Telco vs Municipality

From Meshbox interview with Sascha Meinrath:

As for the benefits of community-owned — it’s really about resource extraction — if the community owns the infrastructure, funding to pay for that infrastructure stays in the community; I see that as a good thing. The real question, in my mind, is whether the economies of scale that big telecom has can outperform the localization benefits that municipalities have to provide better, cheaper service. My own contention is that we should let these entities compete — let the users decide. I’m actually not advocating that these systems should only be built by municipalities, but rather that we shouldn’t create barriers to entry for whichever entities want to compete to build these systems.

Meanwhile, Intel is supposedly backing municipalities deploying broadband network infrastructure. With the recent Centrino branding success (and $$$$$$$$), I wouldn't bet against them achieving what they intend to do in terms of mindshare anyday soon.