A DSL Co-op in Your Neighborhood?

Steve Hamlin writes "In reading on Slashdot about the increasing cost of cable broadband (and DSL is no cheaper), I ran across this article about a neighborhood that put together a co-op for DSL broadband. From a DSLAM housed in a barn to microwave relays, a frame relay T-1, and problems with Qwest, the whole deal."

Comments

Broadband is cheap, bandwidth is expensive

[fruey]

You can get a fat pipe to your house for next to nothing.

You can't get data to your house for nothing.

It's already pay for what you use on a larger scale. It's no different for broadband. Bandwidth itself costs money, infrastructures cost money, international sharing agreements cost time and money

Get real people. Having access to 2mbps is not the same as downloading at full speed all the time on it.

Internet always on != downloading all the time.

Here I pay a huge amount for 2mbps. But, I resell parts of it an calculate that I can cut costs because everyone is not using the bandwidth all the time.

Broadband users are generally bandwidth hogs and ISPs just got the pricing wrong. Live with it. The economic reality is that your real cost to your ISP is:

local loop + equipment (probably monthly fee + equipment depreciation) = not a lot
Actual KB transferred = a fixed, calculable cost to them.

So that's all there is to it.

Re:Good argument for government intervention...

[King Babar]

To all of you anti-government people, I say "get a clue!" The current system is not working and the free market is, by and large, not solving the problem.

The free market IS solving the problem (see the article that spawned this thread) when it is permited to do so.

The problem here stems from monopolies propped up by the government in the first place, leaving you with no legal alternatives. In fact, about the only thing that justifies government regulation to any extent (and not enough, in my book), is the existance of a government-enforced monopoly.

The most fascinating thing about some radical libertarians is their consistency. The big, gaping piece left out of the above argument about government regulation and monopolies is any comment on how or why we might have some government-sanctioned monopolies in the first place. We have them because there was a time for each monopoly industry when it was believed that the best and cheapest way to provide some capital-intensive service where economies of scale were required was through a private sector company (rather than, say, a municipal utility). In some cases, the decision was probably a good one; in others, possibly less so. In *all* cases, the stage was set for a time when changes in technology would lead to the situation where the status quo (government-regulated monopoly) was awkward. So, I think ATT did about as good and as fast a job of wiring up huge pieces of the US in its day, and provided a level of consistent service that served a genuine public good. But the possibility of commodity long-distance pretty much completely changed that reality, so you had the ATT break-up and now the really awkward situation situation where the Verizons and Qwests of the world have some shadowy status of quasi-monopolies via the effective use of bureaucracy.

Wiring up big metro areas for cable was certainly expensive, costly, and not the kind of thing that any company would jump to do unless they had a guaranteed revenue stream. This was fine when all cable amounted to was higher quality feeds of local channels and a few exotic notions like HBO. Now the capacity and reach of the system has gone waaaay beyond that for which the original monopoly made sense...but getting a system with universal access and anything like free market pricing and any kind of reasonable structure is tough.

I could go on. I think it's pretty clear that in most cases, what has gone wrong is neither some raw "failure of the market" or "failure of governmental regulation" but changes in the whole technology landscape that have had completely unforseen consequences on companies, governments, and citizens. It is going to be a mess. I think a market can set prices when it is competitive, but we don't really have many of those going now (except for long distance telephone, the big success story for de-regulation). I think regulated monopolies can spend the money it takes to get infrastructure built, but they are much less useful when their reach extends to the content that is broadcast or the services that are provided.

For that matter, some of the near-future technologies that can help remove us from this quagmire will also require some amount of regulation to do any good. I think wireless IP will be the best thing since sliced bread within a decade. With the appropriate set-up, you *could* do voice, date, TV...you name it with a much different kind of capital outlay (look ma, no cable being laid in our street!). But we already know that unfettered 802.11b can have some, um, interesting consequences if there is no planning or regulation of the use of the specrum involved.

I have no idea what the best answer is, but I have little faith that either hard-core governmental regulation approaches or cowboy networking provide the best answer to all concerned.