Lenin named his small movement the Bolsheviks, a word meaning majority. He called his majority opponents Mensheviks, a word meaning minority.

The point is that if one side is large and undisciplined while the other side is smaller but tightly disciplined, the smaller group can win a political struggle.

That seems to be the case with municipal wifi. It's an undeniable good everyone wants. It's relatively cheap to install and maintain. It should be a no-brainer.

But it's losing to telephone monopolies because of lax discipline.

I've gotten a taste of that this week in criticisms of my recent pieces on Philly's WiFi plan.

Glenn Fleishman (his smiling face adorns the top of this item) writes the Philly plan is just what I want, admitting that fact is not being reported. Jesse Kopelman adds that Philly can't put in WiMax because Intel's mobility expectations means gear won't be available for two years.

Both may be right. (I've reported before on Intel's WiMax moves, but didn't think they had delayed production.) I may be wrong. But if Glenn and Jesse are correct then we're all proving this larger point, that advocates of municipal wireless are losing the political struggle to a smaller, more disciplined force. We're all on the same side. We shouldn't be arguing with one another.

So I think it's vital for this movement to get organized, and to seek allies among the corporations that will benefit from its success.

I also think it's vital that advocates of municipal wifi understand they're in a political struggle, and to start acting like it. Unlike every other telecomm issue that has come before, which could be sorted out among elites, municipal WiFi depends upon government action, meaning it is inherently political.

I'm certain advocates of these plans, like the one now coming to Minneapolis (left), hoped they could do this in a non-partisan, non-political way. Yet they were going up against the largest, savviest corporate manipulators of government in the country -- the nation's phone companies. This hope was terribly naive.

The only way to success now is through online political organizing. There's a huge cohort of people out there who were politically activated through the Internet in the last two years. Here is an issue for them.

And the full range of tools need to be employed. We need to activate people locally, get out honest information from a central store, educate the media, make this a political issue against legislators who defy us and, as noted, seek allies.

It's a political struggle, a bare-knuckled one at that. And unless the advocates of municipal WiFi start treating it in that way, Americans are going to suffer many more years of high prices for slow broadband, without the competition needed to push things forward.