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February 14, 2006

CTIA Not Opposed to Municipal Broadband

By Glenn Fleishman

The National Journal reports the CTIA says it’s not opposed to competition from municipal broadband: Many of its members offer Wi-Fi service and Cingular apparently bid on the San Francisco service, which I’m embarassed to have missed. (Cingular is majority owned by AT&T, minority owned by BellSouth. AT&T has led significant lobbying efforts in Texas against municipally owned or franchised broadband, but Verizon and Comcast have been loudest elsewhere.)

Update: A colleague wrote in to note that Cingular’s “bid” in San Francisco was a response to the initial RFI/P (request for information/proposal) in which they noted the prevalence of 3G service. I tried to look up their response and it’s not in the archives at the Tech Connect site that houses SF’s project.

Further Update: Another colleague wrote to tell me that Cingular’s “bid” was part of the SBC response to the RFI which is not found in the alphabetical proposal listings, but rather in the Comments download, which was to be reserved for non-proposal input. On reviewing that submission, it’s clear that SBC answered with a great degree of detail and no real SF specificity except to state that 73 FreedomLink hotspots are in SF. They talk at length about SBC’s fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) and fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) initiatives without noting how many SF residences might benefit. They mention 3G service being ubiquitous without discussing monthly costs or interior access (poor). They suggest DSL service up to 6 Mbps is available, but don’t have any information on which fast speeds are available to which percentage of residents. Hardly a bid for Wi-Fi service.

Posted by Glennf at February 14, 2006 3:33 PM

Categories: Municipal

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