Gillett, Sharon (2006). Municipal Wireless Broadband: Hype or Harbinger? Southern California Law Review. Volume 79: 561-594. PDF: cfp.mit.edu/groups/broadband/docs/2006/Muni_BB_Hype-Harbinger.pdf
This article argues that municipal wireless networks are important, but not for the reasons implied in popular reporting that surrounds this topic (see Section III, p. 21). Cities are unlikely to directly serve the residential and business public. Municipalities, however, have been significant early adopters of innovative unlicensed wireless broadband technologies, providing both a market toehold to innovative products and services using those technologies, and an experimental testing ground for novel organizational models. In addition (see Section IV, p. 26), the concern for policymakers should not be whether cities should be involved in wireless broadband; there are legitimate reasons why they should, and why increasing numbers of them will be. Rather, the important public policy concern is how to ensure that, in the process of facilitating the first uses of wireless, city authority does not get subverted to create artificial limits on future broadband wireless competition (for example, by giving only one company rights to the municipal infrastructure necessary to deploy a citywide wireless network). Doing so will require thoughtful melding of separate legal frameworks governing access to city property and public rights of way into a coherent policy that guides when exclusivity legitimately can or cannot feature in public-private partnership arrangements for communications services. Selected quotes: “Local government involvement in broadband should therefore be judged by whether it fosters opportunities for competition, not by whether such competition is good or bad for incumbent providers of telecommunications—or in the case of Pennsylvania’s statute, specifically telephone—services. To judge whether a local government’s involvement fosters broadband competition requires consideration of the particular competitive situation of each community, and the specific nature of the government’s involvement,” (p. 26). “While blanket bans [of municipal involvement in wireless projects] are clearly a poor idea, narrowly tailored limitations on the nature of local government involvement may be reasonable if needed to ensure that such involvement invigorates, rather than impoverishes, local broadband competition,” (p. 27) “Cities that have been pleasantly surprised by the interest of WISPs in partnering with them today should not blind themselves to the even more pleasant possibility that more WISPs may wish to serve their communities in the near future. Wireless deployments do not justify the same kind of exclusive franchise agreements that made sense for minimizing the public disruption related to the installation of cable television,” (p. 27-28).
