A new bill came to my attention following the latest This Week in Tech podcast. It seems that the replacement for the Telecommunications Act of 1996 has been christened the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act. That link is to a .pdf summary, and John Dvorak also has some discussion on his blog. This bill is co-sponsored by John McCain, and this is the basis of some of my confusion, because McCain is also a sponsor of the Community Broadband Act of 2005.
From the latter bill:
No State statute, regulation, or other State legal requirement may prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting any public provider from providing, to any person or any public or private entity, advanced telecommunications capability or any service that utilizes the advanced telecommunications capability provided by such provider.
This bit seems to run counter to a section of the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act, as quoted here from the summary of the bill as linked:
A state or local government seeking to provide a communications service must give notice of and permit non-government entities to bid to provide such service preference is to be given to non-government entities. Existing government owned network offerings are grandfathered.
While the two clauses do not directly contradict one another, they seem to be in a somewhat different spirit. The former makes it clear that governments (most likely at the state level) will not prohibit municipalities from building their own communications infrastructure. The latter, while fine in concept, would likely open up an opportunity for commercial organizations to tie up community efforts in court battles. Hopefully the full text of the bill (I have not been able to find it as of yet) will address what constitutes a community having done their due diligence in giving commercial firms a right of first refusal.
In principal I do believe commercial organizations are better suited to provide communications services, and using tax dollars to fund the build-out of infrastructure is a gray area. However, with commercial companies such as the incumbent telcos and cable television providers picking and choosing the neighborhoods in which to build out advanced services, you cant help but encourage cities to build out their own offerings such as municipal Wi-Fi. However, if cities were to open up their rights of way, franchises and zoning in order to facilitate a more competitive last mile infrastructure build, they would make it easier for competing low-cost commercial firms to offer services in underserved areas. There is a certain degree to which the municipalities themselves create the problem they then must then try to solve.
Theres always the hope that Wi-Max will make this entire discussion irrelevant.
