Wireless broadband, communities, and the shape of things to come (original) (raw)
ELSEVIER
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect
Government Information Quarterly 23 (2006) 348 - 358
Government Information Quarterly
Editorial
Wireless broadband, communities, and the shape of things to come
1. Background
As electronic communications environments become the fabric of our lives, the quality and range of network connectivity increasingly determine what we can do and how we do it. This issue of Government Information Quarterly examines wireless broadband services and the arrangements municipalities have created to nurture or manage them. Its point of departure is the broad presumption that high capacity networks are not only desirable but also increasingly necessary for numerous businesses and services. The reach and economies offered by wireless make it a core element of the 2007 nationwide broadband availability goal President Bush announced in 2004, and a parallel goal announced in Canada even earlier (Bush, 2004; Government of Canada, 2003). Several other countries around the globe are actively investing in the creation of both wireline and wireless broadband networks. At this writing, few major cities in North America have not examined alternatives for enhancing wireless broadband access in their environs. Even as the empirical evidence materializes regarding precisely what broadband means to the economy, so many educational, industrial, and government-related (including health services) processes assume easy access to broadband that to claim it is “not essential” is analogous to turning one’s back on most of the productivity improvements as well as many of the core cultural and social developments of the past decade (National Research Council, 2002). When pervasiveness and mobile access are added to that framework, the significance of wireless networks - specifically broadband wireless networks seems clear.
The wireless, or WiFi (wireless fidelity), revolution of the late 1990s and early 2000s has catalyzed a new vision of cheap, widespread, and easy access to the Internet. A sister service called, “WiMax,” which would extend wireless signals up to 30 miles from a source (compared to WiFi’s 300 feet range), similarly promises low cost access to the Internet and is especially attractive for more rural regions, although both WiFi and WiMax have limitations in terms of security and handling interference. Operating in unlicensed spectrum in the 2.4−GHz2.4-\mathrm{GHz} and 5−GHz5-\mathrm{GHz} bands, and inclusive of several technologies meeting IEEE 802.11 standards, WiFi offers yet another option for people to connect to the Internet beyond the landline-based
services of cable and incumbent telephone operators. Wireless broadband may be provided by conventional Internet Service Providers but sometimes it is also provided by other businesses or other parties (nonprofit organizations, municipalities) generally working outside of the two major residential sources of Internet access to date, the cable companies and the major telephone companies Verizon and AT&T.
The technological potential of wireless broadband, however, raises controversies. The issue of control, especially whether it is in the private or public sector, is critical to this discussion and extends not only to price and service quality but also to the terms of service, the location of service, and the trajectory of the next generation of telecommunications capabilities beyond WiFi . WiFi is something of an unplanned technology insofar as its original incarnation was not specifically intended to enhance public access to the Internet. The speed with which an entrepreneurial constituency embraced it surprised many. Even as it surged ahead in deployment and attractiveness, incumbent telecommunications service providers, notably telcos, have struggled to position it within their market-driven worldview of telecommunications. Consequently, one of the issues associated with wireless broadband has to do with who should be allowed to develop and deploy it. Even as cities tout their “wirelessness” - Cisco provides rankings of the “Most Unwired City” in the United States and proudly acknowledge enhanced broadband access when they have it, the policy rubric that facilitates or allows cities to have a role in cultivating their telecommunications capabilities is uncertain (Government Technology, 2006). 1{ }^{1} The broader issue, and one taken up in several essays here, concerns communities’ power to create their own unique communications environments.
The subject of the articles in this issue is not so much contributions of broadband or wireless networks as it is how we as a society organize our telecommunications services, wireless being just one in a long series of innovations in telecommunications that have afforded new means for people to gather information, to “listen,” and to “speak,” to function as a community in an electronic as well as a geographical space. While these functions sound a lot like activities protected under the First Amendment in the United States, in fact, the means to exercise these mediated speech rights have run into numerous legal questions over the years. Many of them, for example, have focused on how a particular medium is owned and operated, and who - a corporation or business, an individual, or the public - has speech rights when using the medium. We also note that even though several policy constructions (laws, court decisions, regulations) invoke the term “community” in the context of communications, few actually define it. As will be discussed below, wireless broadband access is a profoundly local capability, and its significance to a community is sometimes overlooked while policymakers consider grand issues such as competition and innovation.
