Test Selling "Last Mile" Fiber to Homeowners Under Way in Canada

Ars Technica is covering an interesting pilot program taking place in Ottawa, CA. 400 homes are being outfitted with fiber optic cables; however, the "last mile" of fiber is going to be sold outright to the homeowners rather than providing internet at a monthly fee. "In the future, it could become commonplace for homes to come with 'tails.' These customer-owned, fiber-optic connections would link them to a network peering point. Without the expense of rolling out last mile infrastructure to every home, many more ISPs could afford to serve a given neighborhood by running wiring to the peering point, leading to more competition and lower prices. Perhaps best of all, the growth of customer-owned fiber could make debates over 'open access' and network neutrality moot, as robust telecom competition should prevent the worst of the monopolistic behavior exhibited by telco and cable incumbents."

Comments

Re:won't prevent anything

[MickLinux]

Yes -- I can think of how this works at the hospital (well, you pay the hospital megabucks for being there--the same money you'd have paid for the full service; but you still find you're liable to the doctor's union, and to the radiologist, and the pharmacologist, and the pharmacist, and the food service provider, and the company that provides the little packets of salt...)

Or I can think of how this works on Windoze machines that are sold without windoze (well, you have to pay them to not install it...)

It seems to me that the idea of selling the last mile of cable is simply a way of offloading costs (servicing the last mile of cable becomes YOUR problem, when you're neighbor's installer cuts your cable) while charging the homeowner a profit at the same time. Nor do I think that prices will be lower.

I'd call it dividing up the bill and double charging.

But maybe I'm wrong. This is Canada we're talking about, not the good ol' US of A. Us USAians are good at taking a good idea and driving it for such profit that we break the camel's back. Canada has followed us in that in some respects, but not nearly as badly.

They should partner with Google

[Tmack]

Since google has already perfected the easiest deployment scheme, with No trenching needed!

Tm