Clay sez:
The 21st Century Infrastructure Consortium (21st CiC)is dedicated to bringing high-bandwidth fiber to the home. Or, rather, they are dedicated to FTTH as long as our city governments don't get involved. From the looks of the paper 21st CiC has filed with the FCC, the worst thing that could possibly happen is that someone could be scheming to offer you access to pure bandwidth, uncluttered by monopolistic business practices.
From their FCC filing: "Municipalities, even when they promise to build an open-access network, should not at all be involved with the FTTx industry."
So take that, you municipal stooges! Your puny notions of "open access" are nothing to us! (I'd suggest a drinking game involving the number of occurrences of the phrase "unfair competition" in a two page PDF, but I think the AMA would revoke my blogging license.)
The very idea that the government would want to treat access to bandwidth as even remotely analogous to access to highways has latter-day asphalt manufacturers in a tizzy. Municipal FTTH may die a-borning, if the beneficiaries of such services don't make themselves heard.
(Thanks, Clay!)