- 1{ }^{1} The site notes: “This year’s survey sheds more light on what previous Intel Unwired Cities surveys were indicating - that connecting to wireless Internet access points with laptop PCs and other wireless-enabled devices in public places is becoming part of everyday life in America. Businesses use wireless Internet access as a competitive advantage to attract customers, and cities use it to enhance livability and quality of life. Consumers are also discovering these so-called ‘WiFi hotspots’ at an increasingly diverse range of locations-from airports and hotels to laundromats and baseball parks.” ↩︎
Policy decisions that prioritize certain characteristics of a communications media shape the technology, the market, and ideas about acceptable uses. Many of these decisions have turned on the rights of the government to regulate the public interest and different parties’ rights of access. Thus, for example, first amendment rights of the publishing industry were roundly vindicated when the requirement of a state (Florida) that newspapers offer a right of reply to offended individuals was struck down (Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, 1974). The broadcasting industry, however, was ruled to be subject to regulation by the FCC in the 1969 Red Lion case; in that instance, the agency’s interpretations of public interest and its implementation of the Fairness Doctrine (since abandoned) were upheld when a station denied the first amendment claims of an individual who wanted to use the airwaves to redress a personal attack (Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 1969). Indeed, the FCC has enacted numerous rules on broadcasting in the name of the public interest. Nevertheless, the regulatory agency has sometimes overstepped its authority in trying to shape a medium. For example, in the 1979 Midwest Video II case, the Supreme Court chided the FCC for its continuing efforts to require cable television operators to provide local programming channels (FCC v. Midwest Video, 1979); the FCC’s attempt to create a public forum within the cable industry was thus challenged. In the more recent 2005 broadcast flag case, the FCC again was reined in from overreaching its authority as it tried to prescribe the capabilities of in-home digital video recording technology (American Library Association v. FCC, 2005), an attempt to limit access of a different sort. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Brand X case effectively eliminated any competitor’s right of access to cable television infrastructure that could be used to provide competing broadband services (National Cable & Telecommunication Association v. Brand X Internet Services, 2005). When individuals or would-be competitors have tried to assert their rights to access newspapers, broadcasting, or cable television for the purposes of “speech,” the courts and the FCC have responded by charting the scope of the public - and at least implicitly, also the private - interest of each medium and defining rights of access.
History and precedent notwithstanding, however, the assumed power of a competitive market to deliver superior and worthy services is currently the gold standard among policymakers at the national, regional, and local levels. Indeed, when the market is at its best, many economists, policymakers, and even jurists believe the public interest is likewise well served. Consequently, issues of the market are entwined with how we as a society define those goods and services that are invested with some element of “publicness” or social good. The elements of communications systems that address the public interest, including access to “speak” and to “listen,” therefore, are subject to those same considerations. Are social goods simply what the market cannot provide? Or, are they the object of values and morals that say something about what we believe is important, market dynamics notwithstanding? New communication technologies - whether broadcasting, cable television, the Internet, or broadband networks - historically have always prompted such questions. Without going further into the varied grounds for why different technological systems are invested with some element of public goods, suffice it to say that matters of competition, availability, fairness, access, and community are at stake in discussions of them all and are currently highly uncertain for wireless broadband.
