New Orleans has become the first U.S. city to escape the Bell Gulag.(That's the Novodevichy Tower in Russia to the left. Figured you were tired of Bell logos.)

It is doing this by building a WiFi network in defiance of a hissy-fit from BellSouth, the local monopoly.

Here it is, straight from The Washington Post:

Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.

According to the officials, the head of BellSouth's Louisiana operations, Bill Oliver, angrily rescinded the offer of the building in a conversation with New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert, who oversees the roughly 1,650-member police force.

BellSouth disputes this, and claims negotiations are ongoing. But the best thing for New Orleans to do right now is hang tough.

The fact is that, if you're starting from scratch (and Katrina forces New Orleans to do just that) a wired solution does not make sense. You can get a ton more bandwidth for a ton less money by going wireless, entirely. A city-owned WiFi network would not preclude anyone from offering their own service, and if the city made certain it ran its backhaul through multiple backbones, creating competition, the price would stay favorable.