John T
@northgrum.com
 from:
TKJunkMail 
| Do local franchises actually help rural buildout?
I can see how local franchises can force companies to serve all of a locale, but I really don't see how, e.g., the City of Philadelphia signing different franchise agreements from its suburbs can prevent Verizon from serving the suburbs but not Philly.
It actually seems to me that statewide agreements are more likely to be able to force a company to serve everyone in a state, and so on. The federal universal service fees and such work similarly-- it is tremendously expensive to run copper, fiber, or anything to rural customers in the middle of nowhere with massive multiacre parcels. There's no real way around that, and for the most part of the century the "solution" has been getting everyone else to subsidize the people in the middle of nowhere. (Combined with regulation, of course.) |
