Imagine, Broadband Without Internet Access

town hall meeting

Wefi is a company that promotes the idea of a world connected by "hot spots". A good idea, but not suitable for holding a town hall meeting. And, speaking of town hall meetings, just how far are we from the day we can sit at our kitchen tables, connect to a videoconference, and have everyone speak on camera, or by phone, or by email, and conduct the town's business? Oh, dear, we're already there! Wonder why it isn't happening? Is it too expensive?

Let's see, what does it cost? Well, everyone needs a cheap desktop sitting on their kitchen table. That would be doable. A few "barn-raisers", and the town would be set up with a computer in every house, surely in every neighborhood. Everyone would need software to run a webcam, if they want to be on camera. And, there's the $50 webcam, itself. If not on camera, they'd need software called, chat software, to participate in a discussion using their keyboard to type their thoughts. Some could participate in a phone conference call setup, which should cover most houses. That's about it, except for connecting all the computers to each other. That could be done for $50 per house. A community wireless mesh network, where everyone connects wirelessly as in "hot spots", and a couple of gateways to keep down the number of hops from one computer to another, in order to achieve broadband speeds for everyone in town.

So, figure $50 per house and a shared monthly cost of less than $10 per month per house, and the community can build a broadband infrastructure to give everyone broadband speeds that are ten-fold faster than anything offered by the telco/cableco monopolies. Wonder why the telco/cableco monopolies don't offer such broadband infrastructure solutions to communities? Easy. No profits!

Hmmmm. Now that I think about it, if every house in the community becomes its own "hot spot" by simply purchasing a $50 unit, plug it in, and automagically, everything is a go, maybe that Wefi idea does just what we want?! We can worry about using our broadband infrastructure to leverage Internet access at affordable prices, later. Wonder what the going rate is, for a telco/cableco monopoly to gain access to our broadband infrastructure?