The growth of municipal broadband networks

Fri Mar 25 19:04:43 UTC 2011

Paul,

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 2:31 PM, Paul Graydon <paul at paulgraydon.co.uk> wrote:
> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/133-us-cities-now-run-their-own-broadband-networks.ars
>
> Ars Technica has a short article up about the growth of municipal networks,
> but principally a nice little 'hey check out this website'
> (http://www.muninetworks.org/communitymap)
(snip)
> I'm curious how the feeling is on NANOG about shifting such provision
> towards municipal instead of corporations?  I guess a rough summary of the
> competing views I've heard so far are:
(snip)

With experience from Sweden, which has seen many varying incantations
of these sort of networks, I have this hopefully useful bit to share:
It's OK for tax-payer money to build layer-1 infrastructure if it
decides so, that non-tax payer money can sell services on, but fail
starts to happen the very moment they decide to go higher than that.

That's... all.

Regards,
Martin