I've had this discussion a couple of times with various city council members and candidates in Sunnyvale. Network connectivity should be a community infrastructure, just like roads. The argument I attempted to establish was that "network" was a thing that connected our community, "roads" connect our community. If you can establish that the city puts in the network to every business and home, they can have them all terminate at a city connectivity building (or buildings) and all of the vendors can offer services there, from Comcast to AT&T to Sonic to NetFlix. You pay "network taxes" as a citizen and as a provider which cover the maintenance of the system. Just like taxes cover the cost of roads.
The downside of course is that it makes it easier for the City to tap into your network connection. And perhaps connect commerce tax revenue with transactions originating out of your network port. Sophisticated users would use VPNs or what not to disguise that of course. But it would put all of the vendors on a level playing field.
"Come build us a super-fast network. You'll have to pay for it all. You'll also be required to sell access to your competitors (those guys that didn't pay to build the network) once you're done. We're also favoring companies that happen to be current cell network providers in the city (all two of you). Please respond to our RFP!"
Why is this doomed? I'm from telecom land and this is how it is always done...
The fact that LA is soliciting bids might mean that they provide easements on the entry rights (which are the main thing that prevent rollouts of this nature). The common carriage clause is great and is actually the only way to build networks like this if you want competition. I don't know if you know this, but Fiber is not subject to common carriage laws like Copper and thus the only way to have shared fiber networks is with regulation or commercial interest (with the latter being unsurprisingly limited to the old boys club).
In short, this is actually the way to build a fiber network if you want competition. Alternatively, raise a bond and build it yourself.
Source: I rolled out a fair amount of fiber for Comcast in San Francisco. Each square foot of street we tore up was about $300 and crossing a cable car track was prohibitively expensive. These costs were the main limitations in fiber optic rollouts (pushing the payback period on buildings over 30 years made them unbuildable). In fact, the main advantage Google Fiber got in Kansas City (which was arguably unfair and anti-competitive) was easing of street cutting costs.
They're basically selling the right to be a monopolistic utility vs. a consumer facing monopoly.
1. No one else is going to come in after you and lay more fiber, it's just not worth it
2. Your competitors are going to buy from you but you're still the one earning revenue from the network. In a competitive market your competitors will earn their value-add (marketing) and you'll earn yours (infrastructure + servicing)
3. You'll displace existing infrastructure competitors. Immediately. All that infrastructure Comcast built? useless, no one is going to be buying shitty internet from them anymore. If they want to continue to operate in the market they'll come just another marketing affiliate for you, which is a game that has much lower barriers to entry.
4. They say they won't give you any favorable treatment but they will. This is now a high priority issue that the city explicitly said they'll do. Which means you saving millions on just the legal costs of figuring out if its feasible in this jurisdiction. They won't contradict themselves (too much).
- There are about 1 million households in LA (3M+ population but 3 people per household in LA County)[1]
- Assuming the vendor got 75% sign-up for the free tier, that's 750K households
- I'll give them a generous freemium-to-paid conversion rate of 10% (sorry but 5Mbs is fine for many people). That's 75K households.
- I'll be generous and say that most paid households will get some kind of bundle and pay $150/month
MONTHLY HOUSEHOLD REVENUE: $11,250,000
- There are 250K non-farm businesses in LA County. I'm not sure how many are in the city limits, but let's say 25K buy a paid. Since we know ISPs love to gouge offices with higher prices for the same service, let's say they get $250/mo from each business.
MONTHLY BIZ REVENUE: $6,250,000
- Quick search puts Comcast's ad revenue is about 4% of total (Charter is 5%). So I'll throw in an extra $1M/MO in ad revenue from this deal, which I think is generous.
1. You estimated revenues - let's multiply that by AT&T's 5.7% 2012 net income margin [1]. Y1 earnings: $12.7 million.
2. That seems low - let's double your business revenue estimate. Adjusted Y1 earnings: $17 million.
3. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim real GDP grew at 2.4% a year between 2009 and 2012. Assume that continues into perpetuity. AT&T pays 5.3% and 3.7% on its 2041 and 2029 debt, respectively - let's say you can borrow between those.
