In the spirit of today’s freewheeling net neutrality debate, Om Malik’s blog features a hard-hitting piece by Daniel Berninger. Berninger, a senior analyst at Tier1 Research, starts off by challenging the arguments and analogies offered in defense of proposed telco service tiering strategies:
Consider the misleading assertion that tinkering with network neutrality simply amounts to adding class of service as in the case of air travel or HOV lanes on highways. Network neutrality refers to the uses of the Internet not the quality of access. There already exists an infinite range of classes of service as regards Internet access. End users pay for what they get regarding the performance and capacity of Internet access. Internet content and service providers like Google, Amazon, and Vonage already pay for access to the Internet.
The telco and cable companies have in mind creating another type of customer not a class of service. They want suppliers to pay for the right of transit. It amounts to airlines charging Time Warner for the right of readers to take Time magazine on an airplane. It means charging Ford tolls in addition to drivers for the right of Ford cars to use highways.
Berninger also weighs in on the relationships between network neutrality, market power, political power and lobbying budgets, and healthy market functioning, in the form of innovation and end-user choice:
Beware of the monopolist that wants the “market” to decide. If there actually existed a healthy market for Internet access, users would certainly switch away from service providers tinkering with performance based on kickbacks from content companies. The toll collecting ambitions of the telco’s and cable co’s hinge on the absence of market forces. The fights against municipal wireless initiatives and lobbying budgets that exceed R&D budgets arise to defeat any leakage of market power. Network neutrality forces a virtuous cycle where winning requires making offers faster and cheaper.
Eliminating network neutrality means giving one participant in the value chain a tool to extract a greater share of revenues without delivering greater value. The best effort Internet holds far more promise than the metering of scarcity associated with QoS because “best effort” continues to improve…Continuous improvements in cost performance represents the key to growth just like every other area of info tech.
An end to innovation probably represents the main motivation behind opposition to network neutrality rather than merely the desire for a second revenue stream from Internet access. The dominant providers of Internet access have powerful incentives to protect their existing voice and video revenue streams from Internet enabled innovations. The ability to add tolls by Internet application end the prospect of Vonage and VoIP as a threat to Plain Old Telephone Service. It ends the prospect of new Internet enabled video distribution models that might compete with CATV. Network neutrality allows end users to choose winners and losers in an application meritocracy that threatens service providers long dependent on barriers to entry. The idea that Yahoo could pay Verizon to improve performance over Google means Verizon not the end user decides which search engine wins.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 8:51 PM | Print | Comments (0)
This article from BBC Online details a problem faced by Britain’s Members of Parliament: they can’t access the Internet via Wi-Fi unless they take to nearby cafes, sidewalks or steps. The problem is the tight security systems around the Palace of Westiminster — the laptops given to MPs even have their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity disabled.
New Tory MP Grant Shapps added: “I did not really care that much that I did not have an office for two months because if I have my laptop and mobile phone, I have everything I need to contact the outside world. “The problem is that not only does this place make it harder than average to contact people outside, it actually blocks you from accessing outside contacts using your own laptop, so it is working against you.”
Is it just me or does this scenario spark amusing images of wonky lawmakers desperately trying to find signals by roaming the streets of London with opened laptops?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:33 PM | Print | Comments (0)Reading Cynthia’s discussion of Gary Bakula’s testimony at today’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing reminded me of the vast potential of the Internet—some of it already realized, some being explored by Bakula’s Internet2 organization, some just a twinkle in the eye of an inventor or entrepreneur, and much of it not yet imagined. That’s been the Internet’s amazing story since its beginnings, and, like most Americans, Bakula clearly wants to avoid seeing its vitality and ability to create value sapped by bad public policy.
A VP at Internet2, Bakula spoke as a representative of the organization, which he described as “a not-for-profit partnership of 208 universities, 70 companies and 51 affiliated organizations, including some federal agencies and laboratories [whose] mission is to advance the state of the Internet…primarily by operating…a very advanced, private, ultra-high-speed network called Abilene.”
