MuniWireless

Toronto Hydro, the public utility owned by the city of Toronto, has sold its telecom subsidiary, Toronto Hydro Telecom (THT), for $200 million to Cogeco Cable. Among the assets of THT are the municipal Wi-Fi network called OneZone and a 450-kilometer fiber optic network that connects 500 buldings in the city. The city plans to use part of the proceeds from the sale of the subsidiary to repair public housing units.

Read more about this story here (from the Toronto Star).

Businessweek has an article about ViaEuropa, a Swedish company that manages the fiber networks of sixty Swedish cities, based on the open access model. The chairman of ViaEuropa is Jonas Birgersson, a flamboyant (by Swedish standards) entrepreneur, who in the late 1990s, started several companies including Bredbandbolaget (an Internet service provider) which he sold to Norwegian telco, Telenor, for $730 million.

Birgersson wonders why the US does not move to the open access model, which creates more competition in the market…

Craven County, North Carolina (pop. 95,000) is deploying a wireless broadband network that will initially connect five schools in rural areas. It will also be used for the police and fire departments. Recently, the county installed a fiber optic network but it does not reach all communities. As a result, they will also use wireless to connect those towns without fiber. Craven County has hired Windchannel to deploy the network.

Deploying wireless broadband networks makes sense in a lot of rural…

The Wall Street Journal writes that cities are taking matters into their own hands to bring true broadband (i.e. FTTH) to their communities. Because the incumbents focus mostly on large cities, the smaller ones are getting left behind, so a few cities have built their own fiber networks.

Unfortunately, the incumbents have successfully lobbied some states to prohibit local governments from investing in fiber infrastructure. Why? Because the infrastructure will be open to all competitors and that is exactly what the…