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.'"

Comments

Re:Won't work

[Lumpy]

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.