Submitted by acohill on Tue, 04/09/2013 - 08:00
All is coming to pass as I have predicted...this is my 38th posting about the Death of TV, and the mainstream media is finally beginning to notice. The San Francisco Chronicle has an article about what is being called "Zero TV" households, meaning that there is neither a cable TV nor a satellite TV subscription at that address. Instead, as I've been writing about for years, people are watching "TV" on their Internet feed instead, using services like Hulu and Netflix to get access to far more content than is available on the traditional cable/satellite feeds, and in a much more convenient fashion.
For communities stuck with "little broadband," the math is pretty grim. With several computers, tablets, and smartphones in the average home, every single device is now a "TV," and so you have to think about the aggregate bandwidth needed to deliver good quality video to several devices in the home at the same time. This eliminates DSL completely, despite the every present claims that DSL/copper twisted pair will get faster "Real Soon Now." It is possible to push 20 or 30 megabits over copper twisted pair, but the unspoken assumption is that you are a relatively short distance from the DSLAM and you have brand new, very high quality copper cable connecting you to that switch. But that's not the case in most rural areas of the U.S. still stuck with DSL. Their copper cable is often decades old.
Wireless broadband is also problematic. Despite the grand claims for 4G/5G/6G/UmpteenG cellular data, the bandwidth caps make it prohibitively expensive to sit at home and watch TV over your cellular data connection. Fixed point broadband wireless (i.w. WiFi, WiMax, etc.) requires line of site, which is difficult and/or expensive in most areas of the country. While fixed point wireless is going to be a very important bridge technology in many rural areas, fiber is and will remain the goal for the U.S.
Skeptics who claim it is too expensive to run fiber to most homes and businesses forget that A) it was possible to run telephone and electric service to homes and businesses decades ago and that was the old One Service--One Cable business model; B) the new fiber cable can deliver many services simultaneously, which changes the business model and makes it financially viable.
The cable and telephone companies have chosen not to compete; instead they are going to state legislatures to get laws passed forbidding municipal and county networks from getting started.
But don't worry...to paraphrase Yoda from Star Wars..."There is...another way." Restrictive legislation is nothing but a speed bump, and it's nothing to worry about....even in North Carolina.
http://www.sfgate.com/business/technology/article/Broadcasters-worry-about-Zero-TV-homes-4415896.php
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 01/04/2013 - 09:20
Facebook is about to roll out voice calling between Facebook users, directly from its smartphone apps. Hmmm...lemme see...back of the envelope calculations here.....Facebook has, roughly, one BILLION users. If Facebook enables voice calling, Facebook is about to become the largest phone company in the world.
What does this mean for communities? It means that one more service is moving very quickly to an all-IP platform and away from the antiquated landline network. Telephone is dying, and dying perhaps even faster than TV. Fast, cheap broadband is going to be the community economic development engine, and communities that can't support the emerging array of thousands of new IP-enabled niche services are going to wither. It's a replay of the interstate build out, except that every community can have an exist on the interstate, because broadband is cheaper than roads. It's cheaper than water lines. It's cheaper than sewer systems. And there is plenty of money for broadband; it's just that in communities today, all that money is being stuffed in envelopes every month as payments to the cable and telephone companies, and the money is being carried by the Postal Service out of the community and typically out of the state.
Link: http://www.macrumors.com/2013/01/03/facebook-updates-ios-app-with-voice-messages-testing-voip-calling-in-canada/
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 10/30/2012 - 12:47
Apparently some IT firms did not study the lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina. What took out most of the phone system and the broadband/Internet networks in and around New Orleans was not the high winds and rain, but rising waters. Many of the network electronics were on high ground (e.g. upper stories of buildings, above flood waters), but the emergency generators were on the ground! The water rose and flooded all the generators, and the networks went dark.
So in New York, the same thing is happening. Major Web sites are going dark because data centers are having power and flooding problems. Anyone that puts a data center in a flood zone (and lower Manhattan is a flood zone) is nuts.
The second lesson from Katrina is that you may need all your data and servers fully duplicated at another location somewhere well away (e.g. several states away) from your primary server location. If the Huffington Post Web site is dark because of power problems in New York City, that tells me they don't have a disaster recovery plan.
