Longmont, Colorado, will have a question on its November ballot asking whether city residents should be taxed to pay for and subsidize "telecommunications services, advanced services and cable television services."
Municipalities around the country have struggled for years, and ultimately failed, to partner with private companies to provide the public with cable and telecommunication services. The reasons for failure are numerous, including bankruptcy of a private "partner,” often resulting in taxpayer funds being wasted. And while some would nitpick the details of the failures, the fact remains that taxpayer money was put at risk and often lost.
Moving backward by adopting the failed model of municipal provision of communications services is the wrong idea, as Longmont's own experience has demonstrated. While taxpayer funds were expended in 1997, today, 12 years later, the potential has not been realized.
And Longmont's experience is not unique, or even uncommon.
IPI has addressed this issue a number of times over the last several years and cautioned governments to be careful not to sponsor communications ventures like municipal broadband networks, and in particular, local Wi-Fi projects. Time and experience have proven us correct.
As detailed in “We Told You So: Continue to Say No to Municipal Broadband Networks,” (available at www.IPI.org), municipal broadband has been plagued by failure nearly every time it has been attempted, and at great cost to taxpayers.
The major problem: Technological innovation continues to far outpace the speed of government, which simply cannot compete with the market. Technology infrastructure investment is not for the faint of heart or the partially committed. One must jump in with both feet and update and innovate, not only the technology but the business models as well.
And that is just to keep even with competitors. As online services continue to become more sophisticated, customers have become accustomed to regular upgrades, challenging the ability of governments to keep up with demand.
When municipal broadband networks fail, taxpayers must pay for the loss. Let’s not throw good (or at least new) taxpayer dollars after bad municipal broadband networks.
* * *
Today's TechByte was written by Bartlett D. Cleland, director of IPI Center for Technology Freedom.