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So, I haven't done any market research, but the model I have in mind is that the network is dark fiber terminating in a carrier neutral facility to decouple the infrastructure from the service - I think this is important for financing reasons. Running fiber to the home is a pretty expensive operation and most people would need some kind of financing. In a non-decoupled scenario, that financing would come from locking in a long term provider subsidy contract, but the timescales needed (maybe 5-15 years) are way too long to commit to a single service provider. They might be awesome in the beginning, but they then deteriorate or go bankrupt or whatever and you're stuck paying for Comcast-like service for a decade. A dark fiber, however, is a perfectly neutral medium and it's trivial to measure it's quality so you can set up meaningful SLAs (basically, like water or electricity - it's either there or not, and if it's not, it's the providers problem. OK, not quite, but it's a heck lot more clean cut than deciding whether your internet connection is too slow, why and whose responsible). So you essentially take out a mortgage on your fraction of the dark fiber coop (my consultancy could conceivably facilitate this financing - maybe there's some local businesses or wealthy citizens that you like to underwrite the loans, but they'd still need the infrastructure to facilitate the loans and secure the collateral). You own the bit of infrastructure that only serves your house outright (if you're in a dense area, that't not much, if you have a two mile driveway, it's more) and 1/nth of the shared infrastructure, including the carrier neutral termination room. When someone buys in later, they pay for any direct cost of connecting them, and their 1/nth is distributed evenly between the existing members. If this is a community effort, you can save a lot of money digging ditches yourself (the consultancy will provide instructions on how to properly secure the cables in the ditch) and by placing the termination room in a town hall, community center, church or local business annex - ideally close to existing backbone cable runs. Obviously, bullet proof leases and contracts for access to this room would need to be in place, that's part of what I imagine the consultancy would help with. Once you have the infrastructure in place, you need to get a provider to set up shop in the termination room. It would make a lot of sense for the consultancy to also be an ISP for this purpose. Maybe the cost of setting up could be incorporated in the initial capital of the coop, maybe the ISP will front it on back of signing maybe 1-2 year contracts for service (which is separate from and on top of the cost of the fiber), maybe it can just provide the service on the expectation of being able to do business - that would likely depend on how remote the community it. Installing optical transceivers at each end of the fiber is the responsibility of the customer and their desired ISP. |