As more and more stuff is stored online in "the cloud," there is a growing demand for data centers, and data centers that are away from coastlines, away from flood and hurricane zones, and near high performance open access fiber networks have a distinct advantage.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 10/24/2012 - 08:27
Apple introduced the new iPad mini yesterday, which is an incredible piece of engineering, but to me, the more interesting story is the release of the new iMacs, which seem impossibly thin, largely because Apple has eliminated the DVD drive. Apple has always led on storage media, and the company has a long history of pushing the entire industry in a new direction, including 3.5" floppy drives, CD-ROM drives as standard, DVD drives as standard, solid state drives as standard, and now, elimination of removable media entirely.
The story behind the story is broadband. Only widespread availability of broadband has made it possible to eliminate removable storage from our computers. Apple's Mac App store and the Web have made it possible to buy any software you need directly from the 'net, so who needs a DVD drive? The interesting side effect is that broadband is green....really green. Eliminating hundreds of millions of DVDs also eliminates the cost and energy of manufacturing, storing, and shipping those DVDs. While it is true that data centers storing our content in the cloud use energy, at the same time, broadband and the cloud are eliminating lots of other energy uses.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 08/07/2012 - 14:02
The Danville Broadband Conference, on November 8th and 9th, is still available for the early registration price of $95. It will soon go back up to the full fee of $475, so if you are planning on going, get in on the great deal. You can register here.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 07/12/2012 - 12:55
The city of Danville, Virginia has implemented a long-term comeback strategy. Danville's early investment in an open access fiber network has helped transform Danville's economy after this former tobacco and textile town lost its traditional economic base. At one time Danville had the highest unemployment in the state of Virginia. Today it is attracting new jobs and new industries - and its open access fiber network plays a key role in business attraction and retention. It will be held on November 8th and 9th, 2012.
THIS IS THE FIRST conference of its kind in this country - an event devoted entirely to the relationship between a community's economic vitality and the presence of advanced broadband networks. Nations around the world have recognized this powerful linkage and responded to it - as have a growing number of communities in the United States. Each event in this new conference series will be held in a city with an advanced broadband system. Each event will have an impressive array of speakers whose mission will be to help attendees evaluate the options and opportunities and develop the optimal, affordable solution for their communities. The first conference is in Danville, Virginia - the Comeback City that bounced back from devastation with a visionary broadband strategy that's creating jobs and attracting the businesses and industries of tomorrow.
Learn how once-struggling towns and cities like Danville are successfully deploying fiber networks that serve their citizens today and position their communities for tomorrow while others struggle against seemingly intractable forces and financial challenges.
Topics and Themes Include:
The conference will be chaired by Jim Baller, President of the Baller Herbst Law Group and widely recognized for his expertise in communications and economic development. The FTTH Council called Baller "the nation's most experienced and knowledgeable attorney on public broadband matters."
Dr. Andrew Michael Cohill is president and CEO of Design Nine, a company specializing in municipal and community broadband planning and build outs. Dr. Cohill was director of the world-renowned Blacksburg Electronic Village at Virginia Tech, known as "the most wired community in the world." Design Nine has assisted dozens of communities with broadband planning, and the firm has more open access network experience than any other firm in the country.
Produced by Broadband Communities Magazine in partnership with the City of Danville.
Register now!
http://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=1106024
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 07/03/2012 - 08:01
The storm last Friday night on the East Coast caused such widespread power outages that it took down some cloud-based services, including Netflix. Some of the outages lasted as long as twenty-four hours, but in general, the cloud hosting providers got things back online quickly.
Here is the real problem: suppose your business is located in one of the areas where power won't be restored for a week. Your office has no power....for at least five business days.
Sitting in McDonald's and trying to run your business off laptops, along with sixty other business people, is not a plan.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 05/10/2012 - 11:07
If you were not able to attend the 2012 Broadband Communities Summit in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, you missed a great conference. With an increased focus on both community broadband and open access networks, there were a lot of really good, solid session, especially the five sessions on open access, which I helped to organize.
Here are some of the key ideas, concepts, and take-aways that I noted from the conference:
There was much much more, but those are some of the highlights. Start planning now to attend next year's conference.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 03/29/2012 - 06:15
If you are planning to attend the Broadband Communities Summit in Dallas next month, make your hotel reservations now, as the hotel is selling out. The conference was able to secure an additional block of rooms for the conference, but these are expected to be all gone next week. The conference is going to have a strong focus on community broadband, with tracks on rural broadband initiatives and open access broadband.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 02/09/2012 - 14:52
The popular Broadband Communities Summit (April 24-26, Dallas, Texas) has an extensive track of speakers and sessions devoted entirely to open access and community broadband networks.
