Tuesday Morning Links
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 elray
join:2000-12-16
Santa Monica, CA | Utopia Fails As predicted, with no profit motive, no reason to be efficient, and a subscriber base unwilling to pay the costs, Utopia is in debt up to its eyeballs, and circling the drain.
What's the solution?
Raise property taxes, of course! | |
|  | axus
join:2001-06-18
Washington, DC | Re: Utopia Fails Try to sell it to Google  It definitely shows how inefficient government can be; commercial broadband providers are making lots of money. | |
| | | Reviews:
 ·Millenicom
 ·AT&T Southeast
·Verizon Wireless..
| Re: Utopia Fails I have looked at the re-sellers offerings. They mostly are old think. It is no wonder few sign up. I see companies offering low ADSL speeds and bragging about a fiber connection. I see companies who only do "business" accounts. This experiment shows that giving unimaginative incumbents access to a fiber network is like giving a 3 year old child access to a new $9,000 engineering workstation as a present. He will probably only want to play games that could be done on a $900 all in one. The demand for an open access network was based on what seemed like a reasonable theory that it would foster serious competition. It was supposed to work like local loop unbundling did in other countries such as Japan, Great Britain, and France. The real solution may be to remove the incumbents and build a regional/municipal FTTH network similar to EPB Fiber, LUS Fiber, or Monticello MN FiberNET. | |
| | | | elray
join:2000-12-16
Santa Monica, CA | Re: Utopia Fails said by davidhoffman: The real solution may be to remove the incumbents and build a regional/municipal FTTH network similar to EPB Fiber, LUS Fiber, or Monticello MN FiberNET.
Who will pay for it? | |
| | | | | Reviews:
·Millenicom
·AT&T Southeast
·Verizon Wireless..
| Re: Utopia Fails Taxpayers and electric utility customers. If the smart electric grid applications are as important to dealing with future electric energy availability and pricing as some analysts have indicated, then the taxpayers and customers are going to need to pay for the fiber optic connections necessary to utilize all the potential benefits. As long as you are out deploying a fiber optic network for the electric smart grid, you can deploy fiber optic infrastructure to create a FTTH ISP framework by running FTTP to all premises you provide electrical service to. Since you are the electric utility, getting electric connectivity to power all the devices is not a major problem, as you are building the fiber system along your own electricity supply system. You can design and construct facilities to house ISP operations and equipment. Then you can either become an ISP yourself, expanding from being the electric utility company, or you can hire an experienced contractor to run the ISP portion using your newly constructed facilities and FTTP network. You get the smart grid needed for future electricity availability management and the community gets a FTTH network and a new ISP choice. In a future world of IP based video and voice services you may not need to offer a specific television or telephone package of services. Subscribers should be able at that time to stream or download directly from the content producers. They may have to pay the content producers subscription fees, pay per view fees, or watch advertising to do so, but that will not concern the ISP operator. As far as voice telephone services, that is more difficult to predict. Will everyone be using a Google Voice type telephone service? Will Skype type services be prevalent? | |
| | | | | | elray
join:2000-12-16
Santa Monica, CA | Re: Utopia Fails My electric rates are high enough, as are my taxes.
No thanks.
I have no interest in subsidizing your fiber fantasies. | |
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Reviews:
·Millenicom
·AT&T Southeast
·Verizon Wireless..
| Business under-served broadband market - FierceTelecom I disagree with the author's premise that there is not enough attention paid to business HSI needs. The USA Stimulus funds that went to the FCC and USDA for broadband expansion had applicants that were awarded grants or loans based on applications to expand HSI for entire communities. Almost every applicant that was awarded had some mention of better HSI service to a stated number of small and medium businesses in their community. A community would have probably not be awarded if they had been ignorant enough to forget the small business HSI needs in the application. I read many of those applications and most included the number of potential businesses to be served and potential job growth. The bigger problem is that we have too many laws restricting municipal FTTH and rural cooperative FTTH builds even when there is no progress in service from incumbent ISPs. Let more small communities build like Monticello MN did and you might see some real progress from real competition. | |
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