From the onset of the Internet, and especially in its earliest phase as a wholly noncommercial network, many people recognized its potential to provide benefits not only to knowledge economies but also to education, health, government, and other public services. Concern about the market’s ability to provide such benefits and to deploy telecommunications infrastructure in rural and less lucrative areas prompted lawmakers to include in the 1996 Telecommunications Act a provision that mandated that the FCC monitor the development of “advanced services” lest some of the advantages and public benefits delivered by networks (including the Internet) be unavailable to certain populations or certain regions, especially rural areas (Telecommunications Act of 1996). 2{ }^{2} Over the course of the last ten years, we first saw an era of concern about a growing digital divide that demarcated those with computer skills and Internet access from those without; these concerns were later muffled under marketplace rationales and the louder argument that if some people used computers and the Internet while others did not, the market would sort everything out in the long run. 3{ }^{3} As well, public interest groups in some towns and cities formed organizations and sponsored projects that provided free Internet access in order to nurture computer and network-related skills among the disadvantaged (Servon, 2002); certain states and cities proactively invested in or researched the idea of having locally controlled high speed networks, first for landline access and now for wireless broadband access. 4{ }^{4} This context affects how broadband access is viewed today.
For the purposes of examining wireless broadband, the rationales behind various regulations, laws, and programs allowing, catalyzing, or prohibiting access or deployment are pertinent because they convey the ways that public policy apparatuses are attempting to define the service. A convoluted series of regulatory decisions, court cases, and laws continues to try to determine what types of services can be offered by whom or what, and under what conditions, and wireless broadband is currently in the crosshairs of such controversies. The deregulatory rhetoric and its partially enacted principles 5{ }^{5} of the last twenty years or so (especially since the 1996 Telecommunications Act was passed) that rely on broadly conceived “markets” have afforded less room for careful analysis of market imperfections and the increasingly precarious notion of the public interest in telecommunications services. Complicating matters still further is the prominent state-level interest and authority regarding telecommunications that works alongside the federal jurisdiction, juxtaposed with the locallevel interest in, but scant authority over, ensuring that their communities have affordable and widespread telecommunications services, particularly access to the Internet (Rowe, 2000). The desires of cities and municipalities to develop a telecommunications infrastructure and service
- 2{ }^{2} The FCC defines advanced services as synchronous transmissions at greater than 200 kbps .
3{ }^{3} This is a reference to former FCC Chairman Powell’s public analogy between digital divide issues and choices of driving luxury or pedestrian cars.
4{ }^{4} North Carolina’s e-NC Authority, Texas’s now defunct Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund, Mississippi’s Broadband Technology Development Act, and Connect Kentucky are examples of such state programs.
5{ }^{5} We argue that these are only partially enacted because although achieving a broadly competitive marketplace in telecommunications was one goal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, it is generally acknowledged that the number of primary companies dominating these services has diminished. ↩︎
platform sometimes clash with cable and telephone companies that also want to deliver wireline and wireless broadband services or competing, mobile services such as EVDO on an entirely commercial, market-led basis. All of these considerations have come into play as wireless broadband access services unfold.
2. The role of cities and communities in WiFi development
Wireless broadband is a “last mile” connection linking the users within range of a wireless hotspot to a series of networks, and in the United States, wireless Internet service providers, like their landline counterparts, operate what the FCC has called an “information service,” a category it declines to regulate. The essays in this issue examine ways that communities in Canada and the United States are organizing wireless broadband access, even as a changing policy environment seeks to legislate such efforts. They investigate how certain publics create the telecommunications environment they desire.
On the face of it, the more such access services, the more widely available the Internet. Indeed, the Canadian government’s National Broadband Task Force was established specifically to advise the government on how such access could be facilitated, taking a more proactive approach than in the United States in terms of government sponsorship or facilitation of broadband networks (Government of Canada, 2003). One might expect policymakers to do everything they could to expand this particular technology and attendant services, but in the United States attention has been directed to limiting or controlling the provision of broadband by the public sector, particularly the municipality. TechNet’s State Broadband Index (2003) noted that 12 states had legislatively limited municipalities’ abilities to build and/or maintain broadband networks, a number that now has grown to at least 17. As well, in the past few years, telecommunications companies have worked with state lawmakers to introduce legislation to prohibit subdivisions of the state, as well as public power companies, from retailing broadband or other telecommunications services. For example, Nebraska Legislative Bill 645, passed in 2006, prohibits elements of the state and public power companies from retailing broadband and other telecommunications services, and it imposes a two-year moratorium on public power companies’ wholesaling of broadband (Legislature of Nebraska, 2006).