Right now the conference is running an early bird registration special (http://bit.ly/wESDR8). A list of the Open Access sessions are below.
Business Planning and Open Access Networks
Open-access networks are built to support multiple providers that offer dozens or even hundreds of services. Instead of collecting revenue for two or three mostly low-margin services, network operators can accrue revenue directly or indirectly from every service offered to customers on the network. Though most of these will be niche services, many have high profit margins. This session will discuss key differences in open-access network architecture, introduce alternative business models and show how those business models can create attractive opportunities for service providers.
Modern Right of Way Management
A community’s rights of way constitute a valuable asset that it can use for economic development and revenue enhancement. Too often, city officials manage this asset in a reactive way, simply responding to requests from telecom providers and other utilities for right-of-way use. Find out how leading-edge communities proactively plan and manage right-of-way usage in order to attract ultra-broadband providers, encourage economic development and fully exploit their assets.
Case Studies: Success Stories for Open Access
The first open-access networks in the U.S. were launched into uncharted waters – no one knew whether or how they would work from a business or technical standpoint. Those starting out today can benefit from the experiences of the pioneers and choose strategies that have been proven successful.
Technology for Open Access
Though most fiber-to-the-premises networks can be configured to support multiple service providers, there are preferred ways to design networks specifically for open access. Learn about new technologies for all aspects of deployment and operation – ranging from conduits to optoelectronic equipment to solutions for network management and provisioning – that have been specifically designed to make open-access fiber networks cost-effective, manageable and easy to implement.
Open Access Fiber and Economic Development
Many of the middle-mile fiber networks being constructed today are open to multiple providers - some of them, though by no means all, because of requirements imposed by government funding. In this session, deployers and operators of middle-mile networks will share what they have learned, from both a technical and business standpoint, about making open access work in the middle mile.
Do it Yourself Fiber – Creative Approaches to Organizing, Financing and Building FTTH Networks in Rural Areas
Rural communities that have been bypassed by both private and public broadband programs are left to their own devices when it comes to obtaining broadband. Some are now proving adept at what might be termed do-it-yourself or “crowd-sourced” broadband strategies. This session will present case studies of rural coalitions – ECFiber in Vermont and B4RN in northern England – that rely heavily on local resources to raise capital, organize projects and even deploy fiber. Can these new models make FTTH practical and affordable in rural settings?
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 01/24/2012 - 10:49
The City of Danville, Virginia is beginning to see some big wins with their steady expansion of the City-owned open access fiber network. Back in the early 2000s, the City Utilities Department had begun installing fiber on City utility poles. Danville Utilities provides electric power throughout the City and large portions of three surrounding counties, with a total service area of nearly 500 square miles, and the fiber was an early smart grid initiative that provided the Utilities Department with better management of substations and power use.
In 2006, the City retained Design Nine to help develop a business plan and network architecture that would open the City fiber to commercial use. This led to the first municipal open access fiber network in the U.S. in 2007, and was arguably the first Gigabit municipal network; true Gigabit circuits were available on day one of operations--the nDanville network is active Ethernet.
Funded with revenue from anchor tenants like the City and the K12 schools, the network has expanded slowly, but from the beginning, the fiber network was part of a larger economic development strategy to re-invent the City, which had seen the loss of thousands of textile jobs in the late 90s. nDanville fiber has sharply reduced costs for connected businesses, especially in the medical community, and a commercial supercomputer facility is coming online in downtown Danville--the location determined in large part by where nDanville fiber is available.
The whole story is here.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 01/20/2012 - 09:53
Apple's announcement yesterday of an improved iBooks application for iPads and iPhones may seem like a kind of ho-hum sort of thing, but it is potentially as big a deal as the introduction of the iPod was a few years ago. Remember that there were all sorts of digital music players on the market prior to the introduction of the iPod; they were uniformly awful to use. The iPod set a very high bar for usability that resonated with customers.
The iBooks announcement was less about the bookshelf app itself than about the accompanying application called iBooks Author. Apple is giving this application away for free, and it sets a new standard for the ease of creation of ebooks. iBooks Author makes it much easier for textbook authors particularly to embed multimedia content in an ebook.
