We've seen it before, and it's back from the dead! Rizzo's rambling on metropolitan Wi-Fi: Philadelphia Councilman Frank Rizzo's letter to the Wall Street Journal against a project that he doesn't understand or represent accurately has now appeared in the Chicago Tribune as an editorial. I've already dissected it once.
But here are a few choice tidbits: "Independent analyses and prevailing market prices for network and construction costs make clear that the real costs could range from $30 million to $100 million for a feasible network. And this is just the starting point."
There have been no independent analyses, only numbers supplied to Rizzo by folks like the New Millennium Research Council, an arm of Issue Dynamics, which has almost all major telcos as their clients. Thus "independent" numbers are coming from reports issued by dependent organizations. Philly's $10 million number may turn out to be low, but I wouldn't turn to the NMRC for an estimate. Philly could hire a disinterested third party and guarantee their report will be published. That's the way these projects are usually overseen.
"Indeed, municipal forays into local telecom networks have created a sea of red ink in Georgia, Iowa, Oregon and elsewhere." This is so depressing when Rizzo recites failures that don't exist. None of these three projects were failures. Only the NMRC and its ideological and similarly incumbent funded ilk promote that view, and they use incorrect numbers that don't reflect reality.
Tip to Philadelphia reporters: ask Rizzo for specifics about these failures and where he got the information from.