>> Sure, true Internet access is not free. You pay taxes to fund your >> libraries, schools, and government, which has to maintain the backbone >> for our continent. > > The last time I checked, these were Internet access consumers, not > providers. The Internet is a collection of COMMERCIAL backbone networks.
Consumers pay for providers' networks: some classes of consumer are themselves funded partly by taxes. So, at least to a certain extent, (some) commercial backbones are (partly) funded by taxes. Since some of these consumers are often users of large amounts of bandwidth (research networks, for example) I think this probably does also in turn contribute to allowing a greater economy of scale so lowering the cost of lower bandwidth connections to other consumers. > $30/month is a long way from covering the cost of SDSL/Frame Relay/Frac > T-1 high speed Internet access. Think more like 5X that figure or more > for commercial access plus a couple thousand dollars per store in > equipment. Wireless distribution can help there (at least in busier areas able to support a number of hotspots) since a lot of the more expensive equipment doesn't need duplicating at each site. (I agree that commercial access is needed for this type of project - the figures for consumer cable/ADSL don't work out if many people are sharing that type of connection). -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