Apple has cleverly paved the way for the sale of millions of iPads that will replace conventional textbooks in both K12 schools and in higher education.
But while that is interesting and brilliant, it's not the real story.
The real story is that iBooks Author allows writers and teachers to create ebooks and sell them directly through the iBooks store without the services of a publisher. Uh oh. Text book publishing is extremely lucrative, with very high prices for the books, and very low royalties paid to the actual authors of the books. Now, text book authors can, albeit with a bit more work, cut out the publishers completely and reap much larger income by selling directly to students via Apple's iBooks service.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 01/10/2012 - 08:58
Open Access networks will be a main highlight at the Broadband Communities Summit in April. This conference was formerly called "Broadband Properties Summit," but the focus of the conference has been widened considerably to include community-owned and municipal networks. In addition to a complete track on Open Access Networks, there is also a full track on Economic Development (in the context of telecommunications), which should be of interest to planners, developers, and local government officials.
More information is available here.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 11/15/2011 - 12:09
A new (http://media.pollposition.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/Poll-Position-Crosstbas-Social-media-helpful-or-harmful.pdf) study suggests that a slight majority of adults think social media is harmful to the social development of today's youth. With the ever-increasing use of social media by young people, Poll Position wanted to know if Americans think social media is helpful or harmful to the social development of today’s youth.
In a national telephone survey of registered voters, 53% said it is harmful, 20% said it is helpful in the social development of youth, 17% said it is not making a difference either way and 11% did not offer an opinion.
Men and women shared similar views on the question with 53% saying social media is harmful to the social development of young people.
Among men, 22% said it is helpful, 17% said it is not making a difference and 9% had no opinion.
Among women, 18% found social media helpful in the social development of young people, 17% said it is not making a difference, 13% did not have an opinion.
By a smaller margin than the national average, young people in the 18-29 year old age group found social media more harmful than helpful with 47% choosing harmful versus 35% who thought it was helpful to the social development of today’s youth. Sixteen percent said social media is not making a difference and 3% did not offer an opinion.
Anecdotally, I see a problem constantly with young people in the workforce who do not know how to communicate in an appropriate way. Many of the younger people I interact with simply won't pick up the phone to discuss a business issue, and instead rely on email, which is often a time-consuming way to identify a problem and propose a solution. I also see an over-reliance on texting and email for urgent information requests. Neither email nor texting is a synchronous communications medium. And when I'm in a business meeting, my attention is on the meeting, not on incoming texts and email. I rarely ever check email or texts during a meeting--if I'm with customers, it is just plain rude.
I have lost count of the number of times someone has emailed me for information that they need within an hour or two, and instead of calling me or talking to our receptionist to determine if I am available, they start sending ever more frantic emails--three or four in the space of an hour, demanding to know where I am and why I have not answered them.
There is a broader issue afoot here than arrested development of social skills, and that is our technology makes it more difficult to escape work. We are expected to read email, respond to texts, and answer phone calls in the evening and on weekends, just because we can. Our ubiquitous connectivity adds stress and strain to our lives. Let's all take a deep breath and slow down a bit.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 10/24/2011 - 08:07
The iPod is ten years old today. The iPod was the brainchild of Steve Jobs. There were plenty of other MP3 music players at the time; most of them were much less expensive and smaller than the iPod, but the iPod was easy to use, both from the interface of the iPod itself, but key to the music player's success was the way the iPod synced with iTunes on your computer--a layer of complexity was completely eliminated, and that made all the difference.
The emergence of the iPod was also the death of the music store, but it was neither Jobs nor Apple that was the death of that anachronism, it was the inevitable march of history, or as Schumpeter calls it, "creative destruction." Ancient Greeks decried written language as the ruination of memorization. In the Middle Ages, the printing press was seen by some as a loss of control over knowledge. Time and technology move on. As we speak, tablet-based devices like the iPad are completing the creative destruction of most paper-based materials, especially magazines and newspapers. I think there will always be a place for some paper-based books, but really, paying less than ten bucks for the latest best seller in ebook format is much better than chopping down trees, making energy-intensive paper, and then engaging in the energy-intensive process of printing and hauling millions of tons of those books around. That's also true of music--music used to require enormous amounts of energy to deliver to the buyer, because music was heavy; it had weight. Today, we buy music as a stream of weightless photons.
