Comments on: Voters approve citywide fiber project

Residents of Lafayette, La., vote to fund a citywide network to provide high-speed Net, telephony and TV.

governments and the people

A government is to assist /our tribe/, it it NOT to favour an
arbitrary business or minority over the people. Air is free, clean
water is free -- certainly cheap -- and communications is, or is
becoming, a necessity for normal productive life.

We should assist local governments in doing the /right/ thing,
and NOT some arbitrary, capitalistic fat-cat. Communication
flow is the requirement for good social justice, fair governments
and for people to educate themselves! It is the antithesis of (I
forgot the word) rule by a few.

Hopefully our /tribe/ is ethically encompassing more of the
world.

My philosophical perspective.

[kmguru]

Democracy in America works - Sometimes

Democracy in America works - sometimes. And we are trying to export the same to the world. What a mess we are going to create, if not already done so!

This is good news

This decision should keep the cablecos and telcos on their toes. Government shouldn't necessarily be competing with these two groups, but sometimes that's what it takes to win for the consumer.

[hamako]

They scent the danger!

I am neither American nor do I live in the States, but I am a frequent visitor and observer of what is going on in your country. In short, I find the Philadelphia idea great, because leaving it to the so called "market forces" would leave you country in the broadband doldrums for much longer, Why? Because the market forces do not work right in an oligopolistic market. The US is still one of the most expensive industrialized countries in this field, but compared to the paradise that we have got here in Japan; my country of residence, the service, private operators in the US offer is lousy. Here in Japan it started out the same as in the US, with the fat cat NTT, the "Ma Bell" of Japan, offering ADSL with 8MB for some 60 bucks. They looked at a rosy sky with plenty of Yen signs on it, until maverick Soong of Softbank founded Yahoo BB and offered the same service at 20 bucks - flat rate for the connection including IPS. I was one of the first to subscribe, which was difficult, because my name could not be written in Kanji (Chinese characters), but the service worked like a charm. Boy, you should have seen the market scramble. Yahoo BB has some 6 Million subscribers now, and thanks to "BB Phone", which offers country-wide connection at 6 Cents for 3 minutes, my phone bill shrunk from some 1000 bucks to under 100. Now the next revolution is on the horizon, Mr. Horie of the company Livedoor, an Internet "shop", will cover the whole central Tokyo until the end of September with WiFi at a flat rate of 5 bucks a month. This is how market forces should work! He wants to cover all Japan by the end of 2006. Imagine! We can all throw away our expensive cell phones and use a small hand held device that looks like a cell phone but is in reality a mini-computer that allows to log into the WiFi net and use SKYPE or some other VoIP provider and talk for free or very little money like on our cell phone. Such devices are already on the market now. And this is, what the oligopolistic telecommunication companies in the States are afraid of - loosing further ground in their core markets AND loosing the fat revenues from broadband. But it is good for the consumer, so if the market forces do not work, cities have all the right to do it better as a service to their citizens. Philadelphia and other cities - Go, Go, Go!