Colorado interested in a "Qwest Monopoly Protection Act"

Submitted by acohill on Tue, 05/03/2005 - 09:18.

Dave Hughes, one of the true pioneers of community broadband, has a hard-hitting article about the "Qwest Monopoly Protection Act" that is close to being passed in Colorado. Like a similar and very bad Pennsylvania law, it would bar communities from investing in their own future. The most sobering part of the article is Hughes' point that some communities in Nepal have better broadband services than some rural communities in Colorado. I know Hughes is right about that because I saw Dave make a phone call to Nepal last year in Austin, using a cheap laptop, the conference center WiFi service, and Voice over IP. We got a guy out of bed in Nepal to answer the phone at 4 in them morning, but the point is the service works. The Nepal system was designed and installed by Dave himself, using inexpensive off the shelf equipment.

I guess Colorado lawmakers think their state slogan for economic development should be, "Colorado--almost as good as Nepal."

Colorado steps on community rights

Submitted by acohill on Mon, 02/14/2005 - 15:42.

Add Colorado to a growing list of states that have bills pending in the legislature that would take the right to determine their own future away from communities.

Like other states (are you starting to see a pattern here?), the Colorado bill would require communities that want to invest in broadband to ask the private sector first. That permission is not likely to be forthcoming, and according to the report, even if the private sector declines to offer broadband service, the community is still stuck.

There are some issues here that are worth reviewing.

First, the article talks about (some) broadband initiatives as a way to raise revenue. Some communities are seeing it this way, but they are crazy. It makes no sense at all to invest in public infrastructure as a hidden tax scheme. Why on earth would you spend money that way when using it as a tax collection mechanism makes the community less competitive from an economic development perspective? This is an education problem--community leaders need help understanding telecom is not a way to balance the local budget, but a way to create jobs and create an economic development engine.

Second, it is important to keep our eye on the ball. Hong Kong just announced it is rolling out Gigabit Ethernet to more than a million homes, beginning later this year. Meanwhile, I just got a flyer from Verizon touting DSL. The flyer explains how fast their 1.5 megabit service is because it actually permits 384 kilobit upload speeds. That's right...here is Verizon's math:

384,000 bits/second = 1.5 million bits/second

Huh? Meanwhile, in places like South Korea and Hong Kong, they are getting broadband service hundreds of times faster than we are getting here while our own legislators are trying as hard as they can to hold their own citizens and businesses back.