As Bakula put it:
Abilene…enables millions of researchers, faculty, students and staff to “live in the future” of advanced broadband. By providing very high speed pipes - 10,000 times faster than home broadband, in our backbone - we enable our members to try new uses of the network, develop new applications, experiment with new forms of communications, experiencing today what we hope the rest of America will be able to have and use in just a few years.
Noting that “our Abilene network does not give preferential treatment to anyone’s bits, but our users routinely experiment with streaming HDTV, hold thousands of high quality two-way video conferences simultaneously, and transfer huge files of scientific data around the globe without loss of packets,” Bakula explained how that came to be:
When we first began to deploy our Abilene network, our engineers started with the assumption that we should find technical ways of prioritizing certain kinds of bits, such as streaming video, or video conferencing, in order to assure that they arrive without delay. For a number of years, we seriously explored various “quality of service” schemes, including having our engineers convene a Quality of Service Working Group. As it developed, though, all of our research and practical experience supported the conclusion that it was far more cost effective to simply provide more bandwidth. With enough bandwidth in the network, there is no congestion and video bits do not need preferential treatment. All of the bits arrive fast enough, even if intermingled.
Bakula suggested that the focus of network development should be on continuation of the Internet’s simplicity, coupled with an investment focus on bandwidth expansion, including construction of a fiber-based infrastructure that can be very cost-effectively upgraded over time.
We would argue that rather than introduce additional complexity into the network fabric, and additional costs to implement these prioritizing techniques, the telecom providers should focus on providing Americans with an abundance of bandwidth - and the quality problems will take care of themselves.
For example, if a provider simply brought a gigabit Ethernet connection to your home, you could connect that to your home computer with only a $15 card. If the provider insists on dividing up that bandwidth into various separate pipes for telephone and video and internet, the resulting set top box might cost as much as $150. Simple is cheaper. Complex is costly.
Bakula speaks of a future where, once a basic fiber network is in place, bandwidth could be increased by an order of magnitude every five years for a per-port cost of $30-$50 per year.
It does not cost all that much, relatively, to upgrade a network once the basic wiring is in place — that’s the big original cost. For example, a university campus in the Midwest that serves 14,000 students and faculty, recently estimated it would cost about $150 per port (per end user) to replicate their current 100 Mbps network for a five year period, or about $30 a year per user. To upgrade to 1000 Mbps (1 gigabit) it would cost $250, or about $50 per year.
Innovation, says Bakula, is another factor that favors the open, standards-based, “neutral-core/intelligent-edge” Internet model. He also points out that very little of the Internet’s steady flow of innovation has come from either telephone or cable companies.
A simple design is not only less expensive: it enables and encourages innovation…The original Internet grew so fast, and spurred so many new uses, in part because of the way it was designed. It was designed to have an agnostic, neutral “core” whose job was to pass packets back and forth — and not to discriminate or examine the packets themselves. This allowed the network to be very cost efficient and economical. It also allowed all of the “intelligence” in the network to be at the “edge,” that is, in the hands of the user.
This was very important to the evolution of the Internet. The network provider did not have control, the user did. As long as the user utilized the standardized protocols, he could expect to send and receive packets to anyone else on the network in a completely understandable, predictable manner. That allowed the user to experiment with new programs, new applications, slightly tweaked applications, and even new devices — and the user would know that the network would treat the packets all exactly alike.
Innovation was possible and could happen very quickly at “the edge” because you didn’t have to re-architect or re-build the entire network in order to make a tweak or improvement in an end-user technology (such as improving a web search engine or developing a new video encoding program).
