Ben, you should be ashamed. On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 04:57:48PM -0600, Ben Kochie wrote: > this is why I see municipal broadband, both wifi AND fiber to the home > stuff as a GREAT way for us to rid the bad monopolies like comcast and > quest, and bring good service back to the network. Oh, those big bad monopolies that have BOTH upgraded their service at no extra charge to the customer (Qwest went to 1.5mbit, Comcast went from 1.5 to 3mbit, and now from 3mbit to 4mbit without increasing pricing) > > The city builds out a good fiber optic infrastructure, this prevents the > need for multiple privately owned network infrastructures. (cable, POTS > copper, ricochet, etc) This network provides the perfect infrastructure > for wifi. > > Using vlans, and QoS, they can partition the network, and allow private > compnaies to provide the service endpoints of the network, phone, video, > Internet, whatever. Perhaps this is some deep dark secret, but most cities actually OWN THE LOCAL CABLE INFRASTRUCTURE. *YOU* elected the people who chose Comcast, RoadRunner, Charter, etc. to manage that infrastructure and provide services on it. It's possible (and quite easy!) to run multiple cable modem networks on the same coax (at different frequencies) and the cable is already in place. > > This solves the city problem of needing infrastructure at a reasonable > cost to itself for it's services (fire, police, medical, utilities) And > solves the Libertarian problem with municipal competition. The city need > not be a services provider for Internet on the wifi/fiber. It also > prevents the problem of businesses not providing for the "under services" > areas of the city. Again, it's already there, and it has been handed over to various companies to do what they wish with it. Perhaps you should be contacting your local city council or state representatives to promote a law that forces them to share the *existing* infrastructure before wasting money on yet another that will be abused in the same way. > > The city builds the roads, the businesses provide the taxis. Let's not bring the poor quality of Minnesota's roads into this. -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://www.poptix.net GPG public key 0x01938203 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tcwug-list/attachments/20050302/b86fd9a8/attachment.pgp