On 5/31/21 11:49, Daniel Karrenberg wrote:
I do not live in the US and I do not pay US taxes. So I have no
opinion on the original question. Let me offer an observation:
I live in NL and I have two strands of glass plus coax into my house
in a rural village in the ‘far south’. I do not live at the end of a
50 mile dirt road but for NL it is quite rural. The fibre has been
installed and paid for by a company called Reggefiber, founded and
backed by not-for-profit real estate developers. They do not provide
the Internet service. I have a choice of ISPs using the Reggefiber
glass. I buy 500/500 from one of those at EUR 69.50, ~ USD 85 per
month; this includes a data-only SIM with 1GB/month on 4G whether I
want it or not. I actually get 500/500 to the office, we peer with the
ISP. I get at least 450/450 to my family server hosted in DE (RTT
~15ms); so I have to bandwidth limit the back-ups I pull *to* my house
from DE lest I inconvenience the rest of the family. I canceled the
cable broadband which I initially kept for redundancy after a year
because the glass is more than reliable enough.
I am a happy customer!
The reasons this got installed were not subsidies from public/tax
money. They were:
1) Reggefiber was not connected to one of the incumbents with
existing plant.
2) Reggefiber was run by people who understood long term, low
return investments.
2a) They got their money from the part of the banks that
understand such investments.
3) The government did not provide subsidies but regulations that
made this viable for Reggefiber and the ISPs.
3a) Afaik the government provided a subsidy for a small number
(1?) of proof-of-concept deployments.
I guess you see it coming from the past tense already. KPN, the major
incumbent acquired Reggefiber through some pretty impressive lobbying
effort that made it impossible for the founders to keep it. The
company still exists but deployment rates have gone down. On the
bright side: the model has proven to work and there are quite some
smaller localised efforts. I guess that these are similar to the US
co-op idea that was mentioned here.
Just my own observations. Think globally, act locally.
The Stokab model, in Stockholm, still continues to impress me.
Your story reminded me of them.
Mark.