What else has changed? In the old days, ten years ago, when music was still heavy, you needed a well-designed road system for the trucks and cars that hauled music around. Today, you need a well-designed digital road system to haul music, books, magazines, movies, TV, health care, business services, and hundreds of other emerging services. Is your community building those digital roads?
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 10/05/2011 - 08:12
Now that the broadband stimulus money has been distributed, and the Google fiber initiative has taken root in the two Kansas Citys, a lot of communities seem to have lost interest in broadband initiatives. The cable companies have done a fairly good job of keeping up with demand, and the telephone companies continue to cling to their share of the broadband market by competing on price rather than on bandwidth.
But this apparent "Remain calm! All is well" approach is the calm before the storm. And the storm is coming to us in a huge cloud. In the past week, Amazon and Apple have rolled out new cloud-based initiatives that will stream content everywhere, all the time. If cloud storage seems like a gimmick, it is not. It is the answer to the utter uselessness of trying to keep all our media content, personal and business, on local hard drives. Music, pictures, movies, and what we used to quaintly call "TV" are driving this problem. Even though you can buy a two terabyte hard drive for $150, you can fill it faster than lickety-split with purchased video. And then you have to figure out how to back it up. Backing it up with a second drive is a good start, but suppose your house or business burns down? Both drives are gone, as is all your data.
Add to that the fact that everyone now wants everything available on every computing device they own, which typically comprises, for many people, FOUR devices: a smartphone, a laptop, a tablet, and a desktop computer. And the portable devices will never have enough storage to keep everything on the device itself. So the cloud is not a typical IT solution in search of a question. We know what the question is, and the cloud is the answer. But streaming everything to everyone all the time is going to create, over the next several years, exponential increases in demand for bandwidth. And that's when the copper-based DSL and cable modem networks will run out of steam.
Communities that have not made plans to ensure a modern fiber-based infrastructure that also supports ubiquitous wireless mobility access will be at a severe disadvantage from an economic development perspective.
Oh, and one more thing. There is another sleeper in the battle for streaming content....Rhapsody (the music service) just bought Napster to try to fight Spotify. Spotify is a streaming music service that is huge in Europe but only recently began operations in the U.S. So the music industry is still undergoing a massive reorganization that is focused on streaming any song every recorded to anyone, at any time, anywhere. And it is going to be a battle of Titans, with Apple, Amazon, Rhapsody, Spotify, and even tiny Microsoft with its Zune music service all going head to head.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 09/26/2011 - 10:19
Passafire is a Savannah, Georgia based band with some roots on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Their most recent album, Start from Scratch (http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/start-from-scratch/id459145244), has zoomed to the top of the iTunes reggae charts to take the number two spot behind perennial number one Bob Marley. What is interesting about this is that the band does not have a contract with a major record label (and "record" is an anachronism these days). Passafire (http://www.passafiretheband.com/) has their own Web site, sells CDs online, but relies primarily on iTunes for their music sales. Oh, yes, and they actually play music in affordable venues. In short, these guys love music, and are able to make a living doing it, because the middle man, the record labels, have been cut out.
Even ten years ago, the members of Passafire would all have been working day jobs and loading a beat up van on Friday and Saturday nights to play a few local gigs. It is only Apple, with its visionary iTunes music store, that has allowed the band to connect with millions of fans in a way that was impossible just a few years ago.
And while some moan about the loss of jobs due to disintermediation, what the whiners forget is that iTunes has created tens of thousands of new jobs, and I would bet that the net jobs in the music industry has increased, and is spread far more equitably around the country, starting with what must surely be thousands of jobs at Apple just running the iTunes store. Then you have all the musicians that can actually market to a worldwide audience via iTunes, increasing their income and for some of them, turning their love of music into a full time job.
Bring the disintermediation on; it creates more opportunity by decentralizing economic power. Next up: the disintermediation of the TV and telephone industries.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 08/18/2011 - 08:55
Back in 2006, with the help of Design Nine, the City of Danville made the decision to open their city-owned fiber for commercial use. The first customers were connected in 2007. The self-funded project has grown slowly, has spent carefully, and manages more than one hundred and fifty miles of fiber with just two dedicated staff. The City had an early advantage because Danville is an electric city--they own many of the utility poles, and electric utility line crews have done much of the construction and maintenance work. Some specialized work, like fiber splicing, is still outsourced.
