MuniWireless

City of Saint Paul, Minnesota and Ramsey County have issued an RFP and are seeking to enter into a public-private patnership with a proposer who represents one or more qualified network service providers or other qualified respondents to support efforts to obtain funding from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), or other funding sources, for the construction of a next-generation fiber optic, broadband infrastructure and to provide a complete implementation of a Community Fiber Network (CFN) and associated Community…

With the prospect of two new appointees to ARCEP (the French regulator) to replace Paul Champsaur and Gabrielle Gauthey, both of whom were instrumental in bringing more competition into the French telecommunications market, a war of words has erupted between ARCEP and the French operators, notably, France Telecom.

During the tenure of Paul Champsaur, who has been president of ARCEP for the last six years and is retiring at the end of the year, France has seen a significant increase in…

This has to be the quirkiest broadband policy ever. Venice, Italy will be giving free Internet access to newborn residents. The city is laying 76 kilometeres of fiber optic cable to deliver high-speed broadband service and installing 600 Wi-Fi hotspots that will provide free Wi-Fi service. And Venice did what every city should be doing: it asked young people where they wanted the hotspots to be located. This is so obvious but for some reason, many cities don’t bother asking.

Pasadena has shelved its plans for a citywide Wi-Fi network after EarthLink pulled out of its contractual obligations to build one for the city. EarthLink has done the same to a number of other cities (and surprisingly I have not heard one of them suing EarthLink for breach of contract).

According to this article, the problem was the business model: The ventures failed because the business model for such public-private partnerships just doesn’t work, said Morley Winograd, executive director of the…

Viviane Reding, the European commissioner in charge of telecommunications will do everything she can to enforce functional (or structural) separation in the EU. According to this article in the NYT, the EU’s efforts to increase competition in the member states, by clamping down on the power of local telecom incumbents, has resulted in a dramatic rise in broadband penetration and in a few countries like France, lower prices and higher speeds. Here are a few excerpts from the article:

“We have…

Twenty-two towns in rural Vermont plan to pool resources to launch a fiber-optic project that could be live by the end of 2009. The idea is to bring together a large enough collective to attractive the necessary funding.