Citizen.wired.net

In his column on stopping the Cable/TelCo duopoly from capturing our national information infrastructure Dan Gillmore raises several tactics. One is local governement intervention. There's a great example of this right here in Georgia. The little town of LaGrange, GA, about 60 miles southwest of Atlanta, is one of the most wired cities in America.

LaGrange has no big universities, no huge corporate employers. They pretty much did it on their own. Take a look at the IT services the City of LaGrange provides:

The City of LaGrange offers Digital switching service, Multi-carrier POP, Two Growing Networks consisting of a 100 mile commercial network and 150 mile residential broadband network. The City is also a Competitive Naccess Provider for ITC Deltacom, Globe and other interstate carriers. LaGrange also has both CLEC and OCC Certifications and is licensed by the Georgia Public Service Commission fo the entire state of Georgia to offer many traditionally telecom contractor services. Lastly, but certainly not least, the City offers both T1 point to point availability and Raw Internet for businesses.

Not bad for a little country town in Georgia. Broad spectrum wireless may be our ultimate savior from telco feudalism, but LaGrange could teach us all a lesson.

Choice in Broadband as Important as Deployment
[...] There's another party at this table, by the way. Local governments can and should be building their own fiber networks, as some already have done. Unsurprisingly, the phone companies have been lobbying state legislatures to forbid this practice. We need a federal law that explicitly allows municipalities to bypass the monopolists. [...]
[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]