Wired:

The privately funded $5 million dollar wireless network services a modest 700 square miles and seems to be the only show in town.

Doc Searls is correct that internet providers should be racing to offer internet services rather than trying to resuscitate dying products:

Phone and cable companies will never be Internet companies. Never. Nor will Newspapers or TV networks. But the latter don’t matter as much, because they don’t deliver Internet service to homes and businesses. Phone and cable companies do. The Net depends on them.

If Phone and cable companies took the trouble to provide unencumbered symmetrical service — same speeds up and down — and stood prepared to help individuals and businesses of every size use the Net in original ways that they see fit — to engage in Free Enterprise in the open marketplace the Net truly is — countless ways of making money on service to those customers would manifest themselves to the providing companies.

For example, I would gladly pay $100 per month for a block of six IP addresses, no port blockages, and 1Mb of symmetrical service to my home. I would also gladly pay more on a tiered basis for higher levels of traffic and higher grades of provisioned service. Also perhaps for hosting. Offsite data backup (a potentially huge business for which high upstream speeds are required). And perhaps much more. And I’m sure there are millions of small businesses out there that would be glad to do the same. But most of us are stuck with a choice between 1) a shitty asymmetrical service from a phone company that wishes it could still charge for time and distance; and 2) and a shitty asymmetrical service from a cable company that wishes it were still just in the TV channel delivery business.

Locally, TDS, to their credit does offer 4MB symmetrical dsl service (4mbps up and down).

OnPoint:

How does free wireless broadband access and phone service everywhere sound to you? Google has a plan for San Francisco — it’s got telecom and cable companies worried.

Sarah Howard makes the case.

Glenn Fleishman:

The seven vendors who built test hotzones for Grand Rapids, Mich., all showed they had the right stuff: The local paper reports that the city was very satisfied with the results of their vendor face-off. The next goal is figuring out how to set up a no-taxpayer-dollar network, as is the charter of all new municipal efforts. They’re looking at a public/private partnership with a plan ready to bid by December. The town is eyeing local and federal legislation that might restrict their ability to deploy.

UK citizens can now order 24mbps broadband for about $43/month. These speeds are 60 to 40 times as fast as those available in Madison, at similar prices.

Glenn Fleishman:

Muniwireless’s latest report is out on the scale and composition of the municipal wireless broadband market: This latest report states that $700 million will be spent on muniwireless over the next three years in the U.S., with $400 million spent in 2007 alone. Esme Vos, operator of Muniwireless.com and the organizer of the MuniWireless 2005 conference this week in San Francisco, writes that the growth of networks is irrespective of the size of the town or city. As is often overlooked, public safety operations remain the number one application for these networks, despite the focus on public-access broadband for free or fee.