> The city here has been proposing a free city-wide internet service for
> years. I'm not holding my breath.
It is a concept that has failed miserably everywhere it has been
tried. And I've personally been involved in the deployment of a couple
of them.
Municipal-provided utilities (paid, not free) are slightly better, but
have had a long-term negative effect on the communities too. I'll use
Cedar Falls, Iowa as a case in point. CFU (Cedar Falls Utilities,
which is the municipal-operated utility company) got into the
telecommunications game and for a while provided a superior product to
what CTL was providing. They managed to cherry-pick the most
profitable customers which made CTL lose money in the city. Then, CFU
managed to control the permitting process which kept out the
competition or greatly increased the difficulty to do business there.
Cedar Falls had to self-protect their network by denying the customers
choice. Nobody else could deploy fiber to any business customer
without first dealing with multi-year delays. They would only allow
fiber construction if it was part of a through project, not one aimed
at any specific customer. At first everybody cheered because CTL (the
most hated telecom in the state) was being beat upon by CFU. Then
people realized that CFU made CTL look like pikers when it came to
nastiness. All was well for the first few years, but then it became
apparent that businesses were starting to locate OUTSIDE the city
limits or in Waterloo BECAUSE of CFU. Fortunately, those multi-year
delays (and various lawsuits) finally meant that enough fiber network
had been deployed in the city by other companies to be somewhat
usable, but the damage has been done and it has set the area back
quite tremendously.
> BTW: The DSL service from Copper.net is cheaper than the dialup service
> from Earthlink. But, there's a serious problem: I'm not close enough to an
> optical fibre node to be able to use DSL.
The old adage "location, location, location" has never been more true.
Fortunately, there are options...
AG Schnozz
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