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Why ADCo?
Ian Peon writes: "Phoenix center recently released a study (pdf or doc) addressing the 'Last Mile problem.' The paper explains why no one has yet been able to crack the cable and phone providers' local monopolies -- and offers a solution: An ADCo (Alternative Distribution Companies) business model.
SF Gate has a good article on this."
Instead, I think they mean to run optical cable through a neighborhood, but not actually to the neighborhood. That's where the money will be, getting cable from one industrial/commercial zone to another without having to go out to the mains every time.
how do we convince people that they need broadband
The following argument works every so often.
You are in a store. You can either buy one bottle of water for three dollars, or fifty bottles of water for six. Which do you choose?
Then again, some people using AOL won't quite get it. Oh, well...
LIVE NUDE PETS!
Does anyone besides me think that making all data lines a public utility would be such a bad idea? Our roads are a public utility. Why not make our data the same?
I'm not advocating that the government-run everything. I think we all know that would be a nightmare for more reasons than one. If the government owns the cable, then there's nothing keeping different data service companies from using portions of it. This could work from the big pipes, all the way down to the last mile. On the backbones, companies would rent out X number of fibers, and Y amount of floor space wherever said fibres meet. The last mile would probably take a while longer to get set, but the same principle would suffice. Each local unit (neighborhood, apt building, etc) gets one of those metal boxes you see sitting around. The data companies just get to rent out space inside of those, to switch from the fiber to the copper that runs to your home/apartment.
No monopolies. Fair competition. And by leaving the operation to the data corps, the existing players still get to stay in the game. I'm sure someone here can come up with something, but I can find no reason why having the government own the physical layer only would be a bad thing. I realize that there is little chance that the telco lobbyists would let an Idea like this fly, but hey... I guy can dream of the perfect net access can't he?
It's pretty obvious that the main stumbling block is getting new connections into houses. Houses are traditionally built with two wire based connections; power and phone. In the past couple decades it's included cable, which is another market that's developing (developed?) a strong monopoly over their local domains.
Remember when cable started coming in back in the 80's? They had to send trucks down every road in every neighborhood burying a cable to get into your building.
That's obviously what these guys are doing, but doing it by loopholing themselves around regulations to cut some of the costs.
I see these "ADCo's" going through a struggling uphill climb, again, a lot like cable companies did twenty years ago. Robots and sewer lines are nice, but I think they'd be much better served to just duplicate the cable company business model instead of looking for instant gratification type solutions, because it's proven to work.
IMO, when construction companies start realizing that people need more than three wires into a house, they'll start laying fiber under neighborhoods and selling it to local companies. Now *that* would be a moneymaker; laying extra lines would be dirt cheap if you already have the ground torn up.
According to a heise article, 60% of German customers have access to alternative local loop providers. However, 98% are still served by GT.
Sadly, nothing much will change anytime soon. The government still holds a huge percentage of GT's stock. If their monopoly were broken, the stock would deflate like Enron's and that windfall of cash could not be spent on securing the next election by way of pork.