Town Loses Gigabit Connections After FCC Municipal Broadband Court Loss

English: Availability of 4 Mbps-Capable Broadb...

English: Availability of 4 Mbps-Capable Broadband Networks in the United States by County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Carl’s opinion piece is clearly in support of an industry that is very happy to sell equipment to these new customers because the incumbent telco business is not growing very fast, if at all. Allowing government to offer communications services in a particular market is not competing; it is taking it over because they can use bonds (low interest) and taxpayer money to fund these networks. State legislators have created these laws to prevent just these things from happening along with providing protection when half of these ventures go bankrupt.

Telcos are not clean on this because they are using crony capitalism to protect their monopoly or duopoly. If legislators enact such laws they should hold incumbents to the universal service agreement that AT&T adhered for decades.

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AP Takes Annoyingly Narrow View Of Muni-Fiber Focuses on debt-riddled Burlington Telecom as ‘cautionary tale’

Church Street, Burlington, Vermont

Image via Wikipedia

Dave Gram of the Associated Press takes a rather myopic look at municipal fiber operations, noting that the now 70 such operations now make up about 3% of the U.S. fiber to the home business — the remaining majority of course owned by Verizon’s FiOS service. Like any business, some of these operations succeed and some fail — some are based on sound financial logic and some aren’t. The AP decides to specifically focus on the failures of Burlington, Vermont‘s Burlington Telecom — whose $50 million in debt and looming Federal investigation the AP declares is a “cautionary tale” for cities interested in wiring themselves for broadband:

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