The public WiFi service, set up with US$1.2 million in donated equipment, has been "a lifeline" in the recovery from the deadly storm, serving residents, businesses, public safety officials and building inspectors who have vastly increased their numbers of inspections to help the rebuilding process, CIO and CTO Greg Meffert said in an interview this week. Tropos Networks in Sunnyvale, Calif. and Intel Corp. donated the labor and equipment for the public WiFi after the storm; Now the city wants to expand the network in a deal with Earthlink Inc., Meffert said.

But the telecommunications lobby, which offers competing forms of broadband Internet service, opposes keeping the service above 128kbit/sec once the city's state of emergency is lifted. Telecoms point to a two-year-old law that sets standards for competition in Louisiana for broadband, including limits on keeping speeds at 128kbit/sec in municipal broadband networks.

Meffert wants to keep the network running at its current 512Kbit/sec, and believes the slower speed is "useless" for inspectors who might need to transmit data, as well as average users. The push to reduce public WiFi speeds in the city "is like kicking a guy when he's down," Meffert said. "But I'm not going to do it."

Meffert said bills in the Louisiana legislature to keep the WiFi speed high have already failed, but others are pending. He wants to take the matter before a judge, but said city attorneys have advised him that any such effort must be brought by citizens who would be adversely affected by a slowdown. "I guess you could call it a potential fight, but I don't know where this ends," Meffert said.

Meffert said he has solid backing from citizens -- who know him from the constant TV coverage when he was acting mayor for five days after Katrina, as well as more recent coverage of the WiFi battle. "They come up and hug me in the street," he said. "I was going to lunch and some guy yells at me on the street, 'Hey man, keep busting [them],' meaning the telecommunications lobby. I didn't purposely set out to be anti-telecom, but it's amazing how many people have wanted to get out from under the city's [broadband] duopoly."