While municipal operations may not get much attention in the mainstream press, many outlets are having a hard time ignoring the 3Mbps $16 service being offered in one Minnesota city. We also take a look at the second effort to bring community driven broadband competition to three Illinois cities - this time without leaning on taxpayer dollars.

It seems the mainstream press likes cheap broadband; and the Minneapolis suburb of Chaska, where locals are deploying 200 access points to deliver wireless broadband to the city. The project is fed by a Gigabit fiber backbone, and will deliver up to 3Mbps of bi-directional bandwidth to each user, anywhere in the sixteen square miles the city covers. Each account comes with 10MB of web-space, five e-mail accounts, and a "promise" (not a guarantee) of 99.999% reliability.

750 people had signed up for service just weeks after the project was announced, says ISP Planet. One restriction to the $16 deal is you're only allowed to access the network via one device only, though you can upgrade to a $25 tier that comes with three IP addresses. Users will also need to buy a fifty-five dollar Engenius PCMCIA card - chosen because it's a 200-miliwatt card (compared to the typical 40 milliwatt offerings by companies like D-link).

Meanwhile in Illinois, a second effort to wire the cities of Batavia, St. Charles, and Geneva with a broadband alternative to SBC and Comcast could find its way onto the November ballot. If you recall, the tri-cities was the site of a ridiculously under-reported public relations smear campaign by both Comcast and SBC, who managed to convince local voters that a local broadband plan would result in financial armageddon and a rash of government funded pornography.

Porn! Higher Taxes! Government surveillance! Be afraid! In the end, they were, and the vote failed; though forty percent of the community were in favor of moving forward. According to Ed Hodges, chairman of the Fiber For Our Future community group (see our interview), that forty percent would have been more than enough to make the venture profitable.

"We were out-manned, out-resourced, out-spent and out-maneuvered," said Geneva Mayor Kevin Burns at the time. "Our campaign was rooted in truth, our opponents' in anything but." In the end, many of the communities that voted down the initiative were rewarded - with Comcast rate hikes as high as 33% in many areas. Cable providers fighting muni-operations in other communities have turned to the PR effort as a blueprint when they can't get muni-killing legislation passed.

To avoid the tax-phobia of the last campaign, this new Illinois effort won't be touching taxpayer dollars, instead relying on loans from private investors, which would be paid off from revenue from the service. And while Geneva, St. Charles and Batavia would be involved in the end project, this latest push is entirely the effort of the Fiber for our Future community group.

According to group chairwoman Annie Collins, she feels this new effort should see a considerably more positive response from the community. "Now that we have come up with different financing the Cities can live with and residents will not fear, I think the vote will be different this year." she tells us. "In talking with folks so far we are already getting a very favorable response from the "no" voters of last year," she adds.

Often when we report on efforts by Municipal groups, there's a solid number of individuals who fundamentally agree with the concept of a new competitive option, but are uncomfortable with any degree of local government financial involvement. That's apparently what Fiber for Our Future has discovered in their efforts to bring a competitive alternative to their community - these "swing voters" could make all the difference.

With tax dollars out of the picture, it should be interesting to see what kind of effort Comcast and SBC make to derail this latest push. Project supporters have until August 16 to obtain enough signatures to put the idea to a vote in November.