Listen to an hour of discussion at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) on municipal broadband: Deep in the heart of Texas, mere blocks from the State House where a bill is under consideration to ban all forms of municipal networking, I led a panel discussion at SXSWi with three people well poised to discuss the issues: Esme Vos of muniwireless.com, Rich MacKinnon of Austin Wireless, and David Isenberg of the SMART Letter.
The conversation was fairly focused, and you'll hear the same themes over and over again: disruptive technology is threatening incumbents who are trying to prevent all forms of experimentation and innovation by municipalities because any success on these fronts could produce competitive private businesses.
All three panelists agreed the innovation and competition were good. Esme and I agreed that utilities should facilitate competition but don't necessarily need to own and operate broadband networks themselves--but be allowed to bid them out, provide access, and otherwise facilitate them. Rich MacKinnon has worked extensively with public/private partnerships for free Wi-Fi, so he has a more complex view on this. David Isenberg wrote in later to clarify what I posted here to note that he fully supports municipally run broadband: "Not that I believe that utilities are the greatest entrepreneurs, but because (a) they're well positioned (b) the future is unknowable and (c) there are more than a few success stories in that sector already."
The audio quality is mixed: you can hear the panelists quite well, but questioners and commenters from the audience--including well-known quantities like Jock Gill, Dewayne Hendricks, Cliff Skolnick, and Jon Lebovsky--are a little faint.
You can download the audio in MP3 format either directly as MP3 [31 MB] or as a ZIP archive [24 MB].
An article in yesterday's Austin Business Journal--in which publication my picture will appear in about two weeks in an unrelated story--points out that even airport-based Wi-Fi and broadband could be threatened because the contract that the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport has with Wayport would be banned under the first form of the house bill.