As a result of this remarkable design, sometimes called “end-to-end architecture,” an explosion of new Internet technologies were developed over the past decade, many of them on university campuses or by recent graduates. The World Wide Web, the Web browser, the search engine, instant messaging, and many other technologies were innovations by users of the network. Not one of these innovations was developed by telephone or cable companies.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 5:12 PM | Print | Comments (0)
In the ongoing shareholder splinter-group fight against Time Warner, Carl Icahn and his dissident investors issued a report today prepared by Lazard Freres that recommends breaking up Time Warner into four separate companies. The 371-page report (if Time Warner’s management doesn’t embrace the report’s recommendations, Icahn and his pals have already achieved some kind of victory in forcing Time Warner to no doubt print and copy this dense tome for the Board of Directors, at least) recommends breaking Time Warner into four separate publicly traded companies: AOL, Content (Networks and Filmed Entertainment), Publishing and Time Warner Cable.
The report contends that these spin-offs would generate $35 to $45 billion in incremental value for Time Warner shareholders. The document extensively details Time Warner’s purported mis-steps since the merger of Time Warner and AOL and concludes (in so many ways) that the management of Time Warner has blown it.
TWX’s strategy has been shortsighted and poorly executed. The Company has operated without a long-term strategy, which explains many of the contradictions and missteps in its actions.
Aside from miscalculations of how much cash flow the company could generate and botched-deal making, Time Warner has, according to the report 1. failed to nurture or invest in AOL 2. Continued the “walled-garden” strategy of AOL for far too long 3. failed to market a bundled AOL-Time Warner cable high-speed offering 4. Threw road-blocks in AOL’s path to rolling out VoIP 5. Failed to develop its cable programming and publishing businesses.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:58 PM | Print | Comments (0)Last night, on the eve of today’s Senate Commerce Committee hearings on network neutrality, Public Knowledge, a self-described “group of lawyers, technologists, lobbyists, academics, volunteers and activists dedicated to fortifying and defending a vibrant information commons,” issued a white paper making the case for network neutrality rules and proposing a basic outline for such rules. The paper’s author, John Windhausen, Jr., is a former president of the Association for Local Telecommunications Services (ALTS).
After spending most of the paper presenting a basic rationale for imposition of net neutrality rules (more on that below), Windhausen concludes by outlining an approach to such rules that would be based on “three relatively straightforward provisions.”
1. A statement of the network operators’ obligations on a nondiscriminatory basis to carry any traffic, to permit any use and provision of any applications and services, and to allow the use of any equipment.
2. A statement that recognizes the legitimate needs of the network operator to prevent harm to the network, comply with laws regarding access to unlawful content, and engage in legitimate network management.
3. A statement that the principle in 1. shall be enforced through a complaint process and that the network operator has the burden of proof of justifying within a few days of a complaint being filed that any blocking or discrimination is necessary to comply with 2.
Windhausen contends that “the responsibilities…recognized in Statement 2 are not exceptions to the principle in Statement 1 because they are not inconsistent.” He also cautions that “the scope of the network management authority recognized in Statement 2 must not be drafted so broadly as to undermine the principle set forth in Statement 1.”
As to why network operators should bear the burden of proof in responding to complaints, Windhausen says:
Without such a burden, network operators might be emboldened to discriminate based on a purported need for network management when its real purpose might be to discriminate against a competitor. Placing the burden of proof on the consumer or on-line service provider is unworkable because the complaining party generally does not have access to the information to determine whether or not the blocking was justified. Furthermore, by the time the FCC could gather this information through its investigative process, the harm to the consumer or service provider may be irreparable. In the fast paced world of the Internet, a service that is shut down for 60 or 90 days could well be put out of business. Placing the burden of proof on the network operator to demonstrate the need for the blocking within a short amount of time (i.e. 3-10 days) places the burden on the party with the best ability to provide an explanation for the blocking.Not surprisingly, the paper seeks to address the commonly heard (from incumbents) argument that network neutrality is “a solution in search of a problem.”
While the openness of the Internet is universally praised, it is no longer guaranteed, at least for broadband services…Broadband providers now have the…authority…to act as gatekeepers[, to] choose which services and equipment consumers may use. Network operators can adopt conflicting and proprietary standards for the attachment of consumer equipment, can steer consumers to certain web sites over others, can block whatever Internet services or applications they like, and make their preferred applications perform better than others.
