On Friday, March 21, 2014 05:59:54 PM Naslund, Steve wrote:
So, as far as the government or Wall Street funding the build out of the commercial Internet, that is not what happened.
Lots of terrestrial and submarine optical fibre was built in the late 90's, and much of it has either gone unused until now, or saw lots of M&A's as a result of the bust that left hundreds-of-millions of dollars in investment with just a few cents on the dollar, over night. Many of those cable systems go by other names you may know today. The Internet isn't one thing.
I see no reason why the US model would not work in any market economy. It is a simple matter of supply and demand. If your economy cannot afford the infrastructure or the people have no money to pay for services, you are going to have a problem. There is a huge problem in that people think GOVERNMENT FUNDED=FREE, it does not and in most cases is more expensive than the commercial alternatives since there is no motivation to be efficient.
No one said they wanted anything free. Everyone knows free Internet only exists at Starbucks and your next Internet communit conference - and even that is not always reliable. In Africa and parts of Asia, supply and demand is equally rife. In fact, in some cases, supply outstrips demand. We could get into a lot of reasons why supply won't reach out to demand, but I'd be digressing. Suffice it to say, while over-supply may be present, it's in the hands of the few who all concert (mostly unknowingly) to keep prices high. As you know, no one will invest in something for a 20-year return. But by the same token, fibre lives for a long while; trying to recoup your investment in six months is not going to help anyone (except open up competition against you, the one who probably went in first). The need for "neutral" infrastructure which is reasonably and well commercially run is likely a solution to better pricing with professional quality, or the knife that butters the price decline wheat.
In that case a hybrid approach like I used in helping schools in the Philippines will work better. We used government funding and private grants to provide high speed internet to rural schools and we did it by buying commercial available wireless and cable services. This helps the people and also helps grow the communications industry there. The government does nothing but pay the bills (and they rarely even do that right).
And I do agree that a hybrid approach with a neutral fibre backbone is what is lacking with these national projects. The governments building these backbones know little about how the Internet really works (which includes DNS, ICANN, and that free things don't work :-). What is needed is clue going into these projects that help turn the national project into a well-run, commercial businesses that looks after itself, but also fufills the goal of ubiquitous connectivity. The hurdle isn't running the network. The hurdle is getting the fibre into the ground - and that is a monumentous hurdle. Running the network is where it all falls apart if unchecked. Mark.