've experienced on several brands of AP's with several different wifi adapters, and they all experience the problems at the same time. Attempting to make use of 2.4Ghz for utility style bandwidth deployment is a waste of government money and time, better suited to other projects.

On the other hand, I don't believe that state governments should be telling the local governments what to do like this, as it is clear that this is a move by the commercial companies to keep a niche market where they can keep money. ON the other hand, why CAN'T they make money deploying this stuff.

As someone living in Texas...

[Prien715]

I'm quite disturbed at the number of moronic bills that have been passed just this session.

First, they banned same sex couples from adopting children -- most sinister is allowing the state to monitor the activities of foster parents to make sure they're straight.

Second, they've banned "sexy cheerleading". Yes, that right. They took time out of their legislative session to vote on a bill banning public high schools from cheers and outfits people might consider appropriate.

You can learn a lot about your own state sometime just by watching the Daily Show.

And I helped make it happen!

[Cryofan]

The savemuniwireless mailing list kept us all informed of what politicians to email at what times.

I emailed those politicians told them I was going to work for/donate to their opponents when they came up for reelection, if they voted for HB 789.

Now we need to target Phil King, of Weatherford. He is the slimy corporate whore who sponsored hb 789.

We should probably raise money to run ads informing his district constitutents about how he sold out to SBC, et al as a corporate whore.

Here is the url to the Weatherford Democrat, the newspaper for the biggest city in his district.

I say we make an example of this whore Phil King by raising money over the Net to defeat him when he runs for reelection/office again. He will serve as an example for the other corporate whores. With the internet we can focus all our whore-hating dollars on some whore like King.

This guy is just a texas state govt representative. It is not all that big an office. We do not need to raise all that much money or have all that huge an effort in order to make an example of him by kicking him out of office.