U.S. Representative Pete Sessions of Dallas has just introduced federal legislation to ban municipal broadband networks nationally. HR 2726 (ironically named “Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act of 2005″) would give the local phone company veto power over any municipal projects they don’t like. View the proposed legislation here. We all knew this was going to [...]

Adina Levin tells me that Texas House Bill 789 and Senate Bill 743 have died because the Senate and the House could not reconcile the two proposed bills. HB 789 was the telecommunications deregulation bill. Representative Phil King said the House and Senate could not come to a compromise on the statewide franchise for telecommunications [...]

Monticello, Florida is getting a citywide wireless broadband network after all. Charlie Colvin, the city’s Technical Services engineer, had been worried over the past few months that the Florida bill (which initially contained anti-municipal broadband provisions) would derail the city’s project. To view details of the RFP, which I posted on Muniwireless on 25 February [...]

Attention community wireless activists! Free Press and CUWIN have launched a CommunityInternet.us to provide you with information on how to set up an inexpensive wireless network in your community, how to fund your network, and the kinds of applications you can run on it. Here’s what the website says: Imagine a community networking system that [...]

The Boston Globe reports that a group of local residents and officials in Newton, Massachusetts have put together a plan that would save the city money and improve efficiency. They issued a report in which they recommended the creation of a municipal power company and the deployment of a citywide wireless broadband network, among others. [...]

Smart Mobs has an interesting post about a company called Skyhook Wireless, whose software allows for location-based tracking within citywide Wi-Fi networks. The company claims that their Wi-Fi Positioning System can track persons and objects (such as vehicles). According to Smart Mobs:Smart Mobs has an interesting post about a company called Skyhook Wireless, whose software [...]

If you think you’re the only one driven crazy by states trying to pass anti-municipal broadband laws and the US government’s telecommunications policy, read what Barry Diller says in Business 2.0 (March 2005, page 97 [subscription only]) in response to the question “Old media tends to be closed; the Web is open. Will the closed [...]

The Seattle Task Force on Telecommunications Innovation has just submitted a report to the city council that includes recommendations on speeding up the deployment of wired and wireless broadband access throughout the city. Among the recommendations are: Seattle should develop its own network for municipal purposes, and potentially to support the creation of an open [...]