MuniWireless

There was a familiar ring to the report, A Dynamic Perspective on Government Broadband Initiatives, issued this week by the Reason Foundation. Many of the anti-muni arguments in it echoed those in the Heartland Institute’s February 2005 report, Why Muni Wi-Fi is a False Hope.¬¨‚ĆThere was a familiar ring to the report, A Dynamic Perspective on Government Broadband Initiatives, issued this week by the Reason Foundation. Many of the anti-muni arguments in it echoed those in the Heartland Institute’s February 2005 report, Why Muni Wi-Fi is a False Hope.¬¨‚Ć

The tangle of experts and interests at the two organizations provides a curious breadcrumb trail.

Steven Titch, the Reason Foundation’s telecom policy analyst and one of the contacts on the press release¬¨‚Ćfor its¬¨‚Ćreport, was the author of Why Muni Wi-Fi is a False Hope, which¬¨‚Ćwas underwritten by the New Millennium Research Council, an astroturf research organization that eWEEK.com exposed as being owned and sponsored by the Washington lobbying firm, Issue Dynamics Inc.¬¨‚Ćwhich counted¬¨‚ĆAmeritech, Bell South, Comcast, Pacific Bell, Qwest, SBC Communications, Sprint, U.S. West, Verizon and Verizon Wireless among its clients.

The Utah Daily-Herald reported that, although the Reason Foundation¬¨‚Ćclaims no affiliation with the telecoms,¬¨‚Ƭ¨‚Ćit did receive a $100,000 grant from AT&T last year.¬¨‚Ƭ¨‚ĆHowever, as one of the providers on the UTOPIA network, AT&T is working as a private partner with¬¨‚Ćthe 14 municipalities in Utah’s collaborative project.

Back in October, BroadbandReports.Com reported:

“Outfits such as the Reason Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Foundation are free-market think tanks that proudly proclaim that eliminating government oversight in the broadband sector will result in broadband utopia. Their editorials and position papers insist they are concerned with “optimizing broadband deployment’ in this country. However the real agenda, as always, is maximizing revenue for themselves and their constituents by eliminating all regulation, creating an utterly toothless regulatory authority, and letting the nation’s largest corporations run wild.”

The Reason Foundation report, like the Heartland Institute report before it, challenges the idea of municipalities getting into the business of providing wireless broadband as anti-competitive. However, as Glenn Fleishman at Wi-Fi Networking News notes:

“No large city since Philadelphia’s announcement has chosen a plan that would put the brunt of expense, risk, and operation on itself…So the universe of new (and especially wireless) projects in the U.S. that seem to fit the criteria established by writer Jerry Ellig seems to be rather small. I don’t think government is as limiting or incompetent as libertarians believe by philosophy or many believe by real-world experience. But I also tend to agree that in a fast-moving field, there has to be a very particular need for any medium-to-large city to find the funds and build the network in such a fashion that the network meets its financial goals and remains relevant and up to date.”

–Carol Ellison

Related posts:

1. iProvo Under Attack
2. Telco-tainted anti-municipal broadband report released
3. False hopes and municipal wireless