The speciousness, too, is that Wi-Fi and telecom are related. Most of the Wi-Fi networks being delivered will have small voice components initially, and won't replace residential or business telecom at all. IPTV is a component of most municipal fiber networks, and all incumbent fiber networks, where it's hardly a blip in thinking for early Wi-Fi networks due to the vast mismatch in available bandwidth.

It would take weeks to look through their assumptions and analysis on how these largely fiber-optic or fiber-coax-hybrid networks are huge money sinks. But their statement that the systems have cost taxpayers $840m over 20 years is tricky: some of these municipal entities are utilities that are required to invest continuously in infrastructure, and the money put into networking didn't come from taxpayers--it came from ratepayers or even from the electricity or water markets when surplus was sold--and wouldn't have been returned to taxpayers if unspent.

The reports uses data from no later than 2004, and that's tricky because even though a number of these networks have been in operation in some form for years, the first few years of each network's operation involves extremely expensive buildout that's paid back over many years. So a four-year window of operation could show a disaster. And I'm dubious of any analysis of Tacoma, Wash., that shows it as a financial failure--that reveals something about the assumptions used to analyze the network's revenue. It's also tricky to look back to 2004, before incumbents had deployed any real fiber and before broadband had hit its home tipping point, and expect to extrapolate in a straight line from there into 2007.

The hobbyhorse of broadband over powerline (BPL) is trotted out as a "new" technology that needs encouragement. All anti-regulation thinktanks are pro-BPL as a third pipe to the home, allowing yet another incumbent monopoly (electrical utilities) a broadband option. It's unclear whether BPL will ever be a success, though as I wrote in The Economist in December, changes in US and European spectrum regulation may wind up being a factor in promoting rollouts in certain markets. (Texas is a rare example: TXU Electric Delivery handles just the delivery of power, not retail billing or power plant operations, and their adoption of BPL on a broad-scale is still in the early stages of deployment and relates largely to their interest in having a smarter power grid. The broadband part is extra.)

However, the report authors should be commended for exposing their entire set of collected research, including a long appendix showing the yearly data they used for operating cash flow, interest, capital expense, and other factors to produce their "cumulative free cash flow" number, which is their determination of success. I'm hoping a group with the resources necessary can look through assumptions and recalculate the results.

PRI receives significant funding from industries that they write reports about, according to SourceWatch, and seems to be the last hard-line group opposed to any municipal involvement in broadband except in keeping their filthy hands off it.

Read more at: http://wifinetnews.com/archives/007443.html.