Municipal Wireless: Philadelphia Freedom?

Philadelphia approved today its deal with EarthLink to turn Philadelphia into a giant Wi-Fi hotspot. Philadelphia is usually described as the first large city to head down this path, though many smaller cities have already done so. (MuniWireless.com has detailed information about many of these efforts.)

 

I recently gave a talk on Telecommunications Entry and Preemption at a conference on preemption at the American Enterprise Institute. The conference was organized by our Richard Epstein and Michael Greve of AEI. You can find the papers here (and my paper in particular here).

 

My paper addresses past efforts in choosing jurisdictional level for telecommunications entry—cable franchising, the Pole Attachments Act of 1978 and satellite television—and also looks at municipal wireless broadband and video franchising for IPTV (television over fiber from new video entrants such as AT&T and Verizon).

 

I also have slides and AEI has a webcast here (click on the video link in the upper-right corner). (The webcast audio is perfect but the video reveals the dangers of a peripatetic speaker.) I will do a second draft of the paper over the next month, so if you have comments here or via email, please let me know.

 

Comments

[Kimball Corson]

What are the privacy and Fourth Amendment issues here? How does the technology work in these regards? Does any use of the airways, as opposed to copper ground lines, destroy our rights, even if there is frequency blocking on other pickup means? Technologically, we seem to be out running ourselves.

[JohnLopresti]

It is a little puzzling how ATT-SBC could see the video light now, so soon after buying Pacific Telesis and ending their video over copperwire research. Ah: the fiber bandwidth. I wonder how the now largest telco would regard, for example, rolling out a broadband wireless technology, simply for the purpose of competing in the current market which is based on that technology, to debilitate the competition. Eight years of mitigatory rulings have diluted the potential which lay within the telecom act of 1996. It seems to me, as others have observed, there was a historical paradigm with franchises negotiated with cable entities. I guess all this is to say, your paper covers broadband wireless as a new technology, but market conditions are fairly incumbent dominated at present. Reed Hundt had a recent comment about this I found interesting, that there was a neutral network in place regulatorily, about the time his term ended [/end paraphrase]. Then this reconsolidation happened. I preserve hope, though. Municipal franchise; well, lets keep the term and renewal clauses very escapable, or we will find ourselves locking innovation out. It is great to provide internet universally, though. And your paper appropriately asks the question: ?At what thruput? The answer, at least according to the courts ruling for telcos recently has been 'minimal'; i.e., less than universal, or, as you allude, on an uneven playingfield. There is a lot going on underneath the hood of this new technology vehicle, and some of it is the same old politics and monolithic market conditions.

[Gary]

I am not sure the March 2006 Virginia legislation cited in your article doew what the Governor claims it does.

You can find the Virginia legislation at http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?061+ful+CHAP0073