This concern is not just theoretical - broadband network providers are taking advantage of their unregulated status. Cable operators have barred consumers from using their cable modems for virtual private networks and home networking and blocked streaming video applications. Telephone and wireless companies have blocked…VoIP…traffic outright in order to protect their own telephone service revenues. Equipment manufacturers are marketing equipment specifically designed to “filter” out (i.e. block) VoIP traffic. Wireless companies often write limitations into consumers’ service agreements that have nothing to do with excessive bandwidth consumption.
The problem is likely to become worse in the near future. One telephone company executive threatened to put a stop to on-line providers that use the telephone network “for free” (even though on-line providers pay to connect to the network). Another telephone company executive openly announced that his company intends to establish a higher-priced “tier” of service reserved exclusively for content providers chosen by the network operator. This raises the concern that consumers and start-up application providers will be relegated to the “slow lane” on the information superhighway.Windhausen then makes an argument typically dismissed by cable and telco spokespersons, that “network operators have economic incentives to discriminate.”
Network owners today are more than just passive providers of transmission capacity (the “conduit”); they also own and provide services, applications and equipment (the “content”). By giving their own (or their affiliated) applications and content preferential access to the network, they can extract greater profits than if they operate the network on a non-discriminatory basis.In arguing for a network neutrality rule, Windausen points to “the enormous societal and economic benefits of keeping the broadband Internet network open to all users.”
Broadband networks are fast becoming the essential lifeline of our economy and society, carrying on-line commercial transactions, current events, local and national advertising, telemedicine and distance learning, music and entertainment, interactive games, and videoconferencing. Allowing the increasingly concentrated cable and telephone industries to have unchecked control over our access to these sources of information, entertainment and commerce is cause for great concern.
Net Neutrality is also important for our high-tech manufacturing industry. Billions of dollars are invested every year at the “edge” of the network by the high-tech computing industry, the on-line commerce industry, the gaming industry, the news and information industry, and the research community. A statutory Net Neutrality rule will give investors the confidence to support new, innovative applications. On the other hand, giving network operators the potential to block competing applications from getting on the network may be enough to frighten investors away from otherwise worthy new Internet applications.
In terms of balancing overall costs and benefits, Windhausen contends that net neutrality is a clear winner:
In short, open broadband networks are vitally important to our society, our future economic growth, our high-tech manufacturing sector, and our First Amendment rights to information free of censorship or control. Even if an openness policy imposes some slight burden on network operators, these microeconomic concerns pale in comparison to the macroeconomic benefits to the society and economy at large of maintaining an open Internet.
Windhausen attempts to refute network operator claims that network neutrality will interfere with their ability to manage their networks and prevent spam, viruses and other unwanted aspects of the open Internet. As evidence to the contrary, he cites the fact that “[t]elephone companies have always managed their networks to protect against unlawful use even under a much more onerous common carriage regime.”
In response to arguments that network neutrality would interfere with operator’s ability to earn a return on their broadband investments and therefore stifle such investment, Windhausen contends that:
In fact, Net Neutrality promotes broadband deployment because it increases the value of services and applications over the Internet, which increases consumer demand for broadband networks. The greater the demand, the more network operators will invest in broadband to meet it. Furthermore, there remain many opportunities for network operators to profit from their broadband investment that do not involve blocking or discrimination. For instance, network operators can continue to develop their own content and/or enter joint marketing arrangements or other promotional arrangements with other content providers.
Windhausen also claims that operators could still offer customers higher-performance service tiers, even if subject to net neutrality rules:
Net Neutrality does not necessarily prevent network operators from offering levels of access, at higher rates, as long as the tier is offered on a nondiscriminatory basis to every provider and as long as all broadband customers are offered a minimum level of broadband service. A Net Neutrality principle does, however, prohibit the creation of a “private Internet” that grants exclusive access to the higher bandwidth levels to certain providers selected by the network operator.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 2:44 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Despite the tightening tension surrounding the net neutrality debate, the hearing on the topic (webcast and written testimonies can be found here) held by the Senate Commerce Committee today was a restrained, thoughtful and actually productive examination of this hot-button issue.
