Why Open Access Network is Essential

While dealing with COVID work-from-home, many like me are experiencing poor internet performance from home. I was working from home already, and the influx of other work-from-homers (and gamers, and Netflixers, and everybody else doing more on the internet from home) has really eaten up the shared bandwidth allocated to my area.

The impact for me? My HD video calls suffer significantly, even though I have “business class” internet at my house. The fact is, it’s all on the same shared infrastructure. Just like tiny capillaries are fed from arteries, my internet is fed by the big pipeline, and I can only use as much as isn’t used by others.

Jeff Christensen at EntryPoint Networks has written an excellent article explaining the problem and the solution.

The digital divide is exacerbated when much of the country turns to working and doing school from home. The misalignment between what customers want and need and the capacity and flexibility of networks lead us to this moment when we must ask whether the importance of internet infrastructure has reached a point where we should classify it as essential and create incentives for reliable fiber-optic networks to become ubiquitous.
~Jeff Christensen, EntryPoint Networks

Feel free to read the real deal, but I’ll share what I’m picking up from it here.

• Our networks don’t have the capacity for what’s happening as a result of COVID

• The negative impacts (of internet use) are simply a reflection of the way the infrastructure was designed.

  • ISPs designed infrastructure that’s just “good-enough” because their interests don’t align well with the consumer: profit-vs-quality

• Telephone and Cable companies capitalized on existing infrastructure to provide internet connectivity to homes which was a good thing at the time, but now it’s time to change things

• Municipal leadership needs to review the ISP business model and determine if it’s still optimal for their citizens

• The best option seems to be open-access networks owned by someone who does not operate the network.

  • A fiber optic core (or backbone) is the key to quality, high-speed internet connectivity and has the capacity to provide synchronous speeds to all users (instead of 50mb download and 10 upload, 50x50, or even gigabit: 1000x1000)

  • “There is compelling evidence that organizing network infrastructure as a utility and separating the infrastructure from services significantly improve the value consumers receive,” Jeff says.

• EntryPoint Networks is already successfully deploying and managing open access networks for municipalities, and so far, everyone is winning:

  • Citizens have cheaper, faster internet

  • ISPs are more profitable (wow, even they win in this model???)

  • The municipality has a revenue-generating asset

  • There’s opportunity to leverage the fiber network for smart city initiatives that can either save or generate revenue and improve the quality of life for citizens

  • Economic development follows high-speed internet, especially as more people work from home (this Harvard study indicates economic development as a second-order benefit of a municipal fiber project in Chattanooga, TN)

• In his article, Jeff says, “If Fiber Optics were the standard infrastructure rather than the exception, if we gave every home and business a dedicated connection, and if networks offered symmetrical upload and download speeds, then YouTube wouldn’t have to reduce video quality during an event where network utilization spikes.”