Hurricane BellSouth Bearing Down On New Orleans
After Katrina ravaged the Big Easy six months ago, Greg Meffert, the city’s chief information officer, got downtown businesses back online by opening the city’s wireless mesh network—originally deployed to link surveillance cameras—to anyone who needed it. For free.Rough. And perhaps a stumbling block for the recent announcement by the Dems to have broadband nationwide in five years.“Now it is the lifeblood for so many businesses,” Mr. Meffert told Red Herring. With Internet service still down in more than half the city, he estimates more than 15,000 people use the city’s 512 kbps (kilobits per second) network.
The city now has a daytime population of about a quarter-million, but about a third of the city is still without even basic phone service. The population is expected to swell this summer as more storm refugees return when the school year ends.
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Now telecommunication lobbyists are trying to shut down the network, and Mr. Meffert says it looks like the state legislature will agree. State law prohibits cities from providing more than a relatively sluggish 128-kbps network, but New Orleans offered its faster network as an emergency relief effort.
“The vendors, the BellSouths of this world, are not only going to force us back, making our existing Wi-Fi illegal, but also they want to close a loophole for emergencies so that we would not do this again,” said Mr. Meffert.
BellSouth declined to comment. But telecommunications and cable giants have tried to restrict city-sponsored broadband initiatives in other parts of the United States. Several states bar local governments from competing with private telecommunications services.
