Google’s Public Policy Blog features an interesting posting: What if consumers–not carriers–owned the last mile fiber connection to their homes? An experiment in Ottawa, Canada, is set to find out.
In the experiment, about 400 downtown homeowners have the option to pay somewhere between $1,100 and $2,700 for their own personal fiber link. A specialized construction company rolls out fiber to every home, and individual homeowners pay to own the fiber outright, as well as to maintain the fiber over time. The fiber terminates at a “service provider neutral facility,” meaning that any ISP can pay a fee to put its networking equipment there and offer to provide users with Internet access. The project is entirely privately funded.
This sounds pretty whacky on the face of it. What homeowner would want to own, nevermind maintain, his/her own fiber link to the Internet? But Google’s Derek Slater says stranger things have happened:
Cable television started out as CATV — community antenna television, an experiment by individual entrepreneurs and rural towns to deliver broadcast signals across longer distances. The Internet started as an experiment in the research community before becoming the worldwide network we know today.It’s also worth considering that, as recently as a few decades ago, personal telephones were unheard of — the telephone was owned by Bell and simply part of the network. Similarly, the very idea of a “personal” computer used to seem ridiculous, and people relied on sharing access to mainframes. Sure, there are differences between owning your own computer and your own Internet connection, but perhaps one day we may see that the differences weren’t as great as we thought.In the end, it could be like deciding to own your own car or pair of skis. Many people rent those things, but a lot of people decide to buy them outright. And eventually, Slater says, the economics might make sense:
“If you owned your own fiber, you’d be able to connect it to a service provider of your own choosing. Over time, you might save money, and it could make your house more valuable to have a fiber “tail.”And it would lessen the carriers’ overall hold on the vast consumer marketplace, which can only be a good thing for Google. With the carriers out of the last-mile business, more consumers would be able to switch carriers at will, making their decisions primarily on price alone. The result would be to quickly turn carrier-provided Internet service into even more of a commodity than it is today. And that leaves application providers like Google more free to capture and monetize all that Internet traffic…although we all know Google’s true non-evil aim is just to make sure the Internet remains free and open for everyone.
