I’m back in St Paul and finally had the time to watch Geoff Daily’s vidcast with Christopher Mitchell on municipal networks. It was a great exchange between two people who know their stuff.

The topics they touched on included:

Fiber is better than wireless. Wireless is cheaper and a hekuva lot better than nothing but it’s not as fast or as reliable.

Municipal networks should improve community-wide take rate as opposed to competing unfairly with incumbents. I couldn’t agree with that more. A national chain coffee shop moved into our local, independent coffee shop. Everyone thought that would be a disaster – but really it just turned that corner into a coffee Mecca.

A Municipal network is expensive but I think Christopher did a good job pointing out that nearly everything a city does is expensive. It’s just a matter of making it a priority. What’s funny is that I just had this conversation (expense versus priority) with my 9 year old. The quick take – $90 isn’t that much money over a month especially if you consider that’s only 60 euros, but we’re still not getting cable TV.

The success and failures of municipal networks have becomes like email legends. “My brother knows a guy who lives in a city who had to sell their church because the network caused them to go broke.” “My friend’s cousin lives in a city that now paves the street with gold since the municipal network came in.”

Christopher brought up a report from the FTTH Council that said that after 4 years the average take rate for municipal networks was 54 percent. That is amazing.