Gillett Study on Municipal Wireless -- Calls for "Creative Destruction" of Telecom Incumbent Business Models.

Sharon Gillett takes an in-depth look at municipal broadband and takes apart detractors' rhetoric. Gillett concludes:

the real public policy issue raised by municipal wireless is not
whether cities should be involved in broadband wireless deployments. There are many legitimate reasons why they should, and strong economic drivers that ensure they will continue to be. The real question that needs to be addressed in this debate is how to ensure that city authority does not get subverted to create artificial limits on future wireless competition.

Here's more:

The review of municipal wireless activity in this Article highlights its
ability to complement four traditional functions of local government:

(1) Efficiently delivering city services. Broadband wireless enables
cities to apply e-government techniques that let them maximize the value of the taxpayer’s dollar. By deploying their own networks, cities can make police more productive, schools more cost-effective, and maintenance workers more responsive. In this regard, cities are following a trend toward customer ownership of communications networks that is evident in corporations and nonprofits, such as hospitals and universities, as well.

(2) Ensuring equity among local residents. Even in communities
where commercial wireless broadband services are available, such services are rarely equitably distributed geographically. By leveraging local government facilities, such as libraries and schools that are geographically distributed within their communities, cities can supplement private sector offerings to ensure equitable access in traditionally underserved parts of town.

(3) Promoting local economic development. This concern has been manifested in two distinct forms of municipal involvement in wireless broadband. First, cities have experimented with the sponsorship of hotzones intended to draw shoppers and tourists. High churn among the cities involved in such efforts reinforces the experimental nature of these efforts. Second, cities have taken steps to lower barriers to WISP entry, to ensure the availability of broadband services that have become essential to many forms of economic activity.

(4) Managing public rights of way. This function takes a somewhat different form with wireless infrastructure, which imposes a physical requirement for the placement and powering of radios (boxes that can transmit and receive wireless signals), rather than street cuts. Many different types of city facilities can be helpful or necessary in this regard, ranging from water towers (typically used for longer-range, line-of-sight technologies) to traffic signal poles (used for dense mesh architectures).

Gillett points out the current tensions whereby telecom incumbents are attempting to stifle competition and innovation, concluding that "creative destruction" is sorely needed:

While it may be economically rational for existing communications providers to use the legislative process to slow down the adoption of new technical and organizational paradigms that threaten their existing revenue base, the nation’s economic well-being is clearly better served when legislators allow “creative destruction” to proceed apace. Given that it is also politically rational for legislators to respond to the pressures placed on them, political compromises should be considered — for example, providing financial support to the incumbent industries and workers actually dislocated by the advent of municipally supported wireless broadband — rather than completely blocking experimentation and its potential ensuing benefits.