(2006-07-20) Cringley Frankston Net Neutrality Home Broadband

Robert X Cringely on a conversation with Bob Frankston about Net Neutrality and Broad Band/WiFi/Infrastructure funding. While saying they are doing us favors, ISP-s are really offering us services they can bill for. Nothing is aimed at helping us, while everything is aimed at creating a billable event... To Bob Frankston's way of thinking this all comes down to who owns the Infrastructure. The phone (TelCo) and cable companies (CableCo) own the wire outside our homes but we own the wire inside... The obvious answer is for regular folks like you and me to own our own Last Mile Internet connection. This idea, which Frankston supports, is well presented by Bill St Arnaud in a presentation you'll find among this week's links. (Bill is senior director of advanced networks with CANARIE, which is responsible for the coordination and implementation of Canada's next generation optical Internet initiative.) The idea is simple: run Fiber To The Home (FTTH) and pay for it as a community of customers - a CoOperative. (OpenNet)

Related Bob Frankston piece on the Economics Of Scarcity that the TelCo-s are trying to maintain.