In contrast, Canada’s Broadband Task Force specifically recommended that individual communities be directly engaged with planning such networks and integrating local capabilities to use network services. Likewise, the European Union recently approved public investment to develop broadband in Greece, commenting specifically that this action would not disturb the commercial market for the service (European Union, 2006), thereby hoping to put to rest the argument that public investment in broadband stymies private investment in it. The EU has invested in, and continues to subsidize, several broadband infrastructure efforts in its region with little concern for the impact on the commercial providers because they believe the regions in which the government invests would not receive sufficient attention from the private providers in any case. The policy contrast regarding developing broadband, whether wireline or wireless, between the United States and several other industrial democracies in Europe and Asia could not be starker. Ferguson’s analysis of United States
broadband, written for the Brookings Institution in 2002, concluded that deployment and technological progress in broadband in the United States is “seriously inadequate” largely due to “the monopolistic structure, entrenched management, and political power of the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) and cable television (CATV) sectors, worsened by major deficiencies in the policy and regulatory systems covering these industries” (Ferguson, 2002). 6{ }^{6}
One near term result of telecommunications deregulation in the United States and the ascendance of a market solution for serving the public interest is the move to regulate municipal provision of broadband. From the private incumbent perspective, having cities involved in such ventures constitutes unfair competition because municipalities have access to funding mechanisms outside the “normal” capital and debt markets and because public investment will ultimately undercut private investment. They argue that private companies, not municipalities, have better technological expertise and that telecommunications is neither a public good nor a monopoly, the typical justifications for public involvement. The telecommunications companies’ response to public involvement in broadband has been to declare hesitation in investing in new technology and infrastructure as long as municipalities are able to offer services, a hesitation (sometimes interpreted as a threat) that historically has been proffered repeatedly when these companies encountered events or regulations they did not favor. 7{ }^{7} With heavy lobbying from telecommunications providers, states have crafted frameworks to which cities must conform before initiating broadband projects that may include requirements for (1) proving their project’s financial soundness, (2) engaging in formal (and sometimes lengthy) feasibility planning, (3) seeking state agency approval, (4) granting an incumbent provider first right of refusal for building new infrastructure, or (5) undertaking a public referendum for building broadband, methodologies detailed in the Stone, Maitland, and Tapia article in this issue.
For their part, cities have several goals in mind as they respond to wireless technology opportunities. One legacy of the digital divide work that developed in many cities in the 1990s and early 2000s is a social, and sometimes a technological, infrastructure poised to exploit new chances to remedy local information inequalities. Organizations and technology-savvy individuals and groups want to share their expertise and help their communities to become more viable participants in a knowledge economy. Wireless, with its relatively cheap and easy set up, finds ready groups of users among these constituencies (Grubesic & Murray, 2004). Several cities also view increased access to WiFi hotspots as an amendment to their business climate and position their investment in it as economic development (Ford & Koutsky, 2005;
- 6{ }^{6} Examining telecommunications companies’ spending patterns across a decade, he notes that, except for 19992000, network capital spending remained constant and that the incumbent telephone companies engage in virtually no research and development. Nevertheless, their political spending grew dramatically and, as of 2002, averaged half a billion dollars per year on lobbying, regulatory efforts, litigation, and political contributions. Ferguson remarks, “This pattern appears to be the combined result of rational monopolistic conduct, and of entrenched top managements unwilling to face modern high technology competition” (Ferguson, 2002).
