[jessaustin]

There's no monopoly in backhaul, in fact various market shenanigans have reduced long-distance data profits to pennies. The internet is designed entirely with the idea of making it easy to connect the first mile to the rest; that is a solved problem. In USA the remaining problem is local service provided by monopolists. This problem will persist in general until FCC is forced, kicking and screaming, into allowing more equitable use of the radio spectrum. Until then, as TFA notes, this problem will be solved piecemeal in those communities who are allowed to run their own services.

[saas_co_de]

Yes, wholesale broadband rates are dirt cheap and falling like a rock forever because of improvements in technology.

What you pay for for broadband in the home is: 1) last mile connection (expensive to install) 2) bribes (sorry, "franchise fees") 3) advertising to maintain the illusion of competition 4) customer support to help you deal with your anger and cancel/activate you when you switch between various shitty providers to maintain the illusion of competition

[jdeibele]

What kills me about the advertising are three things:

1) It creates a huge barrier to entry because new ISPs have a hard time getting any name recognition.

2) Newpapers, radio stations, and television stations probably wouldn't want to say anything bad about telephone or cable providers. Imagine the phone call an NBC TV station would get if it attacked Comcast. That advertising is a good chunk of money.

3) Advertising is rolled into the PUC-approved "cost of doing business" and the cable or telephone companies get to add their profits on top of that.

[woah]

We’re working on www.altheamesh.com to create networks where participants within the network can compete with one another to provide better service without the end consumers having to switch providers.

This is accomplished by adding a price metric to the routing protocol so that packets are routed along the best and cheapest paths.

So if you notice that a certain neighborhood has bad service, you can set up some kind of connection to it and sell into that network to make a profit. No advertising. The end users will only notice their internet access getting cheaper and or better.