[ale] bandwidth competition (changing the subject)

[tom]

On Mon, 8 Sep 2008, Pete Hardie wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 19:26, Thompson Freeman
> <tfreeman at intel.digichem.net> wrote:
>> Just a bit of a wishful whine here. I personally would _love_ to see a
>> service which just provided the fiber to the house/home/condo/whatever.
>> Nothing more, just a big fat pipe, preferably with a power source right
>> down beside it independent of the power company which could run a POTS
>> style interface, or other low power data task. In this way, I would
>> hope to limit interference in the market to the biggest single
>> bottleneck in revamping electronic communication and media while
>> opening up the ability of the players to compete on service and
>> support.
>>
>> Into this fiber the customer would choose competitive offerings for
>> push media (cable TV), asymmetric media (on demand cable TV), internet
>> connectivity where the data asymmetry isn't necessarily known ahead of
>> time, phone/video phone, alarm monitoring with appropriate
>> bandwidth limits within each provider's contract. Total bandwidth
>> promises sold not to exceed 80-90% of the minimum available bandwidth
>> between the service head and the customer equipment.
>>
>> Regulation of this fiber pipe should be in terms of reliability of
>> service, total bandwidth, and access to all providers of electronic
>> communications services/media.
>>
>> I'm sure that the engineers in this group can clean up the
>> specification here considerably, and the libertarians can clean up some
>> big brother issues.
>>
>> I think it would work pretty well, but the current dominant players
>> might get clawed up in the transition process. And hence I doubt that
>> they would support it.
>
>
>
> Sounds like the idea of the muni installing and paying for teh fiber
> with tax money, and franchising the connections.
>
Actually, no. I was thinking more in terms of physics and regulatory 
environment. I'd prefer prefer that private enterprise would see an 
opportunity and do the job.