SubscribeOver the next several days, StoptheCap! will be rolling out an interesting story about what happens when a local community decides it needs more than what corporate-owned cable and telephone behemoths are willing to give. It’s an important story for any community pondering how to create new jobs in a high tech economy, provide state of the art broadband service to small businesses, colleges, and residents, and stop companies from rationing broadband services to customers at top dollar pricing with limits, caps, and overlimit fees. It’s also a story about what lengths those companies will go to stop that from ever happening.
But first, an introduction to Wilson, North Carolina.
Monroe County should look into this. If Time Warner, Frontier, or even Verizon can’t provide fast, cap free fiber optic then our government should step in. I have no doubt large corporations would try and stop it.
I’m also in favor of heavy government regulation of cable and internet providers. It is obvious they are only interested in very high profits for their shareholders.
Seems like a better use of money than the Ren Square theater.
A few years ago Bill Moyers had a feature about how Philadelphia was developing a municipal internet service. It worried the industry enough to strongarm the Pennsylvania politicians into writing legislation that would ban such a thing anywhere it wasn’t already in place. I don’t recall whether it actually became law in PA or not , but if we don’t keep up the pressure too many politicians will be only too willing to be bought.
While watching the video, I was struck by how similar Wilson is to the Rochester, NY area. We also have historic buildings, valuable waterways (including a river, waterfalls, and a large bay connected to a lake big enough to drown Connecticut), several big high-tech companies, and strong links to other nearby major cities. Wilson doesn’t, however, have over a million residents and several colleges and universities within its metro area. Given Rochester’s density and relatively tech-savvy population, why are we stuck with such crappy internet service? If Wilson can do it, why can’t we? I say we tell the city… Read more »
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14934
My region in California has a local ISP called sonic.net, Sonic rolled out city wide free high speed wi-fi. It was great, the city people were so happy with the service. People had the power of the internet.
AT&T and Comcast threaten to shut down its network to the city’s large business if Sonic.net did not shut down its free wi-fi, needless to say the free city wide wi-fi was removed.
Sad to see small ISP’s shut out by the large ones.
This was a very good video. Kudos to Wilson, NC. I am interested in moving from Greensboro and am glad this popped up on my radar screen. Thanks for sharing.
I am looking forward to following this story.
I would like to know how they got started on this plan; If they can do it what would a city like ours have to do to get something like that started. . . I would love to start something like that and i am 100% serious, I am going to email them and ask.
If I had to guess… the leaders came up with the brilliant idea that if they provided better representation to their constituents, and if the town made some smart investments in technology, businesses would begin flocking to their town, and these leaders, along with the people that make up the town, would benefit and prosper. How rare and awesome an idea!!!
Craig… I wouldn’t hold my breath on this sort of thing being replicated elsewhere. Unless people in your town are already pushing for this sort of thing… you’re gonna be waiting a long while.
wow. This city is awesome. I wish all other cities follow what Wilson did.
There were argument about whether internet is an utility or not, and in the case of Wilson, they make it a public utility. Can someone tell me if they are based on usage (aka cap) like other utilities? I’m 99% sure it’s uncapped though.
And since this is a city owned company, can they give out the detail of cost/revenue details? This will show a more concrete proof of how much profit margin the rest of the cables company have been getting from Americans.
The little town that roared perhaps because they use their public money for projects for their people and are not saddled with TW owning them. A question that needs to be asked is why they need to charge $1.00. Is rent on the big pipes going up or is it just a nice round number to work with. Good luck finding that out. Around here we waste 100’s of million of dollars on things that people neither asked for and do not want or support, they never have except the few the proud the local politicians and most will not… Read more »