Today, most broadband services are controlled by large corporations with large, visible advertising campaigns. Those same large corporations have mixed motives, that don't necessarily align with their customers. Furthermore, they are decreasing your options and increasing control of how you can use your internet connections. Newsflash! Low-cost high-capacity bandwidth is only a few miles away from your house or business, and it is high time we have neutral and very high-speed interconnection with those options. Yes, it won't be cheap to build the infrastructure, about a half-billion bucks for Portland. But whoever builds it, we'll pay for it. I'd just like for us to own it after we've paid for it. I'd also like to be able to *use* it after we've paid for it. We have lots of precedents for publicly owned infrastructure: water, sewer, streets, the Bonneville Power Administration. Break the chains of control! Own your future! Demand neutrally-operated super-fast last-mile broadband infrastructure.

1. Why Publicly Owned Fiber is the
Answer to our Broadband Needs
Russell Senior
Secretary
Personal Telco Project, Inc.
a 501(c)(3) non-profit

2. Own your networks
Wifi as a medium
Wifi is nice, but limited

3. Broadband Needs
Faster
Cheaper
More freedom

4. The Problem
Jumping the Last-Mile Gap

5. Why Fiber?
Capacity
Capacity
Capacity

6. Massive Capacity
14 Terabits/second
14,000,000,000,000
dialup: 56,000
dsl: 7,000,000
cable: 15,000,000

7. What about wireless?
Nice for mobility
Sucks for capacity

8. Why public?
Because private demonstrably sucks
Neutral
Non-profit

9. Incumbent's conflict of interest
Higher speeds undercut existing
businesses:
Comcast (video)
Qwest (voice)

10. Last Mile gives Control
Constraints on kinds of usage
Dichotomizing producers/consumers

11. The Internet means we can all
be producers
Producing is fun
Just consuming is boring
Be a producer!

12. Think Streets
Neutral
Non-profit
Accountable

13. How would it work?
Fiber-speed transit to a co-location facility
Third parties provide services from there

14. Non-Discrimination
Fiber network is vendor neutral
Inexpensive to provide services
Many providers, much choice

15. Financing?
Like other utility infrastructure

16. How much does it cost?
City of Portland
(passing 284 thousand premises)
$450 million

17. How much per service?
Per house/business passed: ~$1k
Each service connected: ~$1k
Construction costs = about 3 years of
Comcast service

18. User Owned Networks
Did I mention there were advantages?

19. Other places have fiber!
In Japan, a 100 Mbps internet connection is
$11/month for a year, then $75/month.
Other Asian and European cities are
building this stuff.
We should too!

20. How to make this happen?
Be willing to pay
Tell the City Council
Support community efforts
Russell Senior
russell@personaltelco.net