7{ }^{7} The same threat occurred when the dominant telcos were required to unbundle their infrastructure to would-be competitors on discounted terms. ↩︎
Brennan Center, 2006). Additionally, some municipalities in poorer or rural areas have charged that commercial vendors either are not present when they are needed, are slow, or do not provide state-of-the-art services. Governments in which utilities are publicly owned are particularly well suited to develop wireless broadband infrastructures because they already have access to potential sites for base stations and because they can use the additional telecommunications bandwidth and capabilities for other municipally related services. For example, several localities are already using local WiFi for emergency services and preparedness purposes (Hu & Reardon, 2005). Municipalities argue that telecommunications goods are essential and that they have a legitimate stake in insuring their citizens have the services that are needed. However, this stake has been contested and pared down over many years.
Historically, the authority of cities to control their own services and destiny has been limited, and a complicated legal framework systematically contributed to the powerlessness of American cities in telecommunications and many other matters. Frug’s masterful essay, “The city as a legal concept,” recounts the ways that the law has made (American) cities “creatures of the state” (Frug, 1980, p. 1063), with most powers delegated to it by other levels of government. Frug points out that the classical liberal political tradition emphasized a division of power between, on the one hand, the individual and, on the other hand, that of the centralized state, relegating to cities only a position as a state subdivision. Denying cities important rights was rooted in a struggle to eliminate intermediaries between the state and the individual. The corruption in many city governments during the 1800s and early 1900s, and the highly charged, negative public reaction to it, encouraged structuring a political system that undercut cities’ rights. As formations with duties to protect citizens and to encourage businesses, cities in the late 19th century exercised power as defined only in specific state grants so that municipal corporations (the cities themselves), which were defined as “public” creations, required legal constraints. In contrast, private corporations warranted protections from the law as their rights and standing became increasingly identified with those of private citizens. In this way, the private sector’s efforts have been valorized, while cities’ endeavors to undertake any activity that might be provided by the private sector have become suspect. Frug’s formulation explains why cities remain hamstrung with respect to technologies such as WiFi: they are statutorily without power to protect or cultivate the services their citizens’ desire. To assert otherwise would give cities standing and power equivalent to (in some cases greater than) that of the states in which they exist. This history, however, undercuts the role that communities might want in determining the mix, quality, and quantity of telecommunications services that operate in their environs.
In terms of telecommunications, cities’ roles or wishes have been limited largely to their authority over rights of way. They have routinely worked with utility, telephone, and cable companies in assigning terms of use policies when they needed public rights of way or access to city-controlled telephone or utility poles. When municipalities own their own utilities, they control not only desirable rights of way but also facilities and administrative processes (e.g., a billing system) that could be cost effectively turned to providing telecommunications services. When these capabilities are combined with the political will and desire to provide new telecommunications services to citizens, however, problems arise.
As computer networks became more common in the 1980s and 1990s, some cities became interested in constructing high speed or fiber networks themselves, generally in order to promote business development but also to modernize their own physical plant, particularly when the local utility was publicly owned. A series of quiet transformations occurred in the 1990s, many of them in small, midwestern communities where people were dissatisfied with their cable service. Some cities built their own cable television infrastructure, sometimes combining it with their public utility services. Although hotly contested by franchised cable companies, the seeds of local efforts to control telecommunications services were sown in cities’ visions of better or cheaper cable television services, and they grew into related dreams of economic development opportunities and improved services using computer networks. Some cities built high capacity fiber networks themselves (Abingdon, Virginia, was one of the first) in order to insure they were not left behind as such network services became available elsewhere. At this writing, hundreds of communities have developed some sort of broadband plan, and well over 100 have adopted wireless networks (Municipal Wireless, 2005). Many of them are small, but some of them, such as Philadelphia and San Francisco, are large.
