On Dec 19, 2010, at 6:21 PM, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 05:58:26PM -0800, Leo Bicknell wrote:
I dream of a day where we have municipal fiber to the home, leased to any ISP who wants to show up at the local central office for a dollar a two a month so there can be true competition in end-user services.
Take a second and think about what THAT would do to the ratio wars. Imagine if any hosting/content provider, with potentially hundreds or thousands of gigabits of unused inbound capacity on their networks, could easily get into providing IP service to eyeballs. Even ignoring the existing 95th percentile silliness like "free inbound transit", which would no doubt rapidly evaporate under this kind of model, the difference in efficiencies between the highly competetive hosting world and the highly non-competetive last mile world are simply staggering.
You say this as if having such a disruption would be a bad thing.
For many content networks, it would be an opportunity to start making money on their bits instead of paying for them, and networks without content expertise would be in serious trouble.
I'm not seeing the problem here. Like any business in a changing climate, they would have to either develop expertise or perish.
I personally can't think of a single thing with more potential for massive disruption to the business models of incumbent providers. There are so many billions of dollars at stake protecting the status quo that it's not even funny, which IMHO is why you'll never see any of this happen in the US, in any kind of scale at any rate. :)
Yes... This is where the "market makes it best" philosophy fails. When the market has become entrenched in one way of doing things, a better way can face serious opposition because of this very fact. Personally, I don't see such a disruption as a down-side. I think it would be the introduction of a relatively level playing field in an area where the playing field has long been very uneven. Owen