Muni, Schmuni, Part 1

Most media have it wrong. Municipal wireless networks across the United States didn't stumble in 2007 - high-profile cities where deals fell apart, such as Chicago, San Francisco and Houston, were not going to finance, own or operate their respective networks. These weren't municipal networks at all. The business model that faltered in 2007 was the "private corporate franchise" model based on the deal that Philadelphia and EarthLink agreed to in 2006. It was, in fact, the free market that failed last year - not governments in their traditional role as the builders and maintainers of critical infrastructure.

OK, so much for misconceptions on what has happened to date. We're really swimming upstream when the popular press continually misrepresents the realities of an admittedly complex and politically-loaded issue.

Sascha goes on to suggest that the definition of a topic matters. A more accurate definition of the industry we're in and the networks that are being built is more descriptive too.

Jon Peha, associate director of the Center for Wireless and Broadband Networking at Carnegie Mellon University, addresses these problems in his work. "Unfortunately some define municipal networks as a network that serves a city, and some define it as the city government's network, and people argue about exactly what the latter means," Peha said. "I often write about models for a 'wireless metropolitan-area network' (WiMAN), because it is a broader term that carries no ambiguous baggage."

I like that, and I feel it approximates the terms I use on this site - "Metropolitan Broadband" and "MetroNets."

Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless.com, lays out a spectrum of ways municipalities can be involved as an anchor tenant; as a subscriber, leasing out or donating city-owned property on which wireless nodes can be mounted, or leasing out or donating backhaul (e.g., fiber access); as an investor or guarantor of a loan; [and] as the owner of the network (e.g., Corpus Christi, Texas, and Burbank, Calif.). At its heart, there's a battle brewing between "free-marketeers" who favor the government taking a hands-off approach to broadband networking, and those in favor of government involvement to help direct efforts at the national, state and local levels.

I ran smack into this debate when I espoused the benefits of public ownership and contrasted those with the short-comings of the Anchor Tenancy model, which is currently the most popular candidate to replace the now-discredited Corporate Franchise model based on EarthLink's design of 2005. My post drew a comment from free-marketeer Hal Hayden, who challenged my conclusions and promoted private sector solutions over those of the public sector. Hal's comment made me realize that we can all too easily slip into a false debate of whether A is better than B, when in fact, there are times when A is better, and when B is better. In a sense, we're both right.

There's no winning such an argument, not only because its subjective, determined by one's outlook on the world, but also because it's case-specific, determined by the circumstances at hand. The circumstances will determine whether it makes sense for a city to go with an attractive Anchor Tenant offer or to forge ahead to own the network themselves. In practice, the choice between buying a service from a private vendor and buying an infrastructure to own will be decided by city officials on a case-by-case basis. My point about city ownership is that its a valid alternative to anchor tenancy, and should be considered when no good offers are available to buy service as an anchor tenant.

Sascha does well to shine the light on how the public and private sectors can intersect to the benefit of all, when he highlights the birth of the Internet and the World Wide Web. He also highlights how fear can slam the brakes on such positive experimentation and collaboration.

When the NSFNET was privatized beginning in 1995, a huge boom ensued whereby numerous corporations built broadband infrastructure. Unfortunately when the free-market technological bubble burst in 2000, governments at all levels refused to get involved in broadband networking. Today, after more than a half-decade of market failure, as a growing number of other countries continue to pull ahead of the United States - deploying far better and more accessible broadband infrastructure - municipalities have an opportunity to turn things around. Joshua King, senior network administrator for the Chambana.net community Web hosting project, puts it this way: "A 'municipal' network is a network whose ownership and operation is under the control of a city and is run for the common good of the citizens of that city rather than for profit."

Like many, King is not against public-private partnerships, but he supports the notion that the core intent of these networks must be the public good and not corporate profits. "This does not mean that the network cannot be utilized by local businesses to turn a profit, nor does it mean that third-party companies can't be contracted to deploy or maintain a network," King said. "But that the network itself provides services in a neutral fashion to all citizens within the network's coverage area (and the city has some obligation to expand that coverage area to all citizens)."

In fact, we're all going to call it as we see it, I believe. While I gravitate to "metropolitan broadband" or "metronets" for short, Sascha veers toward "community broadband" or "community wireless," because that favors his worldview. And he's right, to a degree. A community has to be involved in any effort that has community-wide impact, and a network of this type has far-ranging impacts on a community, not the least of which has to do with cost-recovery, which gets entirely too much press in my opinion. And I'm not alone.

Dailey said municipalities are often overly focused on bottom-line accounting rather than the best interests of local residents. "Why should we predetermine what the right tool is for a network before we have defined who the network is for, where it is, and why it's needed?" she said. "Many of my colleagues want to cling to the term 'wireless' because it seems at the moment to represent something new, something that is in opposition to all of the problems that we have with legacy networks controlled by incumbents. But by emphasizing the technology, I think we fall into the same trap that created the legacy mess. We need to jettison the techno-centric, vendor-driven model of buying and selling networks."

What differentiates Guifi.net, which won Spain's 2007 National Telecommunications Award, from many other Spanish wireless endeavors is that it has found a way to coexist with private companies and municipalities. "The municipal projects don't have to be linked to a single contractor operator and should be able to connect to any other network in the neighborhood, and therefore, be 'open' in the sense of 'open network,'" Roca said. "The only solution for doing so is by considering the network as something open and neutral, out of the assets of anyone. A model where everyone [has] ownership of the physical infrastructure, but not the whole network itself." Roca points out that this ownership model, while seemingly a radical notion is "not very much distinct from the original Internet idea itself." For him, the real question is whether Guifi.net is "a singular exception - or can this mutation also occur and be replicated elsewhere?"

This post has already gotten too long, so in my next post, I'll follow up with the rest of Sascha's well-written and comprehensive piece, where we'll recap his "Ideas for Better Municipal Networks."