802.11b news:

Orlando shut down its expensively operated free Wi-Fi service, and Esme Vos asked why: A number of commenters had responses. I noted that for the area in question, $1,800 per month seems incredibly high. One commenter who lives there says that they couldn’t get on the network across a dozen attempts. Others point out the compromises in location and signal. Another suggests that Orlando is about to launch a larger-scale network….

Thomas Bleha on our lagging broadband capabilities. In essence, we’re falling further behind. Our “broadband” – DSL or cable modems are much slow than those available in Japan and Korea. Their services are priced similarily, yet 20X+ faster.

In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only “basic” broadband, among the slowest, most expensive, and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration’s failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband.

We Madisonians lag the rest of the country as well. We have very little public wifi. Our airport remains without wifi, years after others have implemented these inexpensive services.

Ryan Kim:

The proposed marriage of telecom titans SBC and AT&T would eliminate competition on the wholesale market and could lead to increased prices for business and residential customers, corporate rivals and consumer groups argued in briefs filed on Friday.
In written testimony presented to the California Public Utility Commission, critics of the planned merger spelled out why the deal would be bad for ratepayers and what conditions should be imposed to limit its negative impacts.

SBC dominates Wisconsin’s telco business.

802.11b Networking News:

Two senators counter Rep. Sessions’s pro-incumbent bill with a pro-community networking bill: Pete Sessions, former SBC employee whose wife works at the company and who maintains direct ownership of large Bell stock and option holdings, introduced a brief and terribly broad bill that eliminates essentially all forms of municipal ownership and outsourcing of broadband. The bill he wrote is broad enough to shut down future airport Wi-Fi and other projects beloved by private forms.

Jesse Drucker and Li Yuan:

After years of waiting for a local phone company to roll out high-speed Internet access in this growing lakeside town of about 6,400 people, municipal information-technology director Tony Tull took matters into his own hands. The city last year invited a start-up telecom firm to hang wireless equipment from a water tower and connect the town.
The network now provides high-speed wireless Web access to most of Granbury, and the town is negotiating to buy some of the equipment. But Granbury’s foray into the wireless business has propelled it into a battle between cities and technology companies on one side and big telephone companies on the other.
SBC Communications Inc., the dominant phone company in Texas, and other big phone companies say that cities should not be allowed to subsidize high-speed Internet connections — even in areas where the companies don’t yet offer the service.

Greensboro’s airport joins many others in supporting WiFi. Madison, a community attempting to grow it’s tech business base, still lacks it…. I cannot think of one reasonable explanation for this.

Thomas Content:

SBC seeks to remove price regulation on basic local phone service in 77 exchanges across the state. The Wisconsin Citizens’ Utility Board, a customer advocacy group, has warned that the proposal could lead to price increases. SBC Wisconsin countered that the competitive landscape in the telecommunications industry means the regulation is no longer needed.

I don’t think we should remove any regulations from SBC. SBC requires local telephone service with a dsl line purchase, which essentially taxes VOIP service on dsl lines.

Glenn Fleishman:

The language of the “Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act of 2005” is so hilariously broad and ill-defined that it could kill all kinds of projects that the incumbent carriers this is meant to protect would support or are involved in deploying. It has such a broad grandfather clause that it could allow massive projects to continue if even a tiny portion of the service was in use.

Timothy Karr:

We have Big Media to thank for saving Americans from themselves. Just as the notion of affordable broadband for all was beginning to take hold in towns and cities across the country, the patriots at Verizon, Qwest, Comcast, Bell South and SBC Communications have created legislation that will stop the creeping socialism of broadband community Internet before it invades our homes.