The Muni-fiber Conundrum

Telephony Online is a US magazine devoted to the telecom service provider's business. They have recently published a very in-depth feature on muni-fiber entitled Muni Fiber Networks Bounce Back which I strongly recommend you read if you're at all interested in the dynamics of local government financed fiber deployments. This dossier details, amongst other things, the legal struggles that many municipal broadband projects have had to face in the US.

But even more interesting (to me) is the editorial piece associated to that feature, entitled Changing with the Times. In this piece, Carol Wilson explains that the issue with muni-fiber is not with the local governments, it's with the carriers. Muni-fiber emerged because of a lack of decent service provider offering in many communities. What we Europeans would call market failure. And Telephony Online's stance is that service providers should be working together with municipalities willing to invest to servce the communities that they don't want to serve rather than fight legal battles for terrotories they don't want anyway.

Sounds easy. The issue, I suspect, if the frame of mind...