--> Present value of cash flows: $0.6 to $1.3 billion. Quadruple your revenue estimates and borrow at 3.75% to hit $5 billion.
CAYENNE:
1. $5 billion to roll out fibre across Los Angeles seems optimistic. The issue is compounded by the city council having no skin in the game, even with regards to bureaucratic inefficiencies (e.g. some land use or environmental commission jamming the entire project for 5 years).
SUGAR:
1. Your revenue estimates look pessimistic - businesses could pay differing rates based on usage and more than 1/4 of the population could sign up. You also don't include government demand. But it's thorough enough to look closer than 4x off.
∴ The RFP in its present form looks more like a political stunt than a serious proposal. Not sure what the LA electoral calendar looks like over the next 3-6 months.
This assumes 100% gross margin. If they are buying a bundle, you probably mean TV, so they are going to have to pony up to the networks. Then they'll have to pay for upstream (I don't think AT&T etc is going to freely peer with a 750k residential/commercial network), then they'll have to pay for all the support costs associated with running a fiber network.
I'm thinking they'd be lucky to be able to use half of $18.5M/MO to pay off their $5B investment. We're now at 50 years! And that assumes they can keep their price high despite technological advancements over the next half-century (imagine paying $150/mo for an internet connection using technology from 50 years ago). Oh, and they have to wholesale it to their competitors. There is 0 chance this is happening with these numbers.
In my experience, Cable/Telco companies don't build fiber networks with greater than 15 year payback, with 30 being the hard cap. I think your math is fairly accurate.
Source: See my other comment, I did fiber rollouts with telcos including Comcast in the Bay Area.
Right on. And it will 100% go over budget given the amount of work needed, ancient infrastructure, non-compliant landlords and the "I just don't give a shit to change" LA attitude.
I remember two years ago when I was the CTO of a 100 employee company in Beverly Hills just how difficult and annoying it was to get a single 10/10Mbps Fiber link to our offices.
It took 6 months from the date the order was placed to the provisioning. And it took another 2-months to go from 10-20Mbps. It's totally insane that these things take so long and it was 50% the fault of AT&T and I kid you not - 15 employees at AT&T dealing with this - and 50% the fault of the building who didn't even know what Fiber was and thought it was a back link from their telco room to our servers.
> LA expects the fiber buildout to cost $3 billion to $5 billion, but the cost would be borne by the vendor.
> The new fiber network would offer free Internet access of 2Mbps to 5Mbps (possibly subsidized by advertising) and paid tiers of up to a gigabit.
Am I missing something? If the vendor is paying for the network and they're offering free internet, is the only source of revenue advertising and tiers above 2-5 Mbps? Seems like a money-losing proposition to me.
Here's another good and BETTER option -- demand congress to cut 200 Billion dollars/yr from Pentagon spending, re-invest that into nationwide fiber infrastructure(Namely laying the conduit and pipeline for underground wiring) -- then work w/ all telecoms to co-op building out a co-op shared fiber network nationwide...
Personally I don't think any company should eb able to 'own' something that runs along city lines under the street. -- just like they can't own the airwaves..
Imagine just taking 200 billion + some equal investment from Google, ATT, Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner, etc- - and it'll be owned by the gov't and all 5 major carriers...
Also let users buy in early @ monthly rate they're willing to pay say $5 per month -- which will accrue --so say it takes two years, they'd have $120 in donations to the cause, and a $120 credit for fiber. If they did $100 a month they'd have $2400 in free fiber credit, etc... Let's crowdfund the hell out of this thing and just make it happen... The future is literally waiting on the speed of our broadband pipes.
Semi-relatedly, one of my greatest criticisms of all that stimulus spending of the last several years was how incredibly unimaginatively it was allocated. I've seen figures which indicate gigabit fiber could be rolled out nationally to 95%+ of homes and businesses for $400 billion if gov't paid it all, or $100 billion if done in a private/public partnership. Another figure I've read is that if the U.S. heavy duty truck fleet were converted to run on CNG, we could reduce our oil usage by 20%.
