Why Tom Ammiano's plans to create a city-owned broadband network are a boondoggle-in-the-making

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SF Weekly
October 13, 2004
Fiber-Optic Illusion

Why Tom Ammiano's plans to create a city-owned broadband
network are a boondoggle-in-the-making

By Matt Smith <matthew.smith@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
<http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2004-10-13/news/smith.html>

When I first ran across the proposal by Supervisors Tom
Ammiano and Chris Daly to fund a $300,000 study on whether
the city should go into the business of providing Internet,
cable TV, and telephone services to San Franciscans, it
seemed like a champion idea. The measure, passed unanimously
by the Board of Supervisors last week, will pay analysts to
investigate whether the city should embark on a
multimillion-dollar program of laying fiber-optic cable in
trenches to be dug during an upcoming sewer-system overhaul.

I imagined the new public fiber-optic network functioning
somewhat like the streets above, which enable things such as
cheap, fresh grocery produce because the government
maintains a public way to get from farm to store. With a
city-owned broadband network, I imagined, monopoly telephone
and cable TV companies wouldn't control electronic
communication. Internet-based services such as voice
telephone calls and home-delivered groceries would become
cheap and convenient, like grocery produce is now. Commerce,
education, and communication, I imagined, would flourish,
and the city's two main suppliers of broadband Internet
access, Comcast and SBC Communications, would no longer be
able to extract unfair profits from the exchange of digital
information.

But I was wrong. Ammiano's measure is a
boondoggle-in-the-making. Laying fiber-optic cable in the
sewers would be a mammoth and duplicative waste of money
that would not really advance the cause of creating a public
communications network. And that's not just me saying it.

"We have plenty of fiber already in the metro area," says
San Francisco Telecommunications Commission Vice President
Sunil Daluvoy -- to whom an Ammiano staffer referred me as
the foremost expert on the issue of creating a
government-owned broadband network. "The city already has a
lot of fiber of its own that's not being utilized. There are
also a number of companies that offer [access to] it at
dirt-cheap prices."


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