Quote: Japan is also one of the most densely populated countries there is. The cost per subscriber for DoCoMo to drag an OC48/OC96 line to an apartment complex isProfit, schmoffit. That's what the hell your profits are for! It's the stuff that comes after you've paid all the bills, fixed and
relatively cheap. The population densities in the States work against us, none of the last mile carriers want to lay fiber down. Because that would cut into
their profits. I have only heard of a few building in NY and SF where the residents have gotten together and on a grass roots level purchased a business
level OC12/OC24 from the local carrier. The cost of rewiring the building is not cheap, nor is the instillation of said line. But if everyone is on board, it
can be done for cheaper than the standard DSL package per head.
or replaced whatever needed it, and taken your payrolls out. Developments like this are supposed to come out of your profit margin. Ye gods, big business
needs to understand that when it comes to bandwidth, the "If you build it, they will come" mentality applies. And don't you dare say that you
wouldn't want to have more bandwidth!
As for grass roots...
At one point in time while I was living in Richmond, VA, my roomies and I had ordered up the local Cable service package which included digital phone, TV and
cable internet. Two days after we got it, the connection speed went to shit. A net-friend pointed me to DSLReports and we soon discovered that our problem
was not isolated, but an incredibly wide-spread issue due to a massive consumption of bandwidth (all eyes immediately looked toward the college campuses that
had recently just gotten hooked up and at the very onset of the Bit Torrent craze to boot). To make matters worse, this was just after a massive merger that
made gave the local provider a monopoly over all cable internet in the greater Richmond area, and we'd already tried DSL but the infrastructure on our
block, as it was for most of Richmond, dated back to the 1920's or earlier.
This situation went on for so long that there were groups of people in our regional DSLR forum thinking seriously about ordering up a nice big fiber-optic line
and divying it up throughout their neighborhoods, cost of laying cable be damned. Of course, once word got out about that, the local provider's new pipes
came online.
If Comcast continues down this road, they can expect to see grass roots bandwidth movements like those, even in surburbia.