Municipal Wireless: Evaluating "Public-Private Partnerships" and Other Private Business Models

Excerpted from a report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance entitled
Localizing the Internet: Five Ways Public Ownership Solves the U.S. Broadband Problem.

The term "public-private partnership" is widely used to describe a bewildering variety of municipal broadband projects, projects as different as Philadelphia, where a private company will own and operate the network, and Saint Louis Park, where the city will own a fiber and wireless network and contract with a private company to manage and provide services over the wireless portion of the network.

It might be best simply to drop the term "publicprivate partnership" since it obscures more than it enlightens. What follows is an overview of business models in which the private sector owns the infrastructure, and an assessment of their risks and benefits to the public sector.

The Status Quo: The dominant business model for telecommunications networks in the United States is a network owned and operated by a private, forprofit company that is also the only or primary provider of monthly subscription services. This is true of your local phone and cable companies. They