Newsday should back up its editorial position with the journalistic resources it has

Newsday came out with an editorial on the 5th of February, calling for the bi-county wireless effort to be "done right"  where there is a free tier of access and a significant portion of the revenues allocated to the counties.  With this pronouncement, Newsday should follow up on its interest by informing the public about the development of the program, which has largely evolved in the dark, without any outreach by the committee to the existing wireless providers in the two counties.

The engagement of Civitium to consult for the committee has resulted in the expenditure of taxpayer dollars, and the creation of a local development corporation foreshadows the issuance of bonds to finance something, which means more taxpayer funded debt service.  The actions of the County Executive and committee run counter to their public pronouncements of "We're not paying for it", "The county executive has said, and so have I, that this is at no cost to the taxpayers".  None of the information contained on the county's website mentions the creation of this new entity and what its structure and powers will be.  It would be interesting to see just how much Civitium is getting paid to advise the committee.  The first time I heard about all this was during the public reading of the questions submitted to the committee on the 8th of February.  It became obvious that the RFP was produced from Chicago boilerplate by the poor proofreading job done.  Mentions of Illinois and contact phone numbers in the 312 area code were still present in the public version of the RFP.  For an effort that Esme Vos says is more significant than San Francisco's project, this kind of a mistake is an embarassment.  Its significance is confirmed by a partial list of some of the heavy-hitting attendees of the conference: Earthlink, Metro-fi, ARINC, IBM, Cisco, Motorola, Nortel, Cablevision, and Verizon.  Even Berge Ayvazian of the Yankee Group was there.  All of them see the project worth at least a look see, if not something to go after.  Locally, some of the integration firms were in attendance, along with one of our competitors on Fire Island, Barrier Communications.

It is possible that there may be a market for this network, and it could lead to lower prices for broadband access five years down the road if it were constructed and operated as a wholesale, vendor neutral physical plant.  The selection of a single vendor to implement and provide service to end users on the network without open access provisions, simply turns a duopoly into an oligopoly, which runs counter to the professed spirit of Muncipal Wireless. It also turns into de facto condemnation by eminent domain, ceding monopoly access to public assets to a single, closed entity.

This is where Newsday should come in and provide some insight as to what is currently available in the counties, from both the wired providers, and the licensed and unlicensed wireless companies.  They should also let their readership know that the existing technology, which is being proposed in the RFP cannot come near to matching the performance of offerings from the current wired providers, or the coverage offered by the cellular carriers.  The creation of yet another quasi-governmental agency with either taxing authority or the ability to issue publicly guaranteed debt should also be closely examined.

Long Island is not a location where broadband is scarce.  Cablevision has the highest penetration rate of any MSO in the country, the antipathy toward them notwithstanding.  Verizon has basically given up on DSL and is moving rapidly with their FIOS deployment, providing performance equal to Optimum Online, but there's another company that folks love to hate.  There are some locations where cable and DSL have not reached, and this need is being addressed by the existing unlicensed wireless providers, and there are already at least five wireless companies duking it out over the beaches of Fire Island for the summer time dollars. 

The painful "flight to quality" lessons learned by AT&T Wireless when local number portability became available should be applied to this effort.  AT&T lost millions of customers because it's network quality was abysmal compared to the other providers.  As soon as folks were able to keep their numbers with a different provider, Verizon Wireless became the largest beneficiary of this milestone, because performance and quality of a mobile connection is the most important feature of a network.  If this bi-county effort cannot produce a product at least as speedy as DSL and more available, it is doomed. If you build it, nobody will come because they already have good enough, even if the alternative is cheaper.

Open access to public infrastructure should be the battle cry of the day, not the creation of another private fiefdom and patronage mill.  If Newsday doesn't cover the story, perhaps the self-proclaimed Newsday alternative The Long Island Press should, or perhaps, the old gray lady's metro section will.