From “the Empire Strikes Back” department, Tuesday’s tri-cities referendum on a municipal fiber to the home plan for three Illinois cities (Batavia, Geneva and St. Charles) was defeated, largely, according to Northwestern Business Professor James Carlini by a massive misinformation campaign, funded by the incumbent telco’s:

?According to SBC and Comcast, virtually 100 percent of the region can sign up for DSL and access the Internet via cable modems. In addition, T-1 service is available to businesses throughout the Tri-Cities over existing telephone lines and wireless service is available from several dealers.?
T-1 service has been around for years. To be accurate, the first T-1 circuit was put into service for Illinois Bell in 1963 in Skokie, Ill. We?re not talking about what could be available today. People aren?t looking for 1.544-megabit service if 10-gigabit service is available.
Bast?s small knowledge of network technology seems to have been spoon fed to him by SBC and Comcast. His arguments lack depth of knowledge and it?s very clear from his position paper that he doesn?t know much about fiber-optic capabilities once they are in place.

Carlini also notes that local journalists ran with the wrong message… Read the article here. James Carlini links. Working on the road recently, a group adjacent to me was discussing Verizon’s larger than expected subscription success of their fiber to the home initiative….. Our politicians need to push the SBC’s of the world, or more practically, truly open the networks we all paid for.