I’ll be blunt — this stinks!

“People are paying money in to go to college,” she said, “I don’t think any of that money should be used to subsidize the broadband effort that really is competing with the private sector.”

– Sen. Lisa Marrache, the assistant Senate majority leader

Oh, you are asking what’s the argument? The Univ of Mass is considering going into partnership with several communities and private enterprise in rural Maine locations to get broadband to these localities that are not being served now. The beef of course is that the University is competing with private enterprise. —

Marrache said constituents raised the issue with her after charges were leveled this summer that UMS is competing with private companies in the broadband business.

Severin Beliveau, an Augusta attorney representing FairPoint, blasted UMS at a meeting of the State Broadband Advisory Council, arguing their participation in a group seeking federal funds was improper competition with the private sector.

“I am concerned at what the university is proposing here, because it is receiving a form of subsidy, no they are in fact receiving a subsidy from taxpayers, in competing with the private sector,” he said.

Jeff Letourneau, associate director of information technology at UMS, said the university is part of a private-public partnership created to provide broadband capacity at a “wholesale” level and the university’s role is minor.

“The grant from the federal government went to GWI [Great Works Internet] and two private investors,” he said. “As for tuition subsidizing our broadband efforts, that does not happen and will not happen.”

I am a dirty stinking capitalist of the first order. There are not many $$ deals I won’t turn down. (Though there are moral ones I won’t touch.) But if private companies don’t want to service these areas; and that has been the case for Verizon, now FairPoint for years, then by God you have no right to complain. You were offered a franchise there Telcos, decided it was not worth your effort and now complain when your unopened candy bar is taken away from you. Pffft, tough. Capitalism works best when there is fair exchange going on. Capitalism does not work where monopolistic haunch sitting goes on and the citizenry suffer as a consequence.

Which brings me to the title of this missive. You have to ask yourself whose ox gets gored if UofMaine went thru with the deal? Why the resident Telco is who. That ladies and gentlemen has to be the back story. As a fellow conservative I know says — flare drops. This is only a cover to prevent competition.

Serve your constituents Marrache.

Link.
HT:WetMachine.

Alec Ross has been picked to fill a slot at the US State Dept. hand made for him. He is to fill the role of Techno-Diplomat at State –

Alec Ross arrives today at the State Department, armed with a new set of diplomatic tools including Facebook, text messaging and YouTube.

Ross is a senior adviser on innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — a role created for the 37-year-old nonprofit leader, who quickly rose within the Obama campaign, helping to craft tech policy under top technology adviser Julius Genachowski.

His new job will blend technology with diplomacy in an attempt to help solve some of the globe’s most vexing problems on health care, poverty, human rights and ethnic conflicts. And it is emblematic of the expansive approach the administration has taken to the role of technology in advancing its domestic and global agendas.

Before I start I should lay down a disclaimer that I have never met the man. The considerations given are based on a Bio search of Mr. Ross’s career and public statements.

Alec Ross graduated from Northwestern with a BA. From what I can find he is not a technologist in formal training. (I hold a BS in Computer Science, for example.) His work effort followed with a 2 year stint teaching in inner city schools. (Surprisingly I spent a year doing the same thing.) He also has served as flunky to the CEO of The Enterprise Foundation. Subsequently he co-founded One Economy an NGO that fosters internet access for low income participants in the US and around the world. He has now been appointed as the Man on technical-social policy at the State Department.

Sounds like a pretty stellar rise for a 37yo guy right? Well maybe. But lets consider some facts. Look at One Economy’s 2007 charity summary. Their 990 summary here. CharityNavigator only gives them a slightly better than average rating on charitable efficiency. Their total revenues for 2007 were just a little under $20m. Their total employee count was 21-100 depending on which set of data you view. Still sound ok? Well consider this –

* The average regional McDonalds franchisee with 10-11 restraunts is grossing $20m per annum.
* Your typical WalMart SuperCenter typically grosses in the $18-25m range. That youngist looking guy or gal running the place has more at risk.
* An average long haul truck driver pushes $30m in customer assets just to meet expenses and payroll.
* Fact is there are tens of thousands of micro cap stocks in the $20-100m range in this country. All of them doing so the old fashion way — they earn it in the marketplace.