One policy problem that arose as cities began to provide such services was tested on the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Even though the intent of the Act appeared to be to encourage the emergence of new kinds of service providers, the city apparently was not supposed to be one of them. This result has turned on one section of the Act that states that the federal legislation preempted state laws “expressly or effectively prohibiting the ability of any entity” (47 U.S.C., Section 253) to provide telecommunications services. This would seem to endorse municipalities’ efforts to enter the telecommunications field. Yet in 1997, Missouri enacted a statute that stated “no political subdivision of this state shall provide or offer for sale, either to the public or to a telecommunications provider, a telecommunications service or telecommunications facility…” (Mo. Rev. Stat. 392.410(7)), and the Supreme Court upheld the statute (Nixon v. Missouri Municiple League et al., 2004). Their decision, directly addressing the extent to which federal law could preempt state laws, slapped the hands of the municipalities interested in nurturing advanced services their communities lacked. In essence, a city is not “any entity.” The language of the 1996 Telecommunications Act was interpreted as not pertaining to cities, leaving them essentially without any mooring in telecommunications rights.
As wireless broadband connection services came online, some cities interpreted this to be not a telecommunications service but rather an information service and thus something they could in fact control. With the context of the digital divide, perceived economic development advantages, and enthusiastic citizens and local businesses, many cities have tried to insure that their communities obtain wireless and wireline broadband services as quickly and cheaply as possible and that no districts lack for service. Large telecommunications providers in general lagged behind several cities in planning for broadly available wireless access. In many cases, the private companies also rolled out wireline broadband connections slowly and did not serve all areas of cities, much less rural regions.
Hence, the political and economic battles are before us. Competing bills addressing municipal provision of telecommunications services have been before different congressional
committees in 2005 and 2006, and at this writing the issue is far from being resolved. We hope some of the analyses in this issue will help to sort out salient elements of the debates.
3. In this issue
The complex features at play in public policy regarding municipal wireless broadband are discussed in this issue. Issues of costs and economics are core issues in two articles, one by Lehr, Sirbu, and Gillett and the other by Stone, Maitland, and Tapia. The former illustrates that the type of wireless infrastructure and the municipalities’ specific objectives are crucial to a discussion about public policy responses, while Stone, Maitland, and Tapia note that there are business models that can meet the joint goals of private telecommunications providers and municipalities alike. Lehr, Sirbu, and Gillett examine the new interest in wireless systems and carefully evaluate many of the changing conditions that affect policy decisions to invest in wireless systems. In a departure from other analyses, they take up the question of geographical specificity in thinking about network-based systems and consider whether natural monopolies might exist for such broadband services in certain areas. Their goal is to pose the important questions that municipalities and other policymakers should answer as they consider creating wireless broadband infrastructure. In analyzing the goals of municipalities seeking to deploy wireless broadband systems, Stone, Maitland, and Tapia explore local motivations for investing in wireless broadband. Their review of state laws on the matter, and how publicprivate cooperation in wireless systems might operate, illustrates the tension between state regulation and local-level desires for control and services. The article profiles some alternative structural arrangements between public and private sector parties, noting several benefits or disadvantages to implementing various models of municipal wireless broadband.
Sawada, Cossette, Wellar, and Kurt address aspects of assessing and planning telecommunications infrastructure in their article, “Analysis of the urban rural broadband divide in Canada.” After establishing the importance of broadband connectivity for rural, remote regions in Canada, the authors review some of the pertinent regulatory issues and policies intersecting wireless broadband in the country. The core of their article explores how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) capabilities can be used as a planning tool for locating wireless networks.
Two articles offer case studies of communities that have developed wireless infrastructure. Examining the development of wireless systems in Austin, Texas, Fuentes and Inagaki point out that even in an environment of “free” WiFi, plenty of commercialism is present. They highlight the links between free wireless access in businesses and the city’s ideas about economic development. In a pointed critique of a market model of deployment, their GIS data point out strong geographic inequities in the private provision of free wireless access. Powell and Shade’s research provides some background on the rather different Canadian environment with respect to wireless broadband. They describe the efforts of several community-based groups to develop free wireless services and software to help people create local, meaningful content. Their detailed portrait of a volunteer-run wireless network within an area of Montreal, in which sixty wireless hotspots were created along with over 10,000 user accounts, offers a
model of how social uses of information technology can be developed within a community context.
