Arstechnica had a nice article yesterday by Timothy Lee entitled The Long Tail following up on Derek Slater's article last week on the Google Public Policy Blog entitled What if you could own your Internet connection? Both articles are about a pilot project in Ottawa.
The "tail" in Timothy's article is the "last mile" (or as I prefer, "first mile") fiber connection from individual homes to a network peering point or other aggregation point where individuals can then choose from among multiple competing ISPs. The importance is, as Timothy Lee puts it,
Without the expense of rolling out last mile infrastructure to every home, many more ISPs could afford to serve a given neighborhood by running wiring to the peering point, leading to more competition and lower prices. Perhaps best of all, the growth of customer-owned fiber could make debates over "open access" and network neutrality moot, as robust telecom competition should prevent the worst of the monopolistic behavior exhibited by telco and cable incumbents.
Typical costs run below $3000 per household depending on density and the number of households that agree to participate. Considering the cost of a home, this is one investment that should easily increase the value of the home, most likely by much more than the cost!
Mentioned by Derek although unmentioned by Timothy is the most important person here, Bill St. Arnaud, Chief Research Officer at CANARIE, a Canadian nonprofit that focuses on network infrastructure.
Bill is driving the Ottawa trial and is the leading proponent of condominium fiber as described in his presentations here. His work has also had a major impact on my thinking about "layer zero" competition.
Either way, articles on the Google blog and at Arstechnica will help promote this excellent concept and, hopefully, improve the quality of discussion in policy circles.
I was in Romania this summer and they had a fascinating approach to the last mile: run your own fibre.
It was really funny to see the massive numbers of fibre strands running all over Bucharest, hung willy-nilly from lampposts, power poles, balconies, traffic signals, weather vanes, and pretty much any structure that one could figure out a way to attach a cable to. Messy? Yes. Unregulated? Effectively, yes (you simply sneak up the pole late at night). The upshot of all this is that most of the urban centres in Romania have massive amounts of bandwidth right to the residence. It is common to be able to download data as fast as the NIC in the PC is able to consume it.
They have access to last-mile bandwidth that we in North America can only dream of, for the same cost as we get DSL.
Posted by: Jim Van Meggelen | October 22, 2008 at 10:52 PM
Jim, thanks for this information! That makes me very interested in visiting Romania.
It also reminds me of some strange wiring I saw in Moscow (summer 2007) where there were many examples of cables strung directly between the roofs of 8-12 story apartment buildings, including cables that went across public streets. See:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/broughturner/987586071/in/set-72157601172978418/
I asked what they were. I'm not sure I got the correct answer, but it appears they may be cable TV (but why are there so many??)
In any event, the real last mile issue is rights-of-way, i.e. what vested interests get to control access to rights-of-way.
Posted by: Brough Turner | October 23, 2008 at 10:04 AM