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Houses With Tails

nnfiber writes "What if home owners could also own their Internet connection? Tim Wu, of New America Foundation and Derek Slater, Google's Policy Analyst, say this can be a new effective way to encourage broadband deployment — an important issue in 'America's economic growth.' In his post, Timothy B. Lee says: 'That might sound like a crazy idea at first blush, but Wu and Slater do a great job of explaining how it might work. The key idea is "condominium fiber," an arrangement in which a number of neighboring households pool their resources to install fiber to all the homes in their neighborhoods. Once constructed, each home would own its own fiber strand, while the shared costs of maintaining the "trunk" cable from the individual homes to a central switching location would be managed in the same way that condominium and homeowners' associations currently manage the shared areas of condos and gated communities.'"

7 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is nice, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Boxee can be used as a 'hulu box'. It is in limited alpha testing, but they do allow signups. It is pretty slick to browse through all of the Hulu shows with a remote, and watch anything on demand.

  2. Re:Fios by pthor1231 · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you would bother to do a little bit of looking first, you would see that FIOS is not available in NEARLY all cities.

  3. Is this a joke??? by Splab · · Score: 2, Informative

    This has been going on for ages in Denmark.

    Local community calls up some provider, they dig in cables, each home owner coughs up with the money for the digging+cables (around 10.000DKR ($1800) the houses value increase by the value of the new cables - cables belong to the houses, switch boxes etc. belong to whatever provider you choose.

    Seriously US, get with the times!

  4. Re:Won't work by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Informative

    And I bet the cable companies/isp's would not like the idea of joe sixpack competing with them.

    nope. there used to be a thing called "community TV" a neighborhood would buy a lot, set up a big tower with antennas and wire all the homes with "cable tv" and everyone paid $25.00 a year to it's upkeep and upgrading.

    Cable Tv companies came up with "franchise fees" when they entered into a market. They used this along with lobbying for legislation to make running a non profit free "community TV" system illegal. you had to be a business and pay franchise fees. This killed every system across America as the cable companies came in.

    Nobody is willing to lobby state and federal lawmakers to make it legal for neighborhoods to band together and put up a community tv system legally anymore. We just bay like good sheep and pay out $55.00 a month Cable TV bill.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  5. Re:how is this better then ISPs? by geekoid · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well it depends on your HOA, mine was fantastic.
    That said, you just give another example of why it is important to be involved.
    I went to a couple meetings, but everything was ran so well I didn't have anything to talk about.
    Shock there hand and brought warm donuts to the next meeting. A meeting where they where deciding whether or not to LOWER our dues. I was against it. I told them it would be better to put that extra money aside in case a catastrophe. -- from 85 to 78 month

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  6. Re:Won't work by Ian+Alexander · · Score: 4, Informative

    I hate to rain on your parade but every bear market of the last century has little upward tics every now and then, even while the overall trend is a race to the bottom.

    Here's a chart illustrating our current situation compared to the Depression, the 70's oil crisis, and the Dot-com bust: http://dshort.com/charts/bears/four-bears-large.gif

  7. Re:Segregated pools... by Surreal+Puppet · · Score: 2, Informative

    I live in Sweden, and we have a non-insignificant population of homeless people in the major cities, mainly consisting of uneducated immigrants, druggies and runaway kids. A few "normal" citizens down on their luck too. You get an apartment from the social services if you are drug-free, but some people just can't quit, and i guess some people are too sane to be in an asylum but too insane to live on their own. Remember, illegal immigrants don't get those benefits, if they don't manage to find hostpital staff willing to look the other way.