FCC Commissioner Urges National Broadband Policy with Municipal Wi-Fi

A national broadband strategy should permit, and not prohibit, municipalities from offering high-speed Internet services, Federal Communications Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said Thursday at summit on community wireless networks. FCC Adelstein said that broadband should be so much more available that communities wouldn't find the need to build their own broadband network, speaking at the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks here. But when local elected officials do take matters of broadband access into their own hands, they shouldn't be barred from doing so, said Commissioner Adelstein. Speaking of some recent setbacks in wireless projects in Philadelphia and San Francisco, he said: “To draw from those the conclusions that we should give up and allow states to ban these would be a huge mistake.” At the same time, Commissioner Adelstein said that “it is a shame that communities need to take that up. If we had a national broadband policy, there would be a way of making sure that every community had access” to the high-speed Internet. In fact, Commissioner Adelstein said that other countries surpassing the United States in global broadband availability had done so by relying, in part, on municipal wireless networks. Adelstein said that he hoped that a national broadband policy would be ratified by the FCC “sooner rather than later.”
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