“Evolving wireless access technologies for municipal broadband,” by Sirbu, Lehr, and Gillett, reviews the technologies of wireless broadband. It joins aspects of technology design to the types of considerations facing municipalities when they consider investing in wireless systems. Design choices, costs, and performance issues are reviewed here. The authors illustrate the many technological alternatives and nuances that should enter into an evaluation of wireless alternatives. Finally, the epilogue by Christian Sandvig reminds us of the utility in taking a broader view of the role of government, industry, and innovation in infrastructure development.
This journal issue intends to provide sufficient detail regarding technological choices alongside implementation models to enable the policy and practitioner communities to make intelligent choices. We underscore that broader issues regarding deregulation, community needs and choices, access, and innovation frame the specifics of wireless broadband, as they will frame the specifics of the next technologies that sweep the globe. In order for our communities to achieve the best communications options and opportunities for development, state and national policy makers need to seek information and advice on local needs.
References
American Library Association v. FCC. (2005). 401 F3d 489 (DC Circuit).
Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. (2006). Submission to Nebraska’s LB 645 Task Force: The need to permit broadband from public entities. Retrieved May 16, 2006, from http://www.brennancenter.org/ programs/fepp/broadbandwhitepaper.pdf
Bush, G.W. (2004, April 26). Broadband rights-of-way memorandum (Press release) [On-line]. Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040426-2.html
Committee on Broadband Last Mile Technology, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council. (2002). Broadband: Bringing home the bits. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
European Union. (2006, July 7). State aid: Commission endorses public funding to bridge broadband communications gap in Greece [On-line]. Retrieved July 20, 2006, from http://europa.eu.int/rapid/ pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/06/949&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage == en
FCC v. Midwest Video Corporation. (1979). 440 U.S. 689 (“Midwest Video II”).
Ferguson, C. (2002, July). The United States broadband problem: Analysis and policy recommendations. (The Brookings Institution Policy Brief #105, Working Paper). Retrieved December 2002 from http://www. brookings.edu/comm/policybriefs/pb105.pdf
Ford, G. S., & Koutsky, T. M. (2005). Broadband and economic development: A municipal case study from Florida. Review of Urban & Regional Development Studies, 17(3), 216-229.
Frug, G. (1980). The city as a legal concept. Harvard Law Review, 93(6), 1057-1154.
Government of Canada. (2003). Broadband for rural and northern development. Ottawa: Information Distribution Centre, Industry Canada.
Government Technology [Web site]. (2006). Retrieved from http://www.govtech.net/digitalcommunities/story. php?id=94240
Grubesic, T. H., & Murray, A. T. (2004). ‘Where’ matters: Location and Wi-Fi access. Journal of Urban Technology, 11(1), 1-28.
Hu, J., Reardon, M. (2005, May 2). Cities brace for broadband war [On-line]. Retrieved May 23, 2005, from CNET News.com
Legislature of Nebraska (2006). Legislative Bill 645. Retrieved from http://www.unicam.state.ne.us/pdf/ FINAL_LB645_1.pdf
Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo. (1974). 418 U.S. 241.
National Cable & Telecommunication Association v. Brand X Internet Services. (2005). 125 U.S. 2688.
Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League et al., 541 U.S. 125 (2004). Retrieve from http://www.oyez.org/oyez/resource/ case/1640/
Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC. (1969). 395 U. S. 367.
Rowe, B. (2000). Strategies to promote advanced telecommunications capabilities. Federal Communications Law Journal, 52, 381-409.
Servon, L. (2002). Bridging the digital divide: Technology, community and public policy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
TechNet. (2003). State Broadband Index [On-line]. Retrieved from http://www.technet.org/
Telecommunications Act of 1996, 110 Stat. 70, 47 U.S.C. Section 253.
Sharon Strover*
Seung-Hwan Mun
The University of Texas at Austin,
Department of Radio-Television-Film,
College of Communication 1 University Station A0800, Austin, TX 78712, USA
E-mail address: sstrover@mail.utexas.edu.
*Corresponding author.
Fax: +1 5124714077 .