The long-held dream of liberal Madison bureaucrats is to build a costly city-owned broadband internet infrastructure. That dream died at a recent meeting of the city’s Digital Technology Committee. Several years of shoe leather reporting and analysis by MacIver – along with cold, hard fiscal reality – forced officials to shelve the $173 million boondoggle. Read More MacIver News Minute: Madison Broadband Boondoggle Pronounced Dead
By M.D. Kittle and Chris Rochester – Madison’s costly broadband-for-all dream has gone out “with a whimper and not with a bang.” Read More Madison’s Costly Broadband-For-All Plan Declared Dead On Arrival
Broadband boondoggles litter the big government landscape. All across the country, cities have tried to build their own high-speed internet infrastructures only to fail spectacularly, and taxpayers have paid the price. Will city leaders in Madison learn the lesson these other cities didn’t as they pursue their own fiber optic flop? Read More MacIver News Minute: Will Madison Learn from the Broadband Failures of Others?
By M.D. Kittle – There are plenty of warning signs and cautionary tales about the failures of city-owned broadband networks, if you’re willing to see the obvious. Will city leaders in Madison take note? Read More Broadband Boondoggles Litter the Big Government Landscape
What lessons did Madison’s tech bureaucrats learn from their failed, $500,000 broadband-for-all pilot project? Not much, it seems. But the public and some skeptical members of a city committee overseeing the project found out from a “lessons learned” document assembled by the bureaucrats what a textbook government boondoggle looks like. MacIver’s Chris Rochester joins Matt Kittle on the Vicki McKenna Show on News/Talk 1310 WIBA. Read More Costly ‘Lessons Learned’ in Madison’s Unfolding Broadband Boondoggle