As far as a quick layman's glance has shown, the problem is specific to the 'last mile' bit of data connection, which is run by Comcast, Verizon, etc...
The backbone pipelines are run by companies like Level3 and Cogent, which are not of concern for this debate.
'Last mile' wires tend to be one company per city, so we're stuck trying to prevent relatively small-scale monopolies from extracting rents via regulation. The better solution is competition.
I've heard a little chatter about the subnet idea, but it'd be tricky to do 'underground' with regards to city regulation and trickier to get approval for.
Basically it would be analgous to everyone opening their router and daisy chaining them all together. That would be "last mile". It would be like connect to Linksys.LosAngeles and then backbones connect you up to San Fran. That way either content providers could locate in cities and push locally, or ISPs would have to come to the table.
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Spot on.
As far as a quick layman's glance has shown, the problem is specific to the 'last mile' bit of data connection, which is run by Comcast, Verizon, etc...
The backbone pipelines are run by companies like Level3 and Cogent, which are not of concern for this debate.
'Last mile' wires tend to be one company per city, so we're stuck trying to prevent relatively small-scale monopolies from extracting rents via regulation. The better solution is competition.
Enter Google Fiber, spurring competition: http://www.kansascity.com/2014/04/21/4973046/att-may-bring-g...
I've heard a little chatter about the subnet idea, but it'd be tricky to do 'underground' with regards to city regulation and trickier to get approval for.
Basically it would be analgous to everyone opening their router and daisy chaining them all together. That would be "last mile". It would be like connect to Linksys.LosAngeles and then backbones connect you up to San Fran. That way either content providers could locate in cities and push locally, or ISPs would have to come to the table.
Cool, any recommendations for further reading? I seem to recall Nick Merrill of Calyx being interested in this sort of thing for SF.