I talked earlier with Ed Schwartz, the Wireless Philadelphia committee member who, along with city IT chief Dianah Neff, led the fight to save the city's plan from legislative extinction. Ed's read on the situation is that "the Philadelphia exception" will make it much more difficult for Verizon and other private telecoms to veto municipal initiatives throughout the state. After all, how do you tell Pittsburgh or Reading that you won't permit them to do what Philadelphia is doing?
Besides, the new legislation exempts municipal systems that are already up and running by January 1, 2006... so its immediate impact could be to make 2005 a very good year for wi-fi system architects and equipment vendors throughout Pennsylvania.
Two other results seem certain: First, Philadelphia's wi-fi system is going to happen; and second, legislation like Pennsylvania's will soon be moving through committee in dozens of state legislatures, including Ohio's.
Chris' piece, echoing a recent One Cleveland blog entry by Lev Gonick, says that community broadband in northeast Ohio may be sheltered from these attacks by One Cleveland's unique public/nonprofit partnership. Lev writes:
This brings me to the Philadelphia story. When the AP wire service first ran the story on that City's ambitious effort, David Caruso from AP contacted me. I outlined that OneCleveland, in contrast to a city-centered strategy like Philadelphia, was actually a community network. OneCleveland has subscribers, including a number of cities. This is only one of the major differences. In OneCleveland, many subscribers have, or are thinking about, enabling free wireless services to enable important public policy priorities within the unregulated spectrum known to support WiFi. This is very different than going into business to develop a revenue model for public wireless services.It's hard to say how true this might be. Certainly One Cleveland has done a brilliant job of putting NEO "ahead of the curve", as Lev's title says,in deploying very big bandwidth for government and nonprofit users. (And let me stress that Lev deserves huge credit for conceiving and pulling this off.) It's also true that, to the extent One Cleveland customers including cities, schools and libraries use that bandwidth as backhaul for free wi-fi service to their constituents or neighbors -- as Case now does for its guests -- a law like Pennsylvania's wouldn't affect them.
But the issue gets more difficult when we start thinking about systems to get robust broadband (like 5 to 10 mbs standard 802.11(b) service, or the 50 mbs access now available on the Case campus) to lots of city households and small businesses on an affordable, sustainable basis. Under current law, for example, there's nothing stopping Cleveland Public Power from laying out a fiber network through its substations (actually, it already has one) and then providing wireless broadband service to the surrounding neighborhoods very cheaply. Ditto for the Cleveland Public Schools, or the library system. But such a system, including access to the Internet through One Cleveland or another carrier, might be too expensive to simply offer for free -- there might have to be either a small regular user charge or a significant subsidy from some other public funding pot. If there's a charge and the sponsor is a public entity, a Pennsylvania-style law would give a veto to SBC, whether the public entity gets its bandwidth from One Cleveland or elsewhere.
I think we might not be very far from considering this kind of option -- maybe even in the context of City elections next year. And certainly a role for City government in supporting neighborhood wi-fi initiatives will be on the table very soon. So the spread of Pennsylvania HB30-style legislation needs to be watched carefully by Clevelanders who don't want our city to be prevented from leapfrogging the digital divide, and moving aggressively -- and together -- into the new economy.