Community networks are not just "on-ramps to the information superhighway" -- whatever that is! Community networks are intended to support the community itself -- not merely to help people "get out of town" -- however virtual their trip might actually be. You say that Internet service is now a low-cost commodity; but "low-cost" is relative. Certainly to a homeless person, or virtually anybody in the bottom half economically, Internet service is not cheap enough to be non-trivial. Although it's conceivable that the prices could get so low that nobody would need a free service, I'm skeptical of this actually occurring. Certainly there is a strong market for free access in Seattle. After two years we have over 8500 registered users, and we're getting between 100 and 200 new registration forms per week. The question of economic survival is, of course, key to the success or failure of community networks. Finding a suitable model for sustainability has been almost uniformly unsuccessful. Ultimately, communities will need to decide whether these systems are essential to the community as a whole (as I believe they are) and, if the answer is yes, decide how to fund them. There are lots of possible models out there and these need to be explored. Unfortunately, I fear that ideological objections to any proposal that includes public funding may prevent a thorough investigation of all the possibilities.

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