Already have toolbooths on both ends: I pay for access to the internet. Even those students who have "free" access on campus do, except their payment comes out of tuition and/or university endowment. Individual and larger group (student, business, hotspot, etc)access money goes to an ISP, which in turn pays for its lines, or backbone. Google/Red Hat/etc pay for hosting access. So when I go to Google, which I am paying to do, and run a search, which they are paying to send me the results of, that's tollbooths on both ends.
In essence the data-transfer is being double-billed. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. If the telcos aren't charging enough to cover their expenses, then apparently as national, fortune 500 companies, they haven't quite mastered things like income - expense = profit. They should raise their rates across the board. If someone finds a way to provider cheaper, faster internet, and the telcos lose revenue because of it then they're victims of the marketplace, sucks to be them.
This whole thing is a false scarcity argument. Is there any reason a telco or access provider cannot string 100 10Gbs fiber lines at a time, aside from cost (and they are not that expensive)? Is there an electron or photon shortage I didn't hear about? The technical response is "well the routers only have so much capacity at any given point." Sure, and the response to that is simply "make more points." Increasing the number of nodes and hence possible paths from A to B eliminates the choke point issue on single routers/centers, while it improves the net's response to things like outages and those pesky thermonuclear attacks.
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Already have toolbooths on both ends: I pay for access to the internet. Even those students who have "free" access on campus do, except their payment comes out of tuition and/or university endowment. Individual and larger group (student, business, hotspot, etc)access money goes to an ISP, which in turn pays for its lines, or backbone. Google/Red Hat/etc pay for hosting access. So when I go to Google, which I am paying to do, and run a search, which they are paying to send me the results of, that's tollbooths on both ends.
In essence the data-transfer is being double-billed. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. If the telcos aren't charging enough to cover their expenses, then apparently as national, fortune 500 companies, they haven't quite mastered things like income - expense = profit. They should raise their rates across the board. If someone finds a way to provider cheaper, faster internet, and the telcos lose revenue because of it then they're victims of the marketplace, sucks to be them.
This whole thing is a false scarcity argument. Is there any reason a telco or access provider cannot string 100 10Gbs fiber lines at a time, aside from cost (and they are not that expensive)? Is there an electron or photon shortage I didn't hear about? The technical response is "well the routers only have so much capacity at any given point." Sure, and the response to that is simply "make more points." Increasing the number of nodes and hence possible paths from A to B eliminates the choke point issue on single routers/centers, while it improves the net's response to things like outages and those pesky thermonuclear attacks.