Portland’s muni wi-fi experiment has failed. [Add it to the list of failures]. According to Broadband Reports, taxpayers are going to be on the line for $60K:
Portland had high hopes of being one of those cities where citywide wireless networks might actually work but those hopes did not pan out. Earlier this summer, Wi-Fi provider MetroFi announced that the company could not afford to continue operating the network there. Attempts to sell it off failed and the network was shut down. That’s not the end of the story, though. In order to launch the network, MetroFi had to set up 600 (arguably unsightly) antennas throughout the city. The company had claimed that these antennas would be removed by the end of July but they remain up; MetroFi says that they still plan to follow through on removing them but city staff members report fears that the company is too strapped for cash to keep their end of this bargain. Estimates for removal are around $90,000; subtracting out a $30,000 bond for removal that was part of the MetroFi contract would still mean that Portland’s taxpayers could pay up to $60,000 to get those antennas taken down.
Web Pro News’ Jason Lee Miller seems to think he’s hoisted my colleague Bret Swanson, and The Progress & Freedom Foundation in general, on our own collective petard. Bret had responded to Tim Wu’s NYT op-ed by questioning Wu’s argument for developing “alternative supplies of bandwidth” to free us from the tyranny of the OPEC-like broadband cartel:
Unlike natural resources such as oil, which, while abundant, are at some point finite, bandwidth is potentially infinite. The miraculous microcosmic spectrum reuse capabilities of optical fiber and even wireless radiation improve at a rate far faster than any of our macrocosmic machines and minerals. It is far more efficient to move electrons than atoms, and yet more efficient to move photons. Left unfettered, these technologies will continue delivering bandwidth abundance.
Miller suggests that this response to Wu destroys arguments Bret and others at PFF have made against net neutrality regulation–a crusade led by Wu (who taught me Internet law, as it happens):
So what [Swanson is] saying is bandwidth scarcity is a notion invented by internet service providers and wireless providers to jack up prices and provide excuses for interfering with competing services on their networks. Nice. In a weird way, Swanson focuses so hard on disproving Wu’s analogy one way, he misses how the analogy is proved in another: a few organizations (government or not) controlling an important resource and forcing artificial scarcity in order to control the market for that resource is called a cartel.
Miller’s “Gotcha!” rests on the seemingly undeniable premise that broadband can’t be both abundant (as Bret argues)
and scarce (such that ISPs must management traffic on their networks, however non-neutral that may be). But in fact, this seeming contradiction is inherent in the very nature of the Internet–and the way Internet access is currently priced. Continue reading →
Tim Wu has an absurd piece in today’s New York Times comparing America’s broadband marketplace to OPEC. This really is quite outrageous, beginning with the fact that OPEC is a GOVERNMENT-RUN cartel. Wu also had a comment in the Washington Post today saying that he didn’t think broadband metering was an outrage. Well, that’s nice. I’m happy that we have Tim’s permission to experiment with new business models for financing broadband networks going forward!
This is indicative of what we can expect in the future once Net neutrality laws get on the books: A world of incessant “Mother may I?” permission-based forms of preemptive Internet regulation. Tim and his radical band of regulatory advocates over at Free Press will incessantly petition the FCC to review each and every business model decision and encourage the unelected bureaucrats at the agency to manage the Internet to their heart’s content.
And what does Tim offer for an alternative vision of the way the world should work since he doesn’t believe private markets can handle the job? Well, it’s back to the Big Government drawing board for more tax-spend-and-subsidize solutions! “Amsterdam and some cities in Utah have deployed their own fiber to carry bandwidth as a public utility,” he says. Yeah, that’s the promised land. After all, it’s working out soooooo well at the municipal level. Please.
The always provocative Mark Cuban has an interesting post on his blog today. He writes:
There is a dirty little secret in the cable industry. Its being kept secret not by the cable distributors, but by the big cable networks. End this practice and the United States goes from being 3rd world by international broadband standards, to top of the charts and exemplary. …
What is the dirty little secret ?
That your cable company still delivers basic cable networks in analog. Why is this such an important issue ? Because each of those cable networks takes up 6mhz. That translates into about 38mbs per second. Thats 38mbs PER NETWORK. …
If we want to truly change the course of broadband in this country, the solution is simple. Just as we had an analog shutdown date for over the air TV signals, we need the same resolution for analog delivered cable networks.
Obviously this would entail a government mandate to an industry, which we’re all biased against. If it really were so easy, I would expect to see the cable industry make the move on its own—if nothing else to respond to FIOS. But all that aside, my question to the cable-savvy folks I know read this blog is this: how true is Cuban’s claim? How much “spectrum in a tube” is really potentially available? How difficult would it be to make a digital transition in cable?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.