Addison, Texas, has franchised a wireless data network (map): The town awarded Plano, Texas's RedMoon the franchise to build and operate a wireless high-speed data network using Wi-Fi in the 4.3-square-mile town. There's no discussion of how get the coverage of a promised 1 Mbps inside buildings, and they do sound like they want to build a T-1 competitive service, which is tricky to unlikely for a general purpose cloud-style network. They could certainly mix and match equipment.
A Texas bill that will hit the house floor on March 23 once would have made even this sort of public/private franchise agreement illegal. Arm's length relationships wouldn't have helped. The provision was stripped but will likely return as an amendment.
What's fascinating about this is that although the town awarded a franchise, there should be no factors in place besides siting issues for towers or antennas that would prevent any number of competing WISPs in town. It's just unlikely that with one firm having city support that others would try to compete. As I've noted before, it might be better to hire a firm to operate the infrastructure and others that would sign up customers, thus separating the two functions and ensuring two separate robust layers. In a town this small, that probably wouldn't have worked, though.
Incumbents didn't raise a fuss, and RedMoon is careful to note that they're not going to be as fast as the incumbents. They'll likely compete more with low-speed DSL and even dial-up rather than with high-speed DSL and cable-modem service.
Glenn,
You make some very important points here: 1) The TX bill, and those pending in other states, threaten to make illegal the very right-of-way arrangements that made the cable industry possible. Gee, imagine the telcos wanting to avoid a repeat of the creation of cable... Also the notion of a city becoming an anchor tenant of a private network, even when it is in the city's best interests to do so (for example, to improve public safety via broadband access to police cruisers). It is not too well known that one reason South Korea is so well wired is that the government there had a policy of anchor tenancy on broadband networks when they were emerging. This policy reduced the perceived risk of buildout for private companies when the networks were young. Amazing that the US cannot consider such an enlightened policy...No wonder we are among the developing world in broadband deployment.
On the overbuilding point--the reason that a second or third WISP would not come in to town is the same reason that cable operators are rarely successfully overbuilt--the first WISP takes all the profits.
Ron