ula20-5551212

Thanks to a powerful lobbying campaign by the allied telephone and cable industries in California, control of wired Internet access and video delivery networks was taken away from California's municipalities and handed over to the State of California, which is now empowered to grant "state-issued authorizations" (SIAs) to such service providers. This process replaces negotiations between cities and providers leading to municipal cable franchise agreements. A process to create regulations to implement the provisions of AB 2987, the "Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act of 2006," is now underway. You can read details of that process by clicking on the title of this California Politics Today article: "CPUC Assigned Commissioner Rochelle Chong proposes implementing regulations for Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act of 2006 (DIVCA); 'utility watchdog' TURN says these rules subjugate consumer interests to 'anyone capable of filling out an application'."

Learn more than you can anywhere else about the process by which this change came about in the DIVCA Channel below:

This change in wired network governance has led to two related responses from City of Los Angeles officials.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Janice Hahn has called for a financial and operation audit of the two cable channels operated by the City, offering a motion that states:

"Due to recent changes in state law, resulting from the passage of ab 2987, the City needs to consider alternative ways in which to provide Public, Education and Government (PEG) Access services and facilities more efficiently and effectively….the City should request the preparation of a thorough budgetary and operational audit of both Channel 35 and 36. Once that audit is complete, the City Council can use that information as the basis for discussing the merger of some, if not all, existing public access operations."

In addition to this motion from Councilmember Hahn, Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo has transmitted a document to the Los Angeles City Council instructing the City's Information and Technology Agency (ITA) to:

"…report back in 180 days on the ITA, BITC [Board of Information Technology Commissioners], and Municipal Access Policy Board (MAPB) public hearing findings regarding potential future Public, Educational and Governmental (PEG) operating models for the City along with recommendations to the Mayor and City Council concerning a proposed new PEG operations and services model for the City."

Public access programming is, traditionally, video programming produced by non-professionals for distribution over cable networks. Not a profit center, but a required expenditure for incumbent cable companies under the franchising agreements they have, in the past, negotiated with municipalities, public access in Los Angeles is an antiquated system using obsolete video origination and editing equipment within a production and distribution system utterly untouched by the revolution in digital video, cellphone cameras, low-cost PC video editing software, and the proliferation of populist platforms for the distribution of non-professional video content such as YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, and other web sites.

With newly-expressed interest from LA city officials in examining and possibly reforming the system by which regular people are empowered to produce and offer video content to the City's cable subscribers, it may now be possible to radically re-configure the PEG system to take advantage of all these new technologies, thereby facilitating the production and presentation of much more, and much better, locally-produced programming in a much more economical and cost-effective way.

Whatever money eventually is made available for public access, government, and educational purposes could also be used much more efficiently by using some of it to support the distribution of public media content directly through the Internet, from "PEG supersites," and not just over the co-axial, fiber optic, and hybrid-fiber optic television networks of Time Warner Cable, Verizon's FiOS and AT&T's Project Lightspeed, the owners of which are the beneficiaries, as well as the architects, of DIVCA.

At the same time that government officials are considering updating the administrative structure of public access and related public-oriented programming in Los Angeles, two announcements from the technology sector point towards the possibility of a more-rapid rollout of the broadband wireless Internet infrastructure over which this new programming could be distributed.

Under the headline "Proxim Wireless Pioneers the Convergence of Wi-Fi® Mesh and WiMAX with Introduction of MeshMAX™ Product Line," Proxim today announced:

"New Product Architecture Integrates Two Broadband Wireless Technologies Enabling a New Low Cost, High Capacity Last Mile and Wi-Fi Mesh Network Architecture.

"San Jose, CA, February 5, 2007 – Proxim Wireless Corporation, a global pioneer of end-to-end solutions in Wi-Fi® mesh, WiMAX, WLAN, and wireless backhaul and wholly owned subsidiary of Terabeam, Inc. (NASDAQ: TRBM), today announced MeshMAX™, a new multi-radio product line that incorporates WiMAX, Wi-Fi mesh, and Wi-Fi access. Proxim MeshMAX™ products are available in both the unlicensed and licensed frequency bands. Proxim Wireless is the first company to enable the convergence of Wi-Fi mesh, WiMAX, and Wi-Fi access in a single integrated device. MeshMAX™ provides significant benefits to service providers, municipalities, and customers planning to deploy Wi-Fi mesh and WiMAX. MeshMAX™ enables a new deployment architecture that increases the capacity of mesh networks, simplifies their deployment, and provides outdoor mobility for the 300 million-plus Wi-Fi clients."

Also of note is a system from Meraki ("Meraki [may-rah-kee] is a Greek word that describes doing something with soul, creativity, or love — when you put 'something of yourself' into what you’re doing.") that holds the promise of delivering free or very low-cost (supported by local, national, and/or global advertising) wireless broadband access to the "next billion Internet users" through the creation of neighborhood-based wireless mesh networks.

You can read about the Meraki initiative at "Wireless Internet for All, Without the Towers," in yesterday's New York Times.

You can watch a YouTube video report about an early deployment of the Meraki system in Stapleton, Colorado, below:

Rather than wallow in legacy public access technologies and/or play a losing game of catch-up with other cities who have already moved ahead with municipal Wi-Fi and/or municipal FTTH ("fiber-to-the-home") deployments, plans or studies, why doesn't the City of Los Angeles simultaneously do everything it can to roll out a universal, ubiquitous broadband Internet system using some combination of the Proxim MeshMAX Wi-Fi/WiMAX system and the Meraki micromesh system, thereby creating a "microMeshMAX" infrastructure linked to the City's existing and under-utilized fiber-optic network and then use that network (and the rest of the Internet) to distribute a flood of new user-generated content under a program of enhanced public access support that would allow for a grand expansion of media of the people, by the people, and for the people of Los Angeles?

Other cities would be encouraged by Los Angeles' example to do even more, in this way or others, to upgrade the production and distribution of community-based content as appropriate for their own conditions, situation and whatever their residents desire.

Given how far the U.S. is now behind world-leading competitors in the deployment of the truly high-speed broadband Internet technology essential for future economic growth, political expression, education, and cultural development generally, and how far Los Angeles (despite its media legacy) is behind many other U.S. cities, tomorrow is not too early for civic leaders and all the City's residents to get involved in developing, discussing, and implementing some version of this idea for combining a new way of doing public access with new ways of bringing the Internet to everyone.

As with global warming, one can only hope that it is also not too late.