Wireless Week reports on Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) proposal: The Senator would like to get $50m added to an existing Department of Agriculture rural broadband program to provide funds or tax breaks to get more Wi-Fi built out in smaller towns and rural areas. Wireless Week wonders if this would affect EarthLink or other metro-scale network contractors, but notes that the funds would go to towns almost certainly below these companies' scale of operations.
In a recent podcast with Don Berryman, EarthLink's head of municipal networking, he said that the company has to work by the number of houses passed as a metric for whether to bid on contracts. That metric led them to give a pass on the Smart Valley wireless project in Silicon Valley.