Take back your Internet We have the technology and the will to do what the government and corporations refuse to.
The Dream
The internet is a large network, similar to your home network. We call it a WAN (Wide Area Network). My dream is to make a WAN that connects every house, building, and person in the world directly. With that, we can provide everybody with an infinite amount of connectivity options, and have it all be cheap on a recurring basis. No more crazy internet bills.
Why?
The inspiration for building this project came from when I called up the telecom giant, Wave Broadband, now rebranded to "Astound", and I asked how much it would cost to get a gigabit symmetric (1gbps upload and download). They said that it would cost me over $40,000 in construction fees, and I would have to pay over $670 a month for at least 6 years. My response to this outrageous quote was to do some investigation, just to see how much it would actually cost in parts, excluding labor. I was shocked when I found out that the parts from Home-Depot and Amazon, two stores of which aren't known for having the greatest deals on the market, was cheaper by $15.11 per foot. My partner's house is roughly 3,200 feet from where they said they would need to run a cable from. That said, they wanted about $88,000 to run a cable 3,200 feet and provide a single gigabit. This is a common occurrence across the United States. I want this to end. This is me trying to do something about it. I want to have a future where we can continue to grow our internet capacity as technology moves forward, not be locked into a gigabit for the next 5 years. The rest of the world seems to already be there, even today you can get between 5 and 10 gigabits symmetric for under $300 a month in parts of the US, and as low as $60 a month in parts of Europe. My project is here to benefit every individual, this isn't meant to benefit big corporations. I don't want corporations to rule my internet, why should you? Let's make a difference and work together.
How We Do It
The way we achieve this is simple, we need a transport network. A transport network is basically a LAN that connects the end user (you and me) to another network such as a wholesale bandwidth provider. The way I propose we do this, is by taking advantage of the laws not restricting our ability to run a fiber cable or wireless between each house. If everyone pays for the materials for their own house in this house-to-house network, everybody gets a fair one-time-cost for everything that can be used forever to provide internet and connectivity to your house. You aren't limited to just internet here, you can use this to extend your own personal network. That's to help add to the justification of spending the money on the materials. But at the start, we're going to do this with Wireless. The wireless device costs no more than $150. This will later be used to provide a backup in case the fiber ever gets cut or broken. After phase 1, we will be installing fiber cable between the houses. All the materials that are needed will be neatly itemized with costs and options publicly on the website as soon as we're closer to getting to phase 2. Also, if you're okay with an aerial cable between both houses (both you and the neighbor needs to be okay with it) it reduces the cost significantly, but the default option is buried.
How We Get Internet
Once we have this house-to-house network with about 10-20 houses, we can purchase a gigabit of wholesale bandwidth at their DMARC (location where they would normally build from). By going to their DMARC, it eliminates that cost of construction I was mentioning earlier, this is the primary purpose of this network. Costs of purchasing the wholesale internet will be evenly split between each person on the network. Community broadband networks like I've described already exist in many parts, including many places in Washington. The only difference is these networks were pre-built into the housing community, along with utilities, rather than put in after the fact. The internet that we buy will be shared evenly among all the participants, nobody will be throttled or data capped. There will be some QoS to ensure that someone can't hog all the bandwidth when other people are trying to use it too, and I will discuss that further later on. By sharing the cost we will be able to give everyone better internet for a fraction of what they are already paying now, and being freed from a corporate monopoly, giving us the choice for multiple providers and more resiliency to outages. On top of removing the data-cap.