Michael Weinberg wrote: > > To clarify Russell's point: > > The telcos have a monopoly (or the cable/telcos have a duopoly) on the > carriage of your bandwidth. That infrastructure, is not, in of itself, > lucrative for them. In fact, my sense is that they mostly feel it is a > miserable asset that they are forced to maintain in order to continue > to charge customers for bandwidth and content. Consider how > recalcitrant they often are to send a tech out to repair things. >
Yep. I agree with this. Building out an alternative local loop / last mile infrastructure is sorely needed. Whether that takes the form of high capacity, low latency wireless links (perhaps some 60ghz stuff or 802.11y) or some wired technology (perhaps a combination of fiber and copper ala Uverse but via a CLEC). > Building a community fiber network will always be costly, but I would > argue that it is not expensive. I think that's a huge amount of "it depends". :) Certainly with aerial right of way costs are vastly reduced. However fighting a rate regulated utility for rights of way... well funding the lawyers for that will take substantial capital. > The benefits, both tangible (access to > $10-20 bandwidth, from your choice of providers) and intangible > (access to traditional content over a new medium and access to new > content that does not fit the old model) are enormous and outweigh the > expense withing a couple years. The main barrier, as I see it, is lack > of curiosity and inertia. Convincing your neighbors it is time to take > the plunge is a matter of illustrating what the future could (should) > look like. > So.... outside of the tech savy community that hangs out on open source mailing lists and slashdot .... how many people care about the monopoly/duopoly? I would say it's people that don't have any access to broadband right now (large portions of rural america for example). If people have access to FiOS/uverse or whatever the cable offerings are why do they care about alternatives? I realize why we care and why the issue is important. I don't argue that for a second. I just want to know how we can better evangelize and engage those outside the traditional tech circles. Give me those talking points, and I'll raise the capital and get the resources. I would have already if I had those talking points. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ The Personal Telco Project - http://www.personaltelco.net/ Donate to PTP: http://www.personaltelco.net/donate Archives: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.wireless.portland.general/ Etiquette: http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/MailingListEtiquette List information: http://lists.personaltelco.net To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
