Greg, I particularly like this aspect:
"For local rural partners, the opportunity to skip local loop interconnection charges by connecting directly to tier 1 fiber is hard to pass up. Rural partners gain the benefit of a high-margin, ready-built broadband solution and avoid the local telco’s longer provisioning times."
As an example of what this means there are many homes in the Silicon Valley area which are not, repeat NOT, served by high speed connections. These are in the less densely populated areas (one of the owners of Fry's Electronics lives there) and DSL just can't make it, nor is there cable TV in place.
A relative lives in a quiet valley outside of Morgan Hill (next to Gilroy which is south of San Jose); even though the area is studded with homes costing upward of $1 million, dial-up has been the only possible means of connection, that is, until a local ISP (Garlic.com, what else?) began offering satellite service which still requires a telephone link for uploading. At best the satellite service, like DirecPC's, is not that fast ("up to about 400 kbaud").
But if that is your only option besides a meagre 56K dial-up of course you're going to take what you can get.
Check out garlic.com's website to grasp what they're doing now and why they'd welcome this National/Wilcom connection if they can get it.
Now if that same ISP can offer speeds double and triple that of course they will profit mightily, so I can imagine this model of serving more rural communities will be a winner if the numbers work out. Since the investment dollars aren't that bad, thanks to the MRV wireless links, it could work out very nicely - and the population to be served is pretty big.
One can only hope they are successful with this concept.
Dee Jay |