My point is there are a flotilla of individuals with not only better experience but are so with a technology background and understanding. What Ross brings to the table is connections and how to work the NGO system. I don’t consider that a compliment. Lets call it what it is — political patronage. It is what it is, good or ill. But it is payback for picking the right horse. The way the Washington Post gushes you would think he was the second coming of Geithner. (Which when I think about it, might be true. Not a compliment either.)

Do I fret about it? No. But this is like handing an undersecretary of state position whose sole claim to fame is ’social entrepreneur’. Well Mr. Ross I have a challenge for you. Lets meet shall we? I will bring two PCs and 2 OS disks. The first one to get the system up and running in its stated role in a network environment is last man standing.

For a different perspective look here.

Linky

Article over in the UK Gaurdian from a Colonial over here about the need for Universal Broadband. I go on record as stating that universality in anything ends up being a boondoogle and coarsens the delivery of anything it touches. That being said, there are ways to foster competition to improve service and reduce costs. But I will let the man have his say –

We live in a civil society – a place where primary education is freely available to all, where anyone can enjoy a walk through our public parks or down our sidewalks and freely drive through the streets. Libraries across the country loan out books for free – literature that you can read on a spring day in our parks or beneath the streetlights on main street on a warm summer’s evening. You don’t have to tip the firemen who show up at your house or pay for police protection – in a civil society, public safety is freely available to everyone.

We enjoy myriad services and resources that we don’t pay for each and every time we use them. Yet each of these key facets of contemporary society was part of a new social contract, often adopted only after years of battle and turmoil to overcome a prior status quo (from private fire and educational services to for-fee libraries and parks). Eventually, however, new models are seen to provide such an enormous benefit to the entire population that we’re willing to invest in ideas that lift all boats. We realise that, as a society, each of us is better off when certain basic services are freely available to all.

At the dawn of the digital era, during this first decade of the 21st century, the most important new commodity is internet access. A growing canon of research has documented the enormous benefits that accrue to those with broadband access (and the increasing detriments faced by those without it). Within many civil societies, in much the same way the agrarian revolution helped eliminate famine, the industrial revolution brought manufactured goods into everyone’s lives and the computer era integrated machines (from laptops to PDAs and cell phones to iPods) into our daily regimes, connectivity is the currency of the information age. A new social contract that includes connectivity for all is not a particularly expensive endeavour – free broadband for everyone for life would cost a tiny fraction of the cost of the Wall Street bail-out and far less than the expense of one year of our war in Iraq.

The problem can be summed up in the gentlemen’s preamble — it should be free and available to all. Sorry but there is no free lunch. You pay for the streets with taxes or bonds. The fireman, librarian and policemen don’t have to be tipped because they too get paid by your taxes that you pay for. (And most likely have a better pension than you do working in the private sector.) So the panacea that broadband would be free is a farce. What?! Cisco is going to give the county the equipment for free? Perish the thought.

Am I against municipalities getting together and putting up a system? No. But lets do it right. Set up those municipal service authorities, build it out and pay for it out of user fees. Or have the county bid out the deployment and servicing to a third party. But it has to be a user pays model. Otherwise you end up with the ‘public commons’ problem of too many subsidizing the few that rape the system of bandwidth.

LInky

With some new Pols poised to take the keys to our collective bus in DC, we’re hearing a lot about he need for federal money to fix our digital infrastructure. We’re also hearing a lot of banter about natural monopolies, and economic stimulus  from self appointed experts who are eager to allocate more dollars to to “create jobs and erase the digital divide”. If you think the new team driving the bus will fix anything, I have news for you. We’ve repeatedly tried to fund and regulate better communications networks  from Washington, and failed every time.  The time has come to quit feeding the porkers at the federal trough and take charge of our own infrastructure.

