This morning I was the guest on Joy Cardin Show on Wisconsin Public Radio. We talked about the end of the phone system. Not surprisingly, a lot of the talk focused on swapping copper for fixed wireless. You can download the show here. While regular readers will hardly be surprised by my positions, it is worth listening to the concerns of the Wisconsin residents — particularly from rural areas.
Unfortunately for Wisconsin, Governor Scot Walker is one of the chief cheerleaders in the Chump Parade — as I like to call the states that have decided to totally deregulate their telecom sectors and thus cut themselves entirely out of the most important conversation on telecom we’ve had in 100 years. Mind you, he had a lot of help. As usual, the bill had huge bipartisan support because . . . . well . . . . umm . . . Ma Bell monopoly era regulation bad investment jobs IP magic pixie dust! We didn’t start the fire . . . .
This is rather unfortunate for Wisconsin because, as I noted recently wrt the NY PSC and Fire Island, the only reason the residents of Fire Island have any way to express their displeasure and push Verizon to give them something else is because New York has not joined the Chump Parade and deregulated everything. So the good folks in Wisconsin better hope that nothing bad happens. But really, we’re just playing with critical infrastructure on which every person and every business depends. What could possibly go wrong?
Wisconsin better hope the FCC gets it right. Or perhaps they could call their state legislators and Governor Walker — while they still can — and ask what happens if something goes wrong in the Libertarian Nirvana.
Stay tuned . . . .