Bronx to be pilot for M2Z free wireless project, but only if…

The NY Times reports County Executives of America, a national group of elected officials, has proposed a plan to provide free broadband wireless service to more than 400,000 households in the Bronx. The borough was selected along with 11 other counties across the country for the project, a proof of concept for nationwide plan.

The project is to be built by M2Z Networks – a company that was in the news in 2007 when the FCC denied its application for a healthy swath of spectrum (2155-2175MHz) in return for building a nationwide wireless network.  The FCC revived the idea in 2008 with an open bidding process, upping the speed from 368kbps to 768kbps and including an – eventually dropped – controversial requirement that content be filtered.  Other companies were not in favor of giving any one company such dominance over such a service, and another company NetFreeUS proposed a much more open scenario involving devolution to local providers and a certain amount of spectrum set aside as  ‘commons’.   With the change of the guard at the FCC the plan stalled but now M2Z have got together with the Counties to  try and kickstart it back into action. The only holdup? The FCC has to approve the spectrum deal and the NTIA has to kick in $122m of stimulus funds.