Cities finding getting wired pricey, passe

Two items of conventional wisdom seem to have taken hold in 21st century America. One is stated simply as, "free is better." The other could be summed up as, "technology will always get cheaper." And if free isn't possible, cheap is pretty good.

The average American may not be able to spell Milton Friedman, let alone understand economics, but these concepts are as easy to grasp as the free iPod you may pick up with your next car purchase.

If only politicians and bureaucrats would get it.

In 1964, electronic calculators were huge and sold for about $2,000, the equivalent of $12,000 in today's money. Today, a handful of change will get you one that does just as much and fits in your shirt pocket.

And the pace is accelerating. A year or two ago, DVD recorders were going for somewhere near $1,000. Now they're one tenth of that, or less.

Along the way, a lot of investors lost money in calculators and DVD recorders.

The trick is to know when to buy without losing too much money. And as the folks who made Beta videotapes and IBM mainframes can tell you, it's risky trying to guess where the market is going.

That's something to think about as a Wasatch Front consortium of communities known as UTOPIA continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to dig trenches so that every home in 14 cities can be hard-wired to fiber-optic cable. It's worth considering as Provo's version of socialized Internet, known as iProvo, struggles to stay above the flowing red ink. The city is lagging behind its projected subscribers and can't make the first payment on its $39.5 million bond. Next week, the City Council will meet to consider transferring $1 million from its electric utility reserve. No matter how you switch funds around, that's real money that could be used for something else.

Here's a hint: The lagging subscription rates aren't because that Internet thing isn't catching on. While the bureaucrats labor with what seemed like a good idea a few years ago, the private sector is going ga-ga over wireless.

Google and Earthlink announced last week they are teaming up to offer the entire city of San Francisco a free wireless network. The city will consider this along with several other proposals, but it's hard to see why anyone would turn down free. Free is good.

Google wants to get as many people as possible to see its ads, which already helped it earn $1.5 billion in profits last year.