Municipalities Jump on Broadbandwagon

PHILADELPHIA HAS ANNOUNCED a plan to build the biggest municipal wireless Internet system in the nation. The announcement is the latest in plans by a growing number of cities to treat high-speed web access as a basic municipal service like water, electricity, and trash collection.

"Increasingly, city officials view broadband in the twenty-first century the same way they viewed electricity 100 years ago and telephone service 50 years ago," Ben Scott told the Washington Post. Scott, who is policy director of Free Press, a nonprofit group that favors the development of municipal wireless, added that "cities see this as a way to spur economic growth: on the one hand to put tools in the hands of the underprivileged and give them a leg up, and on the other to provide incentives to small businesses to locate in these cities and to expand their operations."

Not everyone is cheered by the news. Such projects as the 135-square-mile network announced by Philadelphia - which is to be funded, built, and managed by Atlanta-based EarthLink Inc. - will offer low-income residents service for as little as about $10 a month and could threaten the profits of telephone and cable companies. These are waging battle on public relations, legal, and legislative fronts to argue that public money should not support competition with private firms. Indeed, EarthLink is paying the Philadelphia network's estimated $10 to $15 million cost itself in order to preempt such concerns.

Dianah Neff, the city's chief information officer and chairman of the nonprofit group Wireless Philadelphia, scoffed at the telcos' tales of woe, telling the Washington Post that those providers say that 90 percent of the city is already covered, "But if it's at a fee that people can't afford...having it there hasn't helped you overcome your digital divide," she said.

Despite the debate, hundreds of municipalities around the country are experimenting with broadband, with dozens undertaking full-scale networks like Philadelphia's. In the Washington, D.C., region, the suburb of Manassas, Va., established the first U.S. city-wide commercial deployment of broadband-over-powerline (BPL), which delivers broadband over existing power lines. Both the White House and the FCC have spotlighted BPL as an important way to get broadband access to underserved portions of the nation. And nearby Alexandria has established a year-long project for wireless Internet access in a seven-block area at a price sure to alarm the telcos - it's free.