Christopher Mitchell (from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance) just had a nice article in the Pioneer Press. (Thanks Christopher for sending it to me.)

Christopher is an advocate of municipally fiber networks. He does a good job of pointing out the need for fiber for broadband and the market reasons that municipal networks make sense. “Cities must treat fiber networks – the roads of the digital age – as essential infrastructure. Publicly owned common-carrier networks create a competitive environment the cable and phone companies fear.”

As her points out the current providers are not jumping to the occasion to provide fiber – partially I assume because it’s a huge infrastructure investment and the return on investment is too slow for more stockholders patience.

Christopher does a nice job of bringing the point home by mentioning some local publicly-focused broadband project:

Minneapolis Wireless – increases competition, but the speeds are no faster than existing options
Monticello – is working on a fiber network (I blogged about the overwhelming support for fiber in the last election)
Cedar Falls, Iowa – invested in fast network and businesses has been locking to them
St Paul – is working ona plan where the city would serve government and schools but provide access to homes through an open access network model (allow other providers to use the fiber the city owns)