Indiana

Graham Richards, the former Mayor of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, spoke at the Broadband Properties Summit about why Ft. Wayne pushed fiber to the home. Some of the services and benefits included:

A green affordable housing initiative cut monthly energy costs for lower income families, and the broadband network was used to monitor energy use.

The network enabled live video monitoring of latchkey children whose parents had to work. Parents could have high quality video chats with their children as soon as they arrived home in the afternoon.

The Indiana bill that would have restricted the rights of communities to invest in telecom has died in committee.

The Internet is providing an alternate channel for citizens and community leaders to deal with these issues. In the past, bills like this often got passed into law quietly before anyone even knew about them. Today, most legislatures post proposed legislation on the Internet, open to all to see, and lots of people have the opportunity to review this stuff before it is too late. It's a useful counterbalance to lobbyists.

Add Indiana to a growing list of states that have legislatures turning their backs on communities. Legislations is being considered there that would prohibit communities from providing telecom services.

Even though I think that communities ought to stay out of the service business and limit their investments to telecom infrastructure, I think that decision ought to be left to the community, and not be pre-empted by the state legislature.