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Own the Last Mile
jonabbey writes "Robert X. Cringely's most recent column advocates a radical solution to the network neutrality thicket: create our own last mile infrastructure, rather than paying the telcos and cable companies to use our bandwidth as a lever. From the article: "A model in which the infrastructure is paid for as infrastructure -- privately, locally, nationally, and internationally can create a true marketplace in which the incentives are aligned. Instead of having the strange phenomenon of carriers spending billions and then arguing that they deserve to be paid, we'd have them bidding on contracts to install and/or maintain connectivity to a marketplace that is buying capacity and making it available so value can be created without having to be captured within the network and thus taken out of the economy."
What incentive would the bandwidth providers have... for practising a transparent and 'fair' bisiness model? How many 'consumers' are technically capable / informed to take up this task?
I think you may have missed the point. The broadband providers would be out of the picture, so far as the business of prividing broadband access is concerned. ISPs would have to compete on Internet services not access. The question of 'fair' business models wouldn't come up, because they wouldn't have monopoloy control over anything. And if we don't have large companies leveraging their publicly granted monopolies into strategic advantages in Internet services, the result is that the government gets out of the business of monitoring and intervening in private enterprises to enforce fairness.
How many 'consumers' are technically capable / informed to take up this task?
How many are capable now? And even if they were capable, what good does that do if they can only get broadband through one provider?
A public broadband infrastructure would lower the barriers to entry in service. If you don't like Comcast or Verizon, you can choose a small service oriented ISP, or even get together with your friends and start a co-op. You might not be able to figure out which ISP is the best, but if you didn't like your service you could cancel it and buy somebody else's. You can't do that now in many places without giving up broadband.
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We are building a house in a remote, upscale community of 125 houses. The only option out there for access is cable which isn't much of an option as the ISP is small and not very forward looking. I contacted some of the better alternative ISPs in the area in the hopes of finding someone who would be more willing to work with a small community. Most of them said if we can get a commit level of greater than 50% from the community they would bring the service out to us for free (DSL). The DSLAM would be local so everyone would have a fast connection. The ISP is calculating recovery of installation costs in 2.5 years. The people that commit would have to sign a 3 year agreement. Some of you might be thinking that why would someone do that with only 6 months of guaranteed income. The ISPs all said that their customer loyalty rates are higher than average so they are counting on keeping customers for a much longer period of time, plus there isn't much choice in ISPS as there would be in a larger community.
The second alternative which are are looking into is the cost to get the main Telco ISP to drag fiber to us. So far they have speculated that the cost would be around $250K plus we would have to purchase the termination equipment on our end. The builder would be willing to run the fiber from the local demark to each home for free (we pay for the cable). The conservative estimate is that it would take us around 8 years to pay off (at normal monthly cable rates) but we would all have shared access to the fiber.
There is a huge disparity in the costs that the small ISP is calculating for the fiber and what the telco would charge us, I am not sure where that comes from yet but we are looking into it.