I'm having trouble seeing a practical way forward:
1. small NC municipality had a town manager with the foresight to deploy municipal wifi and plan for fiber during that interim period when FCC declared it legal. Good service (symmetric, price adjusted for the actual signal you get), good support
2. that FCC ruling was overturned in the courts
3. municipality spun off the wifi into a little company. Still good service, good support
4. fiber got rolled out
5. municipality leased it to some company that somehow has worse ratings than comcast. That company took also took over operations of the little wifi company
So now what? Even if technologists in NC band together to overturn that state law, the municipality still has a 20-year lease with that company.
municipal "wifi" / last-mile point to multipoint wireless service in unlicensed bands is a technological dead end, and can't match the capacity of a wireline based DOCSIS3 cable operator, let alone a GPON or active ethernet based fiber plant.
the only thing that municipal run wireless services do is serve to sour people on the concept of municipal run network infrastructure, because almost inevitably they're flakier, slower, and less reliable than the existing terrestrial based for profit ISPs in the area.
show me a single municipal run wireless operator today that can match the speeds of a LTE/3gpp based MU-MIMO last mile with carrier aggregation.
> So now what? Even if technologists in NC band together to overturn that state law, the municipality still has a 20-year lease with that company.
A company wouldn't let a little thing like contract law stop them from doing what they want, as they did when they overturned the FCC the rule of law is made to be broken.
We could just change the law to make comcast and all isps owned by the government because the the law says so and comcast could do nothing about it. I know its not smart to advocate that we just change the law to steal stuff from others but this is what corporations, do they take wifi paid for by the public and change the law so that its owned by them, why don't we just do this to corporations?
1. small NC municipality had a town manager with the foresight to deploy municipal wifi and plan for fiber during that interim period when FCC declared it legal. Good service (symmetric, price adjusted for the actual signal you get), good support
2. that FCC ruling was overturned in the courts
3. municipality spun off the wifi into a little company. Still good service, good support
4. fiber got rolled out
5. municipality leased it to some company that somehow has worse ratings than comcast. That company took also took over operations of the little wifi company
So now what? Even if technologists in NC band together to overturn that state law, the municipality still has a 20-year lease with that company.