Muni wireless: friends and foes

Submitted by acohill on Tue, 02/01/2005 - 14:21

eWeek has a good article that provides a useful snapshot of anti-muni telecom investment legislation that is that is making the rounds of legislatures (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana).

Some of these laws are so bad it makes your head hurt. Why on earth are state legislatures wading into what is clearly a local issue? It is exactly the same as if these legislators had decided to make public water projects illegal because "it keeps out private companies." Would our communities be better places to live if all water distribution was handled by private companies?

Actually, we know exactly how that turns out, since that is the way things were done in the late 19th and early 20th century. Prior to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, as one tawdry example, water to the city was provided by several private firms. To save money, they build the main water lines to the city directly over known earthquake faults, and provided no backup means of delivering water.

The earthquake is not what leveled San Francisco. It was the fires that occurred after the earthquake. With all the water lines broken, there was no water to put out fires, and so, over a period of a few days, the entire city burned completely to the ground.

I'm not trying to be hysterical here; my point is that a knee jerk "leave it to the private sector" is not always an appropriate response. Some things really should be done by government, and there is ample precedent to take services that were once offered solely by the private sector and move at least part of them into the public sector--like the transport layer of telecom (NOT the service layer).

Telecom is best done, in my opinion, as public/private partnerships. Are there other ways to do it? Of course there are. But an overreaching principle should be that state and Federal lawmakers should not be usurping the right of communities to decide their own future.