Re: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

[Matthew Petach <mpetach () netflight com>]

On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 6:21 PM, Richard A Steenbergen <ras () e-gerbil net> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 05:58:26PM -0800, Leo Bicknell wrote:
> > I dream of a day where we have municipal fiber to the home, leased to
> > any ISP who wants to show up at the local central office for a dollar
> > a two a month so there can be true competition in end-user services.
>
> Take a second and think about what THAT would do to the ratio wars.
> Imagine if any hosting/content provider, with potentially hundreds or
> thousands of gigabits of unused inbound capacity on their networks,
> could easily get into providing IP service to eyeballs. Even ignoring
> the existing 95th percentile silliness like "free inbound transit",
> which would no doubt rapidly evaporate under this kind of model, the
> difference in efficiencies between the highly competetive hosting world
> and the highly non-competetive last mile world are simply staggering.
> For many content networks, it would be an opportunity to start making
> money on their bits instead of paying for them, and networks without
> content expertise would be in serious trouble.

http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi

Uh...yeah, I think they've already been thinking about that for a while
now.

> I personally can't think of a single thing with more potential for
> massive disruption to the business models of incumbent providers. There
> are so many billions of dollars at stake protecting the status quo that
> it's not even funny, which IMHO is why you'll never see any of this
> happen in the US, in any kind of scale at any rate. :)

Unless of course, it's a content company with even more billions
of dollars that decides it might just be worth it to be able to balance
out some of their ratios, and make use of all the idle inbound
capacity...

Matt