Re: New minimum speed for US broadband connections

[Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa>]

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.