Technologist Brough Turner eloquently makes the case that we should own our dark fiber and be free to chose who lights it. With double strand fiber prices now in the 30 cents / foot range,  a fiber pipe is less costly than the water, sewer, or electric that we routinely pay for. Instead of forking over billions for make work programs run by Luddites in Washington, why not do it closer to home? Opening the market for who lights the fiber will create more jobs that will continue long after the initial construction, and competition will provide better price and service with more options.

Brough Turner says, “Don’t fight for anything above dark fiber.” Changes in telecom tend to happen on a decade’s time scale so be careful what you ask for - it will be with you for a long time. His proposal for improving internet communications in the United States is based on the paradigm of owning the dark fiber ourselves or controlling who lights the dark fiber that comes into our homes.  (IT Conversations)

 

 Brough Turner from IT Conversations [17:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The people of the smallish burg of Monticello, MN may actually be allowed to build and pay for their own fiber network after all. Defying all conventional logic, the local Telco expected the courts to enforce their total monopoly over fixed line broadband access. This time, sound judgment prevailed. Our corrupt Congress should take notes, and the duopoly should be put on notice. Until we open the market to real competition by private enterprise,we will be seeing more of this.

Just as a service provider should be free to offer whatever level of service it feels is appropriate (in this case relatively slow DSL), a municipality should be free to offer better if they feel that the incumbent is not offering adequate service. The Muni built network is a last resort solution that was arrived at after many attempts to have the monoploy deliver bandwidth that meets current deamnd. If the telco in question, TDS telecom, wanted to preserve its monopoly, they needed to provide satisfactory service instead of suing to force the public to accept less.

(story at StarTribune.com)

It’s clear municipalilites can benefit from wireless broadband. Chosing the right model and executing it as a business tool rather than a political one seems to be the difference between success and failure. There’s no reason to believe that this would not apply to Wimax as well as WiFi.

The city of Milledgeville, Georgia has contracted Clearwire to deploy a municipal WiMAX network to provide city-wide wireless internet access. The service will be subscription-based, with a number of different service tiers available. Funding for the project is coming from a USD862,000 grant awarded to the city by the Georgia Technology Authority in 2006. (Telegeography)

We’ll be watching this one attentively.  Will the AT&T legal squad try to stop it?

Recently, after years of sucking up USF and other government subsidies, the big 3 telcos have been selling off rural systems rather than making the improvements the subsidies were to have funded. This has brought about a small wave of Telco upstarts who now operate many of America’s rural systems. One of them is TDS.

While TDS has made some improvements since taking over, Monticello, MN citizens want FTTH service instead of the meager 3MBPS DSL TDS provides. True to telco monopoly form, instead of providing a fiber network, TDS sued when the city decided to build it’s own. Unlike many small cities who have buckled under the deep pocketed telco lawyering, Monticello is fighting back.

Quoting ILSR Spokesperson Brooke Gullikson:

Monticello has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit preventing it from building the fiber optic network 74% of voters supported in a referendum last fall.

TDS, the incumbent telephone provider in Monticello, rebuffed solicitations from the City to build a fiber network before filing a complaint to prevent the City from building its own network.

Minnesota Statute 475.52 gives cities the right to bond for a variety of projects, from public buildings to sidewalks to wastewater treatment plants. The language is quite broad, granting bonding authority “for any utility or other public convenience from which a revenue is or may be derived.”

“TDS wants the court to believe that a fiber optic network offering telephone, Internet access, and cable television is neither a utility nor a public convenience,” says Christopher Mitchell, Director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). “Incumbent providers across the United States file these frivolous lawsuits to prevent communities from breaking their monopoly.”

The second piece of the complaint alleges that part of the bond will be used to pay ‘current expenses.’ MN statute proscribes bonding for current expenses. The city of Monticello has responded that it will be well within the law when using bond proceeds.

“Consider a community using revenue bonds to build a swimming pool. The community must hire employees before it generates a dollar of revenue,” Mitchell continues, “these startup costs have never been considered ‘current expenses’ and Minnesota Supreme Court has said as much.”

Mitchell researches publicly owned broadband networks nationwide, and has followed in the Monticello lawsuit from the beginning.

