IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

88 Chapter 4
centers—but left most of America, which was harder and more expensive
to reach, in the dark. Recognizing that electrification was critical to their
economic development, thousands of communities that were not large or
profitable enough to attract private power companies created their own
electric utilities. As Jim Baller, a U.S. expert on municipal wireless, has
noted: ‘‘Most of these communities found that they could provide for their
own needs better and at far lower cost than the private sector could or was
willing to do.’’ Today, approximately two thousand public power systems
continue to exist and thrive in the United States, providing, says Baller, significantly
better service at substantially lower prices than investor-owned
utilities provide. 38
Many municipalities are considering providing free broadband communication
access in much the same way that they provide free roads and
town squares. Brussels, for example, has deployed twenty hotspots as part
of a larger project to bring broadband access to the entire city. (Some policymakers
in Belgium want to make train travel free, too.) New York City
Council has also embarked on a sweeping change in the way the city buys
and utilizes telecommunications services on the principle that high-quality
wireless communications have become one of the ways people evaluate the
technical quality of a city’s infrastructures. Even tiny Bhutan, a kingdom in
the Himalayas, has completed a pilot project to use wireless and Internetbased
voice telephony technologies to deliver communications services to
rural areas. 39
According to the group Wireless Commons, ‘‘A global wireless network is
within our grasp.’’ Wireless Commons has been founded to accelerate the
spread of community-based, unlicensed wireless broadband initiatives. The
group says that low-cost wireless networking equipment, which can operate
in unlicensed bands of the spectrum, bridges one of the few remaining
gaps in universal communication: ‘‘Suddenly, ordinary people have the
means to create a network independent of any physical constraint except
distance.’’ 40 (Esme Vos, editor of MuniWireless.com, a website that provides
reports on municipal wireless and broadband projects, says it can
cost a town of four thousand people as little as twenty thousand dollars
to deploy a wireless network.) ‘‘Technical problems are the least of our
worries,’’ says Wireless Commons; ‘‘the business, political and social issues
are the real challenges facing community networks.’’ Hardware and software
vendors need to understand the business rationale for implementing
open technical solutions. Politicians need to understand why universal ac-