[1st-mile-nm] Freedom To Connect Conference report

[Richard Lowenberg]

Of relevance to the 1st-Mile Broadband approch:

>From the web site of the just past Freedom to Connect Conference, March
5-6, in Washington, DC.

http://freedom-to-connect.net/

This report on Sasha Meinrath's presentation.   (Links to additional
presentation reports on the F2C site.)

www.isp-planet.com/fixed_wireless/business/2007/meinrath_f2c.html

Meinrath Says Everything Else is Stupid

He's got a pretty good idea based on a simple question: why is bandwidth
priced differently across the U.S.? Isn't it fungible?

by Alex Goldman, ISP-Planet Managing Editor
[March 12, 2007]

At the Freedom to Connect conference, Sascha Meinrath pitched the next way
we're going to eliminate the telcos from the upstream. He was talking
about the CUWiN Foundation (specializing in "Community Wireless
Solutions"). (It was originally the website of the Champaign-Urbana
Community Wireless Net.)

He called the talk: Cooperative Networking (a.k.a everything else is
stupid).

He pointed out that a 1 Mbps upstream connection is $10 per month in San
Francisco, $80 to $90 per month in Chicago, $320 per month in Urbana, and
over $1,300 per month in a town you've never heard of, Greenup. And a
$1,500 wireless link can take bandwidth to almost anywhere.

"But if we had a free market, wouldn't someone bring bandwidth from where
it's cheap to where it's expensive?"

It turns out that there is a network connecting all of Illinois, called
the Illinois Century Network (ICN).

It could provide cheap bandwidth to schools. "So why isn't it being done?
Is it technology? Economics? No, it's layer 8 political BS!"

An attendee understood immediately. "Of course, this network can only be
used for 'research.' But if we're doing research on how the network gets
used (by all sorts of people), then all traffic has a research purpose.
Clever."

There are plenty of other solutions to network the nation. For example, if
community broadband becomes sufficiently ubiquitous, the local networks
could all peer with each other and create a nationwide mesh.

So will it work? It's all being done on a case by case basis, as
opportunities present themselves. But we're interested and hope to
interview Meinrath in the near future as this project progresses.

In his introduction, Meinrath said, "I'm not about home networking. That's
not what I do. I'm not talking about the mesh network. I'm talking about
what's next. The next bandwagon that will eliminate the telcos. The telcos
hated community networking, but now they're leading the charge. These
networks are all over the place, but they're not connected to each other,
and they're still relying on the telcos who hate them."


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Richard Lowenberg
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110,  505-603-5200 cell
rl at radlab.com  	  www.radlab.com

New Mexico Broadband Initiative
www.1st-mile.com/newmexico
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