Those would both have been transformational accomplishments, and the $950B or so spent in total could have probably done it all thrice over. Bitterly disappointing.
Great in theory, but I just don't see this happening with the telcos (AT&T and TWC) controlling the entire broadband footprint in SoCal. It's called collusion, look it up.
These two telcos (the worst in the world most likely) base their entire business and offerings on providing high-speed internet of yesteryear. AT&T UVerse service is a step up from traditional ADSL with speeds up to 25Mbps (I get 19Mbps regularly and live about 2 miles from the CO). Telco execs have been quoted as saying "consumer just don't need higher speeds." And most probably do not, the niche consumers (probably the HNers) would love 1Gbps speeds for reasons unknown (perhaps to host their own in-house EC2/S3!) but the niche consumers are the 1% and telcos don't care about us.
The biggest problem with this concept of Gigabit internet in Los Angeles is who will pay the bill, which will most certainly exceed the estimate.
AT&T already has plenty of fiber running to the pole with copper to the household. There are tens of thousands of old buildings in LA that make it impossible or extremely difficult to run fiber to the home. Not to mention, a ton of landlords will simply not care to tear up their infrastructure even if it costs them nothing. There is a VERY serious disease people in LA have which is "We just don't care."
Additionally, the "free" access of 2Mbps - 5Mbps is redundant since these are quite frankly ancient speeds regardless of their price economics. So with that said, if you do a simple analysis of how many customers would actually pay for high-speed (>100Mbps) access vs. the "free hoarders" it would be dismal. And would never cover the costs of the roll out.
Finally, EVEN if the economics made sense, the telcos would simply fight it, create problems for potential bidders, collude enough to force bidders out and continue their shitty business.
This is correct, but you do need to understand that there are technical limitations to twisted pair. Even if AT&T or $TELCO runs fiber to the node everywhere, twisted pair has gigantic line loss issues over long distances. We really need fiber to the prem or frankly we're just messing around.
There's no financial model that will support building fiber networks except the obvious societal benefit. Having fast fiber everywhere is incredibly valuable from both a social and economic perspective. To put it bluntly, GDP goes up when internet gets faster.
Now, the costs will always be wrong for a fiber network. I question why LA would do this instead of building a WISP (wireless ISP) that would deliver speed over radiowave. Forget tearing up all the streets, just put radio towers on the buildings! The costs are lower, the bandwidth is fast and the rollout is asynchronous (you roll the radio towers as you sign people up).
Source: I come from the Internet and stuff. My credentials: Comcast fiber rollout, AT&T sales, Avaya consulting and 2600hz (open-source telco infrastructure).
> There are tens of thousands of old buildings in LA that make it impossible or extremely difficult to run fiber to the home
Really? Here in Sweden, I haven't seen any problems with running fiber to at least ~80 year old apartment buildings (I recently went apartment hunting, and literally zero of the apartments I looked at didn't have fiber internet)
Indeed, the City is vast, and what people refer to as Greater Los Angeles—which includes most of the grey areas on the first map, like my hometown of Glendale, and a ton more to the east not displayed—is still more vast.
Greater LA aside, there's no chance in hell they lay fiber to every residence in the Valley (the communities that the 134/101 run through and everything else north of that), there's no chance in hell they lay fiber all the way down to San Pedro. Not for five billion dollars, not for five trillion dollars.
Anyone who has so much as casually observed an LA infrastructure/works project in recent history knows that this ends in tears.
That's interesting. Can NY pull anything like that through? Verizon practically abandoned FiOS deployment, and even if they expand in a crawling fashion, more competition will only boost the market and will make prices lower (right now Verizon doesn't even offer gigabit bandwidth, and anything that comes remotely close in FiOS plans costs some crazy money: http://www.verizon.com/home/fios-fastest-internet/#fastest-i...). I.e. they charge $300 for 500/100 Mbps plan.
>>The new fiber network would offer free Internet access of 2Mbps to 5Mbps (possibly subsidized by advertising) and paid tiers of up to a gigabit.
Subsidized by advertising? The only way I can think of doing this is by injecting ads into internet traffic. Is that what they're thinking, