Internet as Infrastructure

[gla22]

The populace in general has plenty of access to internet. This should be near to the bottom of the list of "problems".

[Dylan]

no you're infrastructure

[Saz]

[Saz]

[Kane]

[exploited]

I personally favour a private-public partnership. The project I'm working for IRL is modeled on that, and I think it looks promising. We're looking for around $240 million, with $100 million coming from ISPs and major institutions who need it, but either can't get it or are paying far too much. With that we'll provide fiber to about 2 million people in 380 communities. Our goal is to have 100% of households in the entire region on fibre by 2040.

So far we have fourteen counties on board, and we've gotten past the first two parts of securing government funding. And the big news recently is that ALL the ISPs are largely on board... Which was a bit iffy because we insisted on open architecture and access, which means the barriers to entry into the ISP game are drastically lower. You can just buy capacity anywhere in the region. Competition will skyrocket.

The idea is that we roll it out over about three years. First we link together those few areas that already have fiber. Then we roll it out in select cities, which we picked based upon viability and demand, as well as maximizing market reach and a few technical considerations (right now all data from the region goes through Toronto - for reliability that needs to change). ISPs are charged for capacity, and the fees are put right back into the project. Next, the network is handed off to a private trust, with a nonprofit mandate, which will continue to grow it until we reach our network map goal, at which point all proceeds will be put towards maintenance, upgrades and price breaks.

If everything stays on track, we'll start digging in 2016, and complete the project by 2020 or so. So here's hoping we don't run into too many Galt's.

[Saz]

[Saz]

[Spider]

Anyone downloading anything will use it at full potential. It's not all torrents. As cloud storage (and processing) continues to ramp up, transfer speeds will become more and more important, eventually becoming absolutely critical to how the worlds information systems work. Most all computing tasks will eventually be remote, and fast flow of traffic will be taken for granted.

Back in the 90s nobody could have imagined justifying gigabit data access at the retail level. In another ten years it'll be no big deal at all, and we'll all be streaming Netflix at 4k and consider it minimal. Moore's Law impacts data as well.

[exploited]