“If our ancestors accepted TDS’ position – and there were many companies making the same points 100 years ago – electricity would still not have reached many rural areas, leaving us much worse off as a country,” explains Mitchell. “We hope the court rapidly dismisses this frivolous lawsuit and allows the democratic process in Monticello to continue”.

We enthusiastically support the citizens of Monticello in getting what most US broadband users only dream about, world class access. The presiding judge should throw out the TDS suit without delay.

editorial note: while we agree with the ISLR’s views on this issue, we do not endorse most of their policies or initiatives.

In spite of all of the doom and gloom reported in the out of touch media and billions squandered to create Muni WiFi failures, the availability of free coverage continues to grow.

A new report by ABI Research predicts that the number of Wi-Fi hotspots is supposed to grow forty percent in 2008 as compared to 2007. The majority of those hot spots are being launched throughout Europe and many of them are located on public transportation and in travel service locations such as airports. The report suggests that a majority of these hotspots will offer high-speed Internet for free, stating that fee-based Wi-Fi is counterproductive because people don’t want to pay for connectivity but will pay for “value-add content downloads”. (DSL Reports)

The report falls short of finding a compelling reason for a business to offer free and open WiFi. Put simply, offering free WiFi is a great way to draw and retain customers. It’s an advertising beacon in the neighborhood, every bit as effective a the billboard. It creates good will between the provider and the consumer. Free WiFi sells $5 coffee drinks,  oil changes and cheeseburgers. It draws the road warrior to the bookstore and the soccer mom to the library while her kids do story hour. Near universal coverage will continue to grow simply because it creates real value for those who provide it.

Government sanctioned WiFi failures have the the traits of being a revenue source and a method of social engineering - concepts that never work as intended no matter how they are applied. The government supported systems that are working now have sought neither to sell a franchise or to play Robin Hood with tax payers. They simply provide access to fulfill a predetermined, funded mission, often with some level of free public access. Our social engineering obsessed media rarely reports on these successes.

The free for all style of privately offered access closely replicates the chaotic model that grew the Internet and has proven to work time and time again. Without the meddling of lawmakers, chances are very good we’ll have near universal coverage in many urban areas before we’ll have LTE.

The Governator and State Legislature in Cali must be giving up on the unfulfilled promises repeatedly made by AT&T and the cable guys. The left coast will soon be providing taxpayer funding to bring broadband to the nearly 1.5 that can’t get service. Government tends to not do things very efficiently, but it’s a fair bet thet’ll get it done sooner that a duopoly. I’m betting the duopoly lawyers will use the courts to delay deployment as long as possible.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today announced he has signed Senate Bill 1191 by Sen. Elaine Alquist authorizing community service districts to provide broadband services to their residents.

“We live in an age where technology drives everything we do and to remain competitive and connected in the future we must expand broadband access today,” said Gov. Schwarzenegger. “This legislation will help connect California’s cities to each other and to the world by growing our digital highway.” (Government Technology)

Massachusetts taxpayers will soon be subsidizing the same carriers who are not providing universal broadband coverage to provide said coverage. With the population density even in rural Mass, one would think a determined service provider could work this out without public funding. Unfortunately without competition, there is no incentive.

The measure was approved 144-0 on Monday afternoon. Rep. Denis E. Guyer, D-Dalton, earlier filed an amendment raising the bond bill’s funding to $40 million.

“The additional $15 million in funding will allow us to reach further in our efforts to provide broadband access to both unserved and underserved communities, rather than having to choose one or the other,” said Guyer in a statement. “This is incredibly important for my constituents and the commonwealth as a whole.”

Many of the communities Guyer represents have no access to high-speed Internet.

The bond bill was unveiled last August by Gov. Deval Patrick as a way to encourage investment in broadband capacity in rural and suburban areas.

The legislation would create a broadband incentive fund for developing public and private partnerships to invest in broadband infrastructure tools like conduits, fiber and wireless towers. The fund would be managed by a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.

Some 32 communities statewide have little or no Internet access, primarily in Western Massachusetts. Other regions are locked into monopolies with no choice of provider. (iBershires.com)