SubscribeApparently not being sufficiently warned off by Time Warner’s earlier statements that municipal broadband would be expensive and a pain for the community of Wilson to administer, they found some friendly legislators in state government and helped push a bill that would effectively hamper, if not terminate the Wilson community’s broadband initiative. In a well orchestrated lobbying effort, cable industry officials began claiming that taxpayer funds were being used to leverage the public sector’s broadband product at the expense of “the free market.” But as Wilson city officials explained, their Greenlight project is firewalled from using public tax revenue. The project was paid for by a bond offering and is expected to be self-sustaining through ongoing customer receipts.
Cable industry officials continued to attack municipal broadband projects as failures waiting to happen, pointing to earlier projects that often relied on wireless networks, wi-fi, or older technology. Many cities with these projects have been unable to scale them to grow with expected demand, or have had difficulty expanding their network into other areas of the community. Others outsourced them to be administered by private providers in return for public considerations, such as free/discounted access in certain areas.
Fiber optic broadband projects are new to most municipal broadband projects, and come as a result of a lack of comparable service from private providers unwilling to meet the needs of communities. So having not succeeded in dissuading municipal competition, they now seek to effectively kill it with handcrafted legislation passed into friendly hands.
WRAL continues its in-depth coverage on the challenges Wilson, NC faces in building their municipal fiber network. Time Warner officials, among others, make some unproven accusations and statements in this report that go unchallenged, but overall it provides a balanced look at the growing controversy.
Other stories of interest:
- WRAL Raleigh: Google Weighed In On Wilson Municipal Broadband Issue in 2007
- WRAL Raleigh – With Municipal Competition Comes Time Warner Deals and Offers
- Wilson, North Carolina Builds Its Own Municipal Fiber Optic System When Others Didn’t Step Up
- Big Cable Tries to Squash Municipal Competition: Round One
- Interesting Things in Wilson, North Carolina
Maybe Cable should get their butts in gear and actually provide good service to rural areas. I wish more towns would do this and make cable compete, with no competition there is no incentive to do make improvements.
what people forget is the hardware that has to go into the ground. In rural areas that makes it harder to justify running new fiber/cable thru for the few subscribers they might get.
My parents only have DSL 14 miles in the country North of Durham NC) b/c Verizon had to upgrade the phone switch out near them and had to get the permission of the people whose land it was on. The people were smart and said only allowed Verizon to upgrade the switch if they also made it a DSL node and offered services to those around the area.
This is great for people in the Wilson fiber footprint but anybody just outside the footprint will be big losers. It is the profits telephone and cable companies make in the cities that pays for the telephones and cable in the rural areas. The telephone company Embarq is required to provide service to everyone in their service area now they have lost much of the revenue in Wilson. Projects like this says we will take the profitable parts and you get to keep the unprofitable parts. Who picks up these rural unprofitable customers when Embarq shuts down? Since Wilson owns the fiber how do you tax yourself? Does Embarq get a tax break in town now that the city has grabbed many of their customers. How was the fiber financed was everybody in Wilson forced to pay for it? A private company has to find the money in the open market and has no guarantee enough subscribers will buy the service to make a profit. Does Wilson have this problem if they don’t get enough subscribers they just get the money somewhere else. If they had given the same amount of money to a private company their would have been howls of protest and lawsuits.