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Telecom giants fight broader broadband access

Some Florida cities are offering free or subsidized traditional and wireless broadband Internet access to their citizens. This is a good thing.

Yet bills backed by Gov. Bush would let cities and municipal-owned utilities provide wireless service, broadband over power lines or other technologies only if cable and telephone companies don't offer it first. Even if cable and telephone operators didn't offer a proposal, the cities could proceed only after doing a feasibility study and then asking residents to vote on the project at least once - twice if bonds would be used to finance it. That could take up to four years. The bills also would bar cities that are offering the service as of May 1 from adding customers.

Boynton Beach is in the middle of the fray.

The city of Boynton Beach is trying to get the downtown wireless Internet project it announced last month up and running before some lawmakers get in the way.

The Florida Legislature is considering three bills that would prohibit cities or municipal-owned utilities from offering broadband, wireless or the burgeoning technology of broadband over power lines, or BPL, without giving cable and telephone providers a crack at the job first.

The initiative, backed by Gov. Jeb Bush and the phone and cable companies, is already putting pressure on Doug Hutchinson, director of Boynton's Community Redevelopment Agency and organizer of the city's wireless plan.

"There's a lot of people throwing stones," Hutchinson said this week. "Quite frankly, we see this as something that's due to citizens, and that's why we're doing a pilot program."

Under the bills, if the phone or cable companies don't offer a proposal, the cities can go ahead with their own, but only after doing a feasibility study and asking residents to vote on the project at least once — twice if bonds would be used to finance it.

That would take anywhere from two to four years, one group says.

"No city would look at that process and say, 'Yeah! We're going to go down that road,' " said Barry Moline, executive director of the Florida Municipal Electric Association, which represents cities that own utilities.

The proposal also would bar cities that are offering the service as of May 1 from adding any more customers. Currently, 10 cities in Florida, including Tallahassee and Gainesville, have Internet services available for their residents.

Moline and Craig Conn, a lobbyist for the Florida League of Cities, say the bill handicaps smaller, rural cities and towns, as well as poorer sections of large cities, where the major telecommunications companies don't offer high-speed Internet service.

"If the communities were being adequately served in the first place, then there's no impetus by the government entities to go and do this," Conn said.
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"No one was coming to Boynton and falling all over themselves to make presentations to do this for the community," he said. "As soon as we go out, everybody and their brother is telling us how we should do it, or that we shouldn't do it."

This fight is nothing new - big phone and cable companies are fighting nationwide to keep localities from offering services that their citizens are clamoring for.

Legislative efforts to rein in cities aren't unique to the Sunshine State. Similar bills have been introduced in nine other state legislatures this year. Last year, the battle played out in Pennsylvania, where Philadelphia announced its intentions to become a wireless city.

After a long and bitter fight, a state law was passed effectively banning city wi-fi systems without industry approval. But the ban isn't effective until 2006. By then, Philadelphia plans to have much of its system in place.

The appeal to cities is that wi-fi provides residents with a quality-of-life amenity, creates "digital equity" among those residents and makes cities more attractive to business, said Jim Baller, senior principal with Baller Herbst Law Group, which works with cities to set up wi-fi systems.

He bristles at the thought of telecommunications giants such as Verizon or Sprint pushing legislation to limit city-run wi-fi systems.

"Who the heck are these large incumbents to tell them they can't do that, and get legislators to pass laws to handcuff them," Baller said.

More good old fashioned American capitalism at work.

The prospects for this bill are murky. A call to your legislators could earn you a break on your Internet bill in the future.

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