Joho the Blog
|
|
|
March 05, 2007
At Freedom to Connect , James Salter is talking about the need to get the US connected right. He builds fiber networks. We're at 19 in the world in bandwidth and falling. Fiber can carry 100 terrabytes a second. [Did I hear that right?] YouTube uses more bandwidth than the entire iunterent did 5 years ago. A utility in the southeast is wiring every house with fiber, for $1250 per home, complete. Who's doing fiber? Verizon, selectively. They've done a million or more homes, but it's going mainly to the rich and the white. Gov't ought to be an enabler of fiber. John Waclawsky of Motorola says we've evolved from plain ol' telephony that was simple and reliable to having many options. Connectivity is becoming ubiquitous. And complex. But it will get simpler. We will have a smart edge and a facilitating core, as opposed to a smart edge and a dumb core. Sanjit Biswas of Meraki has what David Isenberg thinks is the "holy grail" of wifi mesh networking. It's a $50 mesh router. It's a spinout of MIT's Roofnet. They want to create networks deployed by communities without involving a telco (except for one person's access). They've been in beta for 6 months. Meraki's market is the "next billion" Internet users. They have 15,000 people connected. It costs users $1-$2 month. Meraki is trying to engage local entrepreneus to create these networks. Today he announces they're building a "huge experiment" in San Francisco, building a network of 1,000 repeaters with free DSL bandwidth - maybe 30 lines would serve the area. [I spoke with Sanjit afterwards and asked him why he won't get sued by the telcos. He said that it's an uncertain area, there are some IPs who are ok with it, they're working mainly in low income areas where a law suit would look really bad, and that he's focused more on areas outside of the US.] [Tags: wifi fiber mesh meraki san_francisco ] Posted
by D. Weinberger at March 5, 2007 02:51 PM
|
Comments
Look back over the last century at the roll out of utilities and infrastructure. Water, gas, sewage, electricity, phone lines, cable. In the US and in the UK we moved from a purely government based system to a private system supported by government financial incentives and controls. We should look at the fibre rollout in the same light.
But this time around, let's not give overwhelming monopoly rights to the private interest that is being supported by tax credits or other financial incentives as well. Let's build in requirements like forcing them to sell wholesale bandwidth and LLU from the start. Then there's a possibility of layering real market competition on top of the infrastructure.
Posted by: Julian Bond | March 6, 2007 03:48 AM