This article in (http://www.virginiabusiness.com/index.php/news/article/in-transition/313469) Virginia Business highlights the slow but steady changes that the municipally-owned fiber have brought to the community.
The Danville Medical Network is an nDanville initiative, and more than 50 medical offices, facilities, and the hospital are linked via city-owned fiber, saving easily many tens of thousands of dollars a month.
The White Building renovation into a massive data center is directly a result of the availability of nDanville fiber at the site.
A new supercomputer will be housed in the Tobacco Warehouse district; superbly renovated historic tobacco warehouses and office buildings all have access to nDanville fiber.
The Ikea plant relies on nDanville fiber for one of their redundant fiber links to keep the plant running.
EcomNets, the green PC manufacuturer, uses nDanville fiber.
nDanville's early focus has been on serving businesses, and every lot in all five business parks in the area are passed by nDanville fiber. Many other commercial areas of the City are also passed by nDanville fiber, and all the substations in the 500 square mile electric service area are managed with nDanville fiber. But (http://www.muninetworks.org/content/open-access-ndanville-network-goes-residential) the project has just announced their first fiber to the home initiative, starting with a 250 home pilot project.
The City of Danville, which once had the highest unemployment in Virginia, now looks like the best place for a technology business in the Commonwealth. What other Virginia community can offer:
A community-owned fiber network that can deliver business class services affordably at ANY bandwidth anywhere on the network.
Some of the finest Class A office space in the state, in beautifully renovated historic buildings, with apartments, condos, and downtown nightlife in walking distance.
Community owned fiber that passes every business parcel in every single business park, with a wide choice of service providers.
A state of the art, 600,000 square foot data center coming online right in downtown Danville.
Beautiful historic homes and churches throughout the community.
Some of the lowest cost of living indexes in the region.
City leaders have taken the slow and steady approach on a wide variety of economic revitalization initiatives, but it is fiber that has, quite literally, connected the dots for Danville.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 04/27/2011 - 09:27
Broadband Properties has published its March/April 2011 in parallel with the Broadband Properties 2011 conference in Dallas. My article on "worst practice" in community broadband networks can be found on page 122 of the magazine, and is available online in the electronic edition.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 10/27/2010 - 07:57
A few months ago, a competitive telecom provider ran fiber down the main road near my home. Yesterday I figured out why; a crew was running a fiber drop to the bank branch on the corner. All over America, it is the dawn of Fiber 2.0. Fiber 1.0 took place in the late nineties, when an enormous amount of capital was spent on fiber too far in advance of the marketplace for demand. Along with the rest of the dot-com ventures, Fiber 1.0 was a bust. But today, the market for bandwidth continues to grow along a nice smooth curve, with the demand doubling every two years, and we have fifteen years of data to back this up. While the incumbents are busy trying to convince us they can meet this demand with 1950s copper cable plant, smaller telecom firms are busy spreading bits of fiber through communities to cherry pick the more profitable business customers. These companies tend to have no interest in full fiber build outs, and instead just want to lock up a portion of the local business market. Fiber is still costly enough (mostly for the labor to put it in) that once a customer like a local bank is captured by one of these smaller fiber firms, no other provider will gamble on the expense of building a second fiber cable to the same location: the first fiber provider in essentially creates a small monopoly. Nice work if you can finance it.
The tragedy is that as communities are chopped up among two or three small telecom firms, a Balkanization occurs. In effect, the incumbent duopoly (the phone company and the cable company) is replaced with a cartel--a handful of providers who have a vested interest in limited competition. Prices come down a little, but then freeze at the new cartel price point. The end result is that it becomes more challenging financially to build a single community-owned shared, high performance network; not impossible, but more difficult because key anchor tenants like schools and large businesses have already been cherry-picked with long term contracts.
Best regards,
Andrew Cohill
President, Design Nine
Design Nine was selected as a Broadband Properties top 100 company in 2008, 2009, and 2010.
Designed by Design Nine, the nDanville fiber network has won the Intelligent Community Forum's Smart 21 award for 2010.
Design Nine provides visionary broadband architecture and engineering services to our clients. We have over seventy years of staff experience with telecom and community broadband-more than any other company in the United States.
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