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PHILADELPHIA: THE CITY OF WIFI LOVE
Share / Recommend - Comment - Print - Monday, Sep 27 2004, 5:17PM
PHILADELPHIA HAS JUST ANNOUNCED FULL ACCESS, FREE WIFI in a two-year project covering 135 square miles of the city.
Connectivity is one of my pet issues -- broadband deployment, the rural/urban digital divide, the information commons, all of that.
As the U.S. government and Federal Communications Commission screw over AT&T, Sprint, and other long distance carriers who were providing innovative bundled communications services that depended on wholesale access to regional Bells' infrastructure, I think that the rate of investment in broadband will slow and prices for many types of access will rise, in contrast to the fall in prices we've seen over the last decade.
Michael Powell, a very dull bulb as Chairman of the FCC (and Colin Powell's son), seems intent on getting on some boards of directors of lucrative monopolies like Verizon, SBC, and Bell South in the future.
I will be writing more on this new age of corporate monopolies that is emerging as the government undoes the 1996 Telecommunications Act -- but in the meantime, I want to commend the City of Philadelphia for making it easier for its blogging moms, data dads, kids, and other citizens like me to get on line easily. I do not live in Philadelphia -- but from here on out I plan to visit frequently.
What is it with this Seattle city official who isn't sure that the tax dollars are worth it? (see New York Times article) And he can justify all of Seattle's tax revenue financed sports stadiums? Seattle may be losing some of its edge.
-- Steve Clemons
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Didn't Chicago try to do this recently? What happened to that?
A similar effort in Pittsburgh has been a miserable failure, for a variety of reasons.
Go Steve!
The last several administrations have lost perspective when it comes to balancing the public interest in basic infrastructure against the benefits of competitive private investment. The recent telecommunications debacle is an illustrative example.
Compared to air travel and interstate highways, broadband is inexpensive. With what's been invested so far (so much of it lost to mismanagement, redundancy, bankruptcy and even fraud), we could have created almost universal broadband connectivity in this country, providing small towns with the same quality of service that we want for metropolitan areas. But our age of deregulation militates against requiring equality of service, and substitutes market economics for economic development. As a result, not even Philadelphia has the connectivity it requires, much less Farmington, New Mexico.
Telecommunications distribution systems -- the investment in cable, poles, switches and software -- are fundamental infrastructure, as basic to the survival of our economy and our lifestyles as potable water and public highways. Communities live and die by them. The basic infrastructure is a public trust. The services provided over that infrastructure can be as free-market and competitive as trucking companies hauling freight on our public highways.
Communities are valued by the people who live in them. That value is lost to market economics, where efficiency trumps diversity, at least in the short term. Governments are supposed to take a longer view. Thus, the tradition, so eroded now, that certain investments -- highways, sewage treatment, airports -- are to be made by the public, in the long-term public interest.
Several models have been proposed that hold out the promise of finding the right balance between the public interest (public investment and regulation) and competitive private investment. Unfortunately, the "very dull bulb" at FCC and his retinue have seen fit to avoid any of them.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 never had a chance. Those who were given responsibility to make it work had a different agenda.
I look forward to reading what you have to say.
-- Larry Martin
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