Monticello, Minnesota fights against the local telephone company to install fibre to every resident. The town decided to issue bonds and the phone company said that it wasn’t a utility [one of the few things the town can issue bonds for], but after a year of litigation, the city has apparently won and set a precedant which could be used by other cities to fight against phone companies hegemony on internet connectivity. You see, back when DSL was growing up, those of us in the industry had to rely on the phone company to put in digital switches for the last mile of installation to take place at a house. It was slow and agonizing, and eventually it hammered the industry to the point where companies who were providing DSL services either went under or were consumed by the companies that hindered the growth of DSL… phone companies. At least, it appeared that way to anyone who was providing DSL services. Complaints centered around it taking 8 weeks for the switch to be installed and hopefully it was installed properly so the connectivity was clean. Well, in Monticello, Ars Technica reports that they weren’t happy with the provisions so they sought to install a city-wide fiber network. You can read more about it at Ars. I would like my town to do the same.
James Hatch
Researching the merging of Business, Technology & Ethics
