6 Ways Cheap Fiber Access Helps You

The big news in the ISP market last week may have escaped you. After all, who really pays attention to the doings of monopolies when the trend is to pay more for less service? However, there are some small players that are shaking things up, and last week there was a distant rumble.

Wha Happen?

Last week a small ISP in Northern California, Sonic.net,  announced that they were going to roll out an installation of fiber optic Internet access to the community of Sebastapol, California. By the end, this installation of fiber optic cable is going to reach about 700 customers, so it’s really just a trial balloon in terms of installation.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, so what? So there’s going to be more access for some people somewhere that I’m not. Or you may even have fiber access already and be gloating over that. But hold on, Tex. This isn’t big news because of the roll out, but because of the price.

Price Point Wars

So here’s the deal. This high-speed Internet access roll out is going to come with a price tag that is only $70 a month for a speed nearly 7 times faster than what Comcast users get for $40 a month! That sort of speed to cost ratio is unheard of in the United States, and that’s something to get excited about.

For more resources about the announcement and the nature of the speeds and prices involved, Nate Anderson over at ArsTechnica wrote a great article about this. I encourage you to check it out. Also, you can find more information in the Press Democrat’s article about Sonic’s move. They are both good information on the news and way more detailed than I intend to get into here.

Fine, get to the point, how does this help me?

So how does this help you? Let’s see if these things interest you:

1. Speed

Greater speed means less time-wasting, and less waiting for data to come to you. It means that you can do more things and faster. I’ll be touching more on this more specifically later, but just keep in mind what you might be able to do with about five times the speed that you’ve got now.

2. A lowering tide lowers all boats

Internet access is a commodity. There’s not a lot of difference between what you get from one ISP versus what you get from another besides speed and price. This means that given competition, prices for the commodity will tend towards the lowest sustainable price to the consumer. Now, there hasn’t been much competition in Internet access in the US, thanks to a whole host of factors. And for some reason, US prices for Internet access have been fairly high, especially when one considers the price to speed ratio of other first world nations. (Here’s a great infographic illustrating this.) If the US gets competition that proves the pricing point model, the chances are that the costs will drop for similar service — first regionally, then nationally.

3. A more competitive US

If you look at the infographic I link to above, you’ll notice that the US isn’t first in something. And we’re not first in something that we’re basing our economy: information and data transfer. As more people work from home or even begin to run their own small businesses, faster, cheaper data transfer is going to become more crucial to allowing the US to compete in a global market. In essence, higher speeds and lower costs is just being patriotic.

4. Better home entertainment

One of the largest growths in terms of Internet bandwidth usage has been in the arena of home entertainment. People love the ease and convenience of streaming videos from YouTube, Netflix and Hulu and listening to Internet radio over Pandora or Live365 or SHOUTcast. This usage has started taking up a significant amount of bandwidth. Some ISPs deal with this growth by beginning to impose limits and caps on the amount of data one user can consume per month or per day. But there are no caps in Sonic.net’s plans. So not only are they looking at faster access for cheaper, they’re going to be providing that access with no limits on amount other than the bandwidth imposes. That means more movies, faster, and that could mean that your new 3D-enabled TV could get streaming 3D content that much sooner.

5. Easier and cheaper future bandwidth upgrades

Bandwidth upgrades in telecommunications are currently limited by the amount of copper wire strung around on telephone poles and underground cables around the US. But with a greater installation of fiber optic cables, innovation could begin to move faster as well. With the infrastructure upgraded, the competition to give better service and higher bandwidth for less cost could begin anew, and we’d all benefit.

6. More speed at less cost = the Internet + INTENSE-ER-ER!

So here’s where my inner geek comes out. Mostly, I just think you’d benefit from these changes because you’d get more of a good thing. The Internet, and how we use it for any number of things, has greatly changed the world in just the last 20 years. If we’ve changed that much going from modems and dial-up to high-speed cable and DSL, imagine how much more things could change, how much more the online economy could ramp up given an increased speed and ubiquity. Often, innovation follows increased access — Amazon wouldn’t be a viable business were it not for the speed and ease with which a host of people could shop there, and YouTube could hardly exist without high-speed  – so with a higher bandwidth, a whole host of as-yet unimagined (or hardly imagined) new offerings could come to pass. In short, human ingenuity could make use of that new bandwidth to make your life better, and your ingenuity could make your life better with the increased money in your pocket.

All hail cheap fiber access!

[Disclaimer: I am a Sonic.net customer (and happily so, for several years).]