Following California’s lead, Wyoming lawmakers grabbed their ankles and took what cable and telco lobbyists gave them: a law that subsidises broadband infrastructure, but only to the extent that incumbents want. Even so, Wyoming is not buying into the 1990s service levels that lobbyists for Frontier Communications, AT&T, Comcast and Charter Communications bribed convinced Californian assembly members and senators to accept.
As described by Phillip Dampier in Stop the Cap, what started out as an effort to give communities the option of pursuing their own broadband projects turned into an incumbent right of first refusal, secretly rewritten by lobbyists for Charter and CenturyLink. Which prompted a sharp response from Cheyenne mayor Marian Orr…
The substitute bill is substantially different than the original bill. And it wasn’t posted on-line or anywhere for anyone except insiders to have access to. CenturyLink and [Charter] are bullies. It’s wrong, and they are hurting Cheyenne and other WY communities from gaining affordable access.
Orr pushed back, but it wasn’t enough. According to Karl Bode, writing in DSL Reports, Wyoming legislators approved the bill this week.
That said, Wyoming’s legislators did not completely prostrate themselves, as California’s did. If no private ISP is interested in serving a Wyoming community, even with subsidies, then a local government can step in.
Perhaps even more importantly, Wyoming’s residential broadband standard is pegged at 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload speeds. That’s equal to the federal agriculture department’s minimum for rural communities, and the Federal Communications Commission’s benchmark for “advanced services” capability. In larger communities, the standard for business service is even higher – 50 Mbps down/5 Mbps up.
California’s lawmakers thought that was too generous. Blindly accepting the campaign cash poor mouth arguments offered by AT&T, Frontier and cable companies, they decided last year that 6 Mbps down/1 Mbps up is good enough for every Californian.
State of Wyoming, Senate File No. SF010, Economic diversification-broadband services