My home internet sucks, relatively speaking. Anytime something shows up as “HD”, I know that it’s not going to work out for me. This is not at all surprising, given that I only have one choice (Time Warner) and they continually send me advertisements offering to spend $100 a month in order to get the bandwidth I’m supposed to get for $50. The sad thing is that if you look at the wireless routers visible from my apartment (> 50), everyone in the building (and nearby buildings) has the same problem. If only we could just share one good connection, we’d all be so much happier.
So here’s what I think should happen.
Apartment buildings should have fiber run to the building, run ethernet/wireless to each floor, and charge $40 a month to access it. Why? Because they’d make money off of it, that’s why. After the initial cost to run the fiber, they could contract with Cogent/Level 3/ATT to provide transit. Based on my crude knowledge of the state of connection costs from 5 years ago, it would cost about $5 a month to give every user 10Mb/s of dedicated service.
And everyone in the building would get 10 times the bandwidth of Time Warner to boot. Hurray!
I’ve been daydreaming about starting a company that contracts to do just this (drag fiber to buildings and contract for support). I know, I know, a lot of this types of companies already exist, but still… let me daydream.
