Slashdot Mirror
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."
Why not set up a comminity wireless network or check if your neighbour already has http:ghostmodernism.com/
I have one word for you: that's two words.
The internet is a huge international resource, I never understood why a few monopoly-prone corporations were put in charge of those last few miles anyway
The internet is a collection of networks. "It" doesn't exist, per se. We only see it as a system because it behaves as one - but it's not like it's some natural resource that copper providers are keeping us from.
In most cases, the companies that have copper (telephone lines for dial-up or DSL, or coaxial cable for TV) were doing that before broadband to your house was even a consideration. They weren't "put in charge" of the last few miles, they invested a ton of money to string up untold miles of cable all over the place so that they could, over the long term, make money by charging people to use what they'd just spent that money installing. Hauling data over that same infrastucture came later, usually long after some areas were already wired up.
Now, I live in a 20-yeard old neighborhood, and I've got my choice of two cable providers, two telcos, and now a fiber provider. They've all pulled their own buried conduis through the area, and will drop off their service right at the wall of my house. They're competing viciously for my bundled bandwith/cable/phone dollars. I haven't really even bothered to evaluate the wireless options since that's less appealing to me.
But the main thing is that your local telco and cable weren't put in charge of your internet connection - they were the ones that already had the infrastructure in place. A completely new pipe to your house, provided by someone else (including yourself) is very, very expensive - you need trucks, utility permits, labor, materials, and something to plug it all into. The math rarely makes sense unless you know you're making a long-term committment. Phone companies figure they are, since even if you move away, the odds are good that the next person at that address will also want the same service. That stability is what made it worth their investment to put that copper there in the first place - and it usually takes years and years of your paying the phone bill to offset what they paid to put it there.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
As to the inter-city hauls, those are already available at decent rates once you get your local bits to a nearby POP.
Sayeth the Cringe (I RTFA):
The whole point of the article is that by doing the expensive (relative to a consumers monthly ISP bill) last mile infrastructure ourselves, we avoid the rent seeking behaviors of the current last mile owners who are more in the business of monthly billing events than transporting packets. If you pay $50 a month for broadband and the part of that service between your local POP and the rest of the world currently runs about $2 per month, what exactly do you get for that other $48 per month? Email service? Blocked server ports? The ability to get a less comprimised QoS by paying more?
Cringe thinks we could, over a 10 year period, finance fiber to your door with crazy local bandwdith (basically free) and cheap metered Internet service (for what you use today, not necessarily what you might use when you can do BitTorrent at 100Mbit/s symetrical) for about $20 per month if you and your neighbors worked collectively. At that point, ISPs and TV providers would be more likely to beat a path to your "last mile" door since the really really expensive part was already built by someone else (you) who doesn't discriminate against them like the Bells would against CLECs.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.