Minnesota

The city of Minneapolis negotiated a deal with the wireless provider US Internet last year to provide a citywide wireless system. As part of that deal, the city is receiving about a half a million dollars a year for ten years. The funds will be used to support community portals for neighborhoods in the city. Planning for those portals is taking place right now. It is a great idea, but the city left a lot of money on the table.

Over the next thirty years, the residents and businesses of Minneapolis (Minneapolis only, not St. Paul) will spend 8.4 billion dollars ($8,403,268,500.00) on telecom services, and so there is plenty of money to build not just wireless but the world's best, full integrated fiber and wireless system, to every home and business in the city. Over thirty years, such a city-managed multi-service open network, designed with end to end automated Layer 3 provisioning, could put nearly 600 million dollars in city coffers ($594,041,030.00). That's a bit more than the projected $11 million from wireless.

The City Council of St. Paul, Minnesota has approved a study to consider the feasibility of citywide wireless broadband.

The three month study will look for "the common good" that might be gained from community-managed telecom infrastructure. This is, as far as I know, the first time the common good has been explicity acknowledged in this kind of study. It has been implicitly part of many other community telecom projects, but it's about time we started this particular conversation in more earnest.

What has dominated the discussion so far has been the "unfairness" of community telecom projects, all viewed through the lens of monopoly telecom providers. Using that yardstick, community water systems are "unfair" because someone might want to build their own, private water system. Public sanitation would be "unfair" because someone might want to get into the sewer business. Our legislators and government officials need to start thinking more clearly about these issues.