Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

Mon Dec 20 02:21:13 UTC 2010

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. 
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 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. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
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