Indeed, many municipal broadband projects are undertaken because the Wall Street metric does not work. The town may be too remote, the population may be too sparse, or the demographic nature may not be consistent with the template used by private sector companies in their profit-maximizing decisions on where and whether to deploy. Those are precisely the circumstances, however, in which the community benefits of providing broadband become most profound, and most valuable.
Bigger Vision, Bolder Action, Brighter Future
Publication Date:
June 2, 2008 
Jim Baller and Casey Lide of the Baller Herbst Law Group produced this tremendous white paper for e-NC. It covers the importance of broadband, relationship to economic development, and offers some recommendations.
This entire site has been greatly informed by this paper. It collects many important examples of how important broadband is and the communities that have greatly benefited by taking action to build networks that responded to their needs.
Although it does not explicitly recommend public owned networks, it provides the foundation for what broadband can offer. This foundation is useful for understanding why privately owned, unaccountable networks are inferior to those that are rooted in the community.
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