🚀 go-pugleaf

" We need Internet connectivity provided by companies that are not in
" the content or network services business.

I was considering just this point when I was thinking about the
benefit of satellite communications that XM Radio/Serius use.  I think
bottling up those satellites in content providers is a bad idea;
instead, selling their bandwidth on a cost-with-margin basis would be
much more useful to customers and to the providers, as far as I can
tell.  Instead of selling "XM Radio" or such, they could sell "x bits
per second at y latency with congestion z for $A", i.e., bandwidth,
delay, priority at some amount of money.  If you choose to transmit
porn to 22yos and get porn back from 22yos, or transmit pictures of
your 80yo grandmother, or to receive pictures of the map to get you to
your 80yo grandmother, or transmit financial transaction details and
receive financial transaction details, or transmit targeting data, or
receive music or talk audio or security video, or anything you want,
that's between you and your far end, and whether you want to engage a
3rd party content provider would also be up to you.  Otherwise, if you
are required to use a content provider, there's an impediment to using
the physical resources, and it will be harder to justify making
physical resources available, and furthermore, if the impediment is
that you are only allowed to use the physical resources in a narrowly
construed way, such as using a particular content (XM radio, for
instance), then you might not even be interested in the physical
resources any more; perhaps that image of an X-Ray you wanted isn't
being broadcast to you when you need it by that old gross drugged up
dying hippie in NYC who has a TV show.  No, that's useless: when you
want a picture of the X-Ray of Grandma, pictures of plastic boobs from
someone else at 4:30PM or whatever doesn't help you, when you're
diagnosing at 10AM.  That's closer to what we have now: less for less
at higher cost, rather than more for more at lower cast.

Why use satellites?  Why use anything at all?  They have particular
qualities, including availabilities and usefulnesses, which makes them
have particular values.

Why not use satellites?  Perhaps those qualities aren't what you need.
But, perhaps their qualities ARE what you need, but everyone who has
them doesn't do business with you, because they'd rather do business
with bad business models that exclude the people actually interested
in the productizable assets.

I'm using satellite as an example; use math symbols for most my words.
Fiber in an old oil pipe and under railroads is just as good an
analogy.

Generally, the ideas can be applied to LANs and WANs as well.  They're
more complex in those cases, but not by much.