Sometimes the smallness of my own mind boggles it. Forget network neutrality. We need Fiber To The Home (FTTH) and we need to do it ourselves. We, the citizens, should own the last mile. That’s Bob Frankston’s idea, through Robert Cringely, and when I read it I felt like Curly Howard‘s dimmer cousin. “Of course,” I said, slapping my forehead. “This is painfully obvious.”
Cringely is absolutely correct when he writes, “making almost any regulation specifically to hinder or help the Internet can only make things worse.” Frankston says the network neutrality issue comes down to billability and infrastructure. The telecommunications and cable giants aren’t doing and won’t do anything that doesn’t create a billable event. Cringely uses the example of WiFi hotspots. Why should his network provider care about who connects to his access point? He’s paid for those bits, it’s his business who uses them. Frankston says this is like “accusing someone of stealing your porch light by using it to read a street sign.”
Frankston reminds us that the phone company—back when there was just one—used to own the wiring inside our own homes even though we paid for it several times over. He points to the success of the internet residing solely in the fact that no one controls the electrons that comprise it. The solution, according to Frankston, is to build and finance the public infrastructure ourselves. Just like we own the wiring in our homes, we should own the wiring from our homes to our internet service provider’s local point of presence. Never mind that we’ve already paid more than US$200 billion for it through tax credits and incentives that were part of the National Information Infrastructure program. The telephone and cable companies took the money, but where’s the fiber?
Frankston credits the idea for a publicly owned and financed last mile infrastructure to Bill St. Arnaud, senior director of advanced networks for CANARIE—Canada’s next generation optical internet initiative. Cringely says St. Arnaud’s idea is simple:
“Run Fiber to the Home (FTTTH) and pay for it as a community of customers—a cooperative. The cost per fiber drop, according to Bill’s estimate, is $1,000 - $1,500 if 40 percent of homes participate. Using the higher $1,500 figure, the cost to finance the system over 10 years at today’s prime rate would be $17.42 per month.”
And that’s a gigabit circuit to a local point of presence that we—the citizenry—collectively own. We’d be able to connect to any provider who wanted to do business in our geographic locality. Frankston calls it honest funding. “The current system is like buying drinks so you can watch the strippers,” he says. “It is corrupt and opaque. We should pay for our wires in our communities just like we pay for the wires in our homes.”
Forget about net neutrality. When we own our own internet pipes, it becomes a non-issue. Cringely spells it out:
“There would be a community-financed Internet revolution and this time, because it would be locally funded and managed, very little money would be stolen. Dark fibers would be lighting up all over America, telco capital costs would plummet, and a truly competitive market for Internet services would emerge. In 2-3 years whatever bandwidth advantage countries like Korea have would be erased and we’d be back on track building even more innovative online industries.
“This would be a real marketplace not a fake one. Today’s system is a fake because it depends on capturing the value of the application—communications—in the transport and that would no longer be possible because with the Internet the value is created outside the network.”
Frankston draws an analogy to the American roadway systems:
“We have an alternative model in the road system: The roads themselves are funded as infrastructure because the value is from having the road system as a whole, not the roads in isolation. You don’t put a meter on each driveway. Tolls, fuel taxes, fees on trucks, etc. are ways of generating money but they are indirect. Local builders add capacity; communities add capacity and large entities create interstate roads. They don’t create artificial scarcity just to increase toll revenues—at least not so blatantly.
“I refer to today’s carrier networks as trollways because the model is inverted—the purpose of the road is to pass as many trollbooths as possible. We keep the backbone unlit to assure artificial scarcity. Worse, by trying to force us within their service model we lose the opportunity to create new value and can only choose among the services that fill their coffers—it’s hard to come up with a more effective way to minimize the value of the networks.”
Forget the politicians; it’s time for last-mile DIY.
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