Today’s WSJ reports efforts by the telcos to block municipal plans to offer Wi-Fi to their citizens in Pennsylvania. Verizon lobbied the legislature to block attempts by cities to offer free Wi-Fi.
My thinking on telco stupidity and avarice was formed by Charles Ferguson’s excellent polemic, “The Broadband Problem: Anatomy of a Market Failure and a Policy Dilemma “.
Ferguson, former CEO of Vermeer, the company that developed Frontpage, a WYSIWIG HTML editor acquired by Microsoft, is a research fellow at the Brookings Institute. I highly recommend the book.
While the role of municipal governments in granting utility monopolies to cable companies was hashed out in the 1980s — essentially awarding a town or city to a single provider to cut down on infrastructure disruption — Wi-Fi doesn’t involve ComCast trucks hanging devices off of utility poles, provides broadband to the masses in the spirit of POTS for all, and if anything, will goad the lazy Verizons of the world to get off their dark-fiber asses and start eating their profitable T-1 businesses.
I’m all in favor of broadband at all costs, especially in rural areas where broadband is every bit as much of an economic development incentive as roads without potholes. While I rather see the private marketplace do its economic magic, the cozy relationship between the Telcos and public utility commissions insures we’ll never see true free market capitalism at work.
yo……
your comments are really premature on monetizing wifi this early on……….
get the masses to depend on it, then structure and reap the benefits of it…………
what’s better, 100 bucks from 50 companies or 10 bucks from 100,000 people…………
don’t be such a filthy capitalist and use your vision for something other than looking in the past…………
mikeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
ps; i’m a longhaul trucker and knowing where the free spots are is a lot better than paying through the nose, lots easier to do that than park an 18 wheeler in a starbuck’s parking lot or high end hotel lobby…………..