said by Jim Baller, municipal broadband attorney
Broadband Resports: Interview
written by Karl Bode
May 21, 2003:

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Let's take a closer look. One of the systems studied was the municipal cable system of Glasgow, KY. The residents of Glasgow love their system because it has given them low-cost, high-quality cable service, and, since the mid-1990s, bargain-basement access to the Internet at 4 Mbps. Yet, according to cable industry, the Glasgow system should be considered a failure because it has never made a profit. It is quite true that Glasgow has never shown a profit, but that is because it sets its rates at the lowest possible level that will enable it to recover its costs. This policy has saved the citizens of Glasgow more than $30 million over the relevant period. For a town of 14,000 in rural Kentucky, that's not a failure -- its a grand success.

Another system included in the Denver study was the municipal communications utility of Cedar Falls, IA. To their credit, the professors acknowledged in their report that the system had not been operating long enough to generate any meaningful data. Since then, the Cedar Falls system has been a rousing success, particularly when compared to its next-door neighbor, Waterloo, IA, which shied away from establishing a communications utility of its own. The two cities are comparable in every way except that Cedar Falls has a municipal communications system and Waterloo does not. The result -- economic development in Cedar Falls has surged since the system was completed, even in the face of the economic downturn, while Waterloo's economy has languished. Hardly the profile of a failed system.

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said by JTRockville :

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..."the government" as being of, by, and for the people.

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