Spurred by the desire to benefit the community they serve and by the threat of losing votes (not to mention the potential for supplementing the public coffers), municipal authorities, particularly in the United States but also in Europe and Asia, have launched "municipal broadband" initiatives.

This report presents case studies of various municipal initiatives around the world, highlighting the issues and challenges that the municipalities concerned have had to face. The various solutions they have chosen to address such issues as, "Who should own the network?", "Who should operate it?", and "How much control over pricing and coverage should a municipality be allowed to have", are described in this report.

The report also profiles key contractors and equipment suppliers and describes the various wireless and fiber technologies that are being applied to this market.

The purpose of this report is to provide municipalities with a comprehensive understanding of the technologies and the issues that they will likely face. In particular, there is much debate over the benefits and dangers of local government becoming involved in commercial markets and the implications that this has for fair competition. The report looks objectively at each of the arguments for and against municipal involvement in broadband access provision and separates out the real issues from the "red herrings". A detailed description of state and federal legislation dealing with municipal broadband in the United States is also provided.

The report concludes with a set of detailed guidelines on the various stages of managing a broadband network project based on the experiences, gathered through Pioneer's primary research, of real people who have been involved in such projects. Pioneer has built these experiences into a spreadsheet investment model with indicative values which can be altered to satisfy the circumstances of a particular municipality. This model is available for free to purchasers of the multi-user version of the report and at a small additional cost to the single user version.