WebProNews

David said, "Today would be a good day for people to ask their elected officials why their cities can't have an Internet utility."

I work for an 11 year old ISP in rural Kansas. Between the RBOCs slugging it out with cable companies on price and having to adapt from increasingly unprofitable dial-up services to rural wireless almost overnight, it's been tough to just stay in business. In the 16 counties in southeast Kansas where we do most of our business, not a single town qualifies as a "city," according to Federal standards. We're just too rural. All of these citizens want high-speed and they want it yesterday.

In one of the major towns (population about 12,000) where we've done considerable collaboration with the town to provide barely-profitable Internet access, the City of Coffeyville, KS decided to become a wireless ISP. They use Motorola Canopy, whose installed CPE cost is nearly $500, they charge the customer $49 to install it and $39.95 monthly. We provide live technical support, they provide email support. We get the rural customers who don't have line-of-sight to their access points and we get calls from their unhappy customers. It appears as though Coffeyville Wireless doesn't know much about managing their network and performance has suffered as they've added more users.

We can't compete with a town whose citizens tax dollars buy the equipment the town gives to rural residents to use. The town won't even discuss the issue with us, apparently preferring instead to slowly put us out of business there instead.

Our strategy is to build a carrier-class wireless infrastructure they and no one else can match and win back their customers. We've resorted to the services of a venture capitalist and put ourselves into hock for the next decade.

To suggest that people call their local city or town officials and ask why they aren't providing Internet services to its residents very short-sighted. A better solution would be to become the Internet franchisee in a town, not unlike the cable franchise. The problem most people have with this approach is that it kills competition which leads to higher prices and evolves into a limited monopoly — most people are not in favor of that.

Don Bledsoe
Terra World Communications
Independence, Kansas