Testimony by industry representatives and academics, as well as statements by Committee members, broke down along the following lines:
1. Network providers need incentives to continue investing in the networks and any mandatory network neutrality rules will derail those incentives.
2. Absent some form of network neutrality regulation, network providers will implement policies that jeopardize a free and open Internet and will snuff out innovation in new content and applications offerings.
3. Other solutions to this conundrum exist, namely jump-starting competition to the current cable-telco duopoly or adopting policies that ensure that all consumers receive abundant bandwidth so that broadband providers can’t thwart the rise of new services.
Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT) said it best when he expressed his own uncertainty about how to approach this problem. On the one hand, he said, there is “the belief that there should be unfettered access or discrimination…the Internet should remain open to all users.” But “at the same time we must balance a company’s interest to manage its own [business]…therein lies the challenge. How do we strike a balance?”
Senator John Ensign (R-NV), who has introduced a bill that favors broadband providers’ rights to block access to content, said “our regulations and our laws need to be modernized to create more incentives for companies to invest so that we have those broadband networks that are higher quality and are faster and give consumers more competition. Everybody agrees that we want the Internet to be free…but we also have to recognize that there is a balance.”
The Committee allowed Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) to make a statement before the witnesses testified (Wyden is a former member of the committee). Wyden, a pro-consumer legislator, said that “In my view there are powerful interests that own the access to the pipes and the net that want to break that [free and unfettered access].” He also advocated that all bits transmitted across the Internet be treated equally “so that no bit is treated better than another one” and that broadband providers be prevented from creating private networks that “allow companies to give consumers better access than they can get generally,” meaning that a two-tiered Internet structure should be banned.
Google’s Internet “evangelist” Vint Cerf pointed out that the Internet was designed from the ground up so that no one would have centralized control and that all Internet standards are “published, open and global.” The fundamental problem is that “the challenge we have is that there isn’t enough competition in the broadband world,” Cerf said, and without that, innovative upstarts won’t stand a chance without net neutrality. “We must preserve neutrality in this system in order to allow new Googles, new Yahoos and new Amazons to form.”
US Telecom CEO Walter McCormick said that there is no problem today even without laws mandating net neutrality. “Consumers aren’t experiencing problems today and there isn’t any statute in place,” he said. Moreover, the phone companies have no intention of interfering with customers’ access to content or applications. “We will not block, impair or degrade content, applications or services,” McCormick said.
Vonage CEO Jeff Citron drew an analogy between electricity and Internet connectivity, saying that just as electricity providers don’t care what you do with the power they supply consumers, so should network providers not care about how customers use Internet bandwidth. “Imagine if the electric company could dictate which toaster you can plug into the wall,” he said.
Citron also said that his VoIP company is particularly at risk without net neutrality rules given that the phone companies view Vonage as a real threat to their core voice business. “Major phone companies have suggested that our service isn’t going to work very well if we don’t pay them a fee.”
National Cable & Telecommunications CEO Kyle McSlarrow urged a conservative approach, arguing that despite its explosive growth, Internet service is a relatively immature market. “A very heavy burden should be placed on those who would have the government intervene for the first time,” McSlarrow said.
Comptel CEO Earl Comstock said “the Internet was built on a framework of common carriage…these are all critical elements that are not being addressed by the FCC today in their network neutrality program.”
Progress and Freedom Foundation Fellow Kyle Dixon warned that “imposing a network neutrality mandate would be neither simple nor harmless” and would further erode the possibility of ever mounting facilities-based broadband competition. “A network neutrality mandate would do nothing to increase competition,” he said. “By imposing costs..a network neutrality mandate would undermine incentives to invest in new broadband networks.”
Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig also urged a conservative approach, but unlike NCTA’s McSlarrow, Lessig favors net neutrality requirements and argues that they are not new requirements at all. “It’s crazy to suggest that the ideas we are talking about today are new. They have been part of telecommunications law for at least the last forty years. It is under these principles that the Internet evolved,” Lessig said.
Lessig warned that the telcos’ plans endanger the growth of the Internet. “The leaders of Verizon and the leaders of AT&T would radically reduce competition in applications and content on the Internet. As they set up fast lanes on the Internet, the only companies that could afford access are the Googles and the Yahoos…companies that have already made a success on the Internet. This restriction in competition would fundamentally weaken the growth in the Internet.”
Like Lessig, Georgetown University economist Gregory Sidak believes that the issues posed by network neutrality are not new but well-known to those who study telecommunications. “It’s clear to me that economics understands the distinctive costs and demand characteristics of telecommunications networks better than any industry that I can think of,” he said.
But unlike Lessig, Sidak believes there is nothing wrong in having network providers charge fees to Google, Yahoo or other Internet services. “There is no acceptable theory that consumers should pay all the costs…and providers that use that network pay nothing.”
Gary Bakula, Vice President for External Affairs at Internet2, said that the Internet2 consortium has discovered that the best way to manage the network for maximum benefits is to simply give customers a lot of bandwidth. “We started out prioritizing certain bits,” Bakula said, “but all of our research led to the conclusion that it was simply far more cost-effective to provide more benefits.” Internet2 would like to see Congress set a national goal of 100 Mbps symmetrical bandwidth in five years and one gigabit symmetrical bandwidth within ten years.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:17 PM | Print | Comments (0)A Verizon executive took off the gloves yesterday and came out and warned Google that there will be no more free lunch. This article from the Washington Post’s Arshad Mohammed quotes Verizon’s Senior VP and Deputy General Counsel John Thorne as saying
“The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers,” Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. “It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.”
Later in the piece Thorne says that the free-riders such as Google, along with franchise impediments, threaten continued investment in the network. He even coins a phrase “Google utopianism” and accuses net neutrality advocates of “drinking the kool aid.” (As an aside, can we all stop use that overworked phrase.)
Thorne described two obstacles to building such networks: the task of getting thousands of local franchise agreements to offer cable television; and what he called “Google utopianism,” a concept he likened to “spiked Kool-Aid.”
As much as I rapped the net neutrality advocates for their extremism (see here and here), can the telcos also please dial down the rhetoric. You look like idiots, which certainly plays right into the hands of your most ardent net neutrality foes. Why should Google’s “lunch” be yours when they created something that in your wildest dreams Verizon could never have developed? It took a whole lot more than “cheap servers” to do what Google has done. And they did so at a time when the idea of a free, open and unhindered Internet seemed like an unalterable reality, even to the telcos.
Given the heat between the telcos and the net neutrality advocates, today’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing (webcast here) on the very topic of net neutrality should generate fireworks.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:53 AM | Print | Comments (1)Glenn Fleishman, who had earlier expressed skepticism about FON’s prospects, reports that FON doesn’t in fact have any deal with ISP Speakeasy, something that was assumed or implied in most news reports and blog posts based on comments by FON founder Martin Varsavsky on his blog. Glenn posted this statement he received from Speakeasy spokesperson Lynn Brackpool:
No relationship, financial or otherwise, exists between Speakeasy and FON. The impression may have been created by FON because Speakeasy has always supported an open wireless sharing policy. We have contacted FON and they too understand that no implicit agreement exists between Speakeasy and them in terms of their service.
While the FON concept—which Cynthia and others reported on after the company announced a $22 million investments from the likes of Google and Skype—is an intriguing one, the clarification from Speakeasy underscores the challenges FON faces in achieving widespread acceptance in the U.S. market. Though Speakeasy and a handful of small ISPs allow re-distribution of their signal, cable and telephone companies that dominate the broadband ISP space have end user license agreements that prevent this kind of sharing.
Given the way they do business, I find it hard to believe that the dominant U.S. broadband ISPs will be attracted enough by FON’s revenue sharing scheme to work with the company. And, as Cynthia noted in her post, Glenn and others have pointed out the difficulties in creating continuous zones of FON coverage and extending service from inside one home to another, something that seems especially true in our nation’s large sprawling suburbs.
But American suburbs may not be FON’s primary targets. The one ISP it has signed up so far is Sweden’s Glocalnet, and Ethan Zuckerman, a FON advisor, makes an interesting case for FON’s relevance in Africa.
I got involved with FON…because I think FON is thinking through the hard questions necessary to help provide inexpensive wireless access around the entire world. I’ve looked closely at projects designed to build community wireless networks and have been frustrated that many of these projects seem designed explicitly for nations where bandwidth is cheap. Most let users share their bandwidth, but don’t provide a way to charge other users for using that bandwidth, or to “throttle back” users who clog your pipe downloading films from Limewire…
In Africa, bandwidth isn’t cheap. Entire universities run on less bandwidth than I have coming into my house on a DSL line. Being altruistic and leaving your wireless access point open in Africa is pretty much a guarantee that you’re going to end up with other users abusing the limited bandwidth you have. It’s important that African users have the opportunity to share their bandwith in a way that allows for “bandwidth shaping” - sharing some bandwidth with other users and retaining the rest for your own needs - and billing, so other users can share the cost with you. FON’s current software isn’t optimized for this situation yet, but it’s close, and FON is engaged with the issues in a serious and sustained way…
…Most of my African friends are entrepreneurs, either on a micro- or macro-scale. They’ll understand the idea of buying access to a scarce resource (a broadband net connection) and selling access to that for an affordable price faster than most Americans and Europeans will. I suspect FON will make a great deal of sense in many developing nations.
The more densely populated and economically less-developed areas of this country also appear to be on FON’s priority list. In a post entitled Barrio FON, Varsavsky said:
Ejovi and I are working on a project at FON that we both care very much about and that is the idea of bridging the digital divide in Harlem. As opposed to the municipal wifi network projects which are great but expensive, FON’s approach is to get donors including my foundation who started Educ.ar and Educar Chile, to contribute free routers for the people of Harlem who will place them by their windows and make Harlem a wifi neighborhood. In order to make the project sustainable, Harlem residents would get free wifi username and passwords but visitors would pay for WiFi access. We have been studying the availability of broadband in Harlem and even though there are not as many internet connections in Harlem than further downtown there are enough to build a wifi neighborhood. FON installs only need 2 to 4 foneros per block to give good coverage.
Update: If I’m understanding it correctly, it seems FON’s plans for Harlem would still require cooperation from the ISPs that provide the 2-4 Fonero connections per block needed to build the envisioned WiFi neighborhood.
In another post, Varsavsky discussed “community building” as a key FON benefit, not only for local community members, but arguably also for ISPs:
In March FON will launch a software upgrade what will allow foneros around the world to build neighborhood LANs or a parallel internet we call the INTERFON. Basically what will happen is that our software will enable routers to seek each other out and if they find they can build direct links between them they will avoiding the regular internet altogether and sending packets through the interfon. This is great for neighbors who want to communicate very fast. For example one neighbor just returned from a trip to Africa and has 100 megs of pictures to send out, with direct wifi connectivity at 54 megs sending them is a breeze. So they connect directly, not through the internet but through the interfon…
…What FON is doing is creating a congregation of neighbors who can communicate in better ways…Build a FON congregation means get your neighbors to download our software and communicate with them directly in a more private, secure, certainly faster way than through the internet. ISPs by the way, would love this cause their clients still pay (if not they can’t be foneros) but they take the heaviest traffic off their networks. At these congregations foneros can play games, exchange files (those that are legal to exchange), videoconference, and whatever activities they may want to do inside the congregation. They can of course also communicate with the rest of the world…but inside the congregation the communication is more natural, faster, meaningful.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:57 AM | Print | Comments (1)
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