A few notes on Broadband:
I finally finished reading the city’s Digital Inclusion Plan, and it seems pretty good. I’ll need to make another pass, but at first reading it doesn’t seem to miss anything, or propose any bad ideas.
I wrote a month ago about the groups raising the possibility that the city would be better off owning its own network, rather than depending on companies like Earthlink. It appears that Hartford, CT has beaten us to it. They are building the network specifically to address the digital divide:
Mayor Eddie A. Perez is building a network as one element of coping with the fact that only 25 percent of Hartford households have a computer with Internet access; 70 percent of suburb dwellers have such access. The 25 percent figure is far below the average in Philadelphia, which encompasses rich and poor alike within its varied borders.If Hartford can do it (although they’re only talking a pilot for ther time being), it seems likely that San Francisco ought to look into it.
Finally, I had a couple beers last week with a guy who covers the West Coast for a digital inclusion non-profit. His impression was that the city could have gotten quite a bit more in the negotiations had they come in with a plan. He also said that the noise around San Francisco’s extremely open process has been a cautionary note for other cities. Chicago, for example, is apparently negotiating with companies individually, rather than having an open RFP process. Finally, he agrees that the network plan Earthlink is proposing will probably not provide enough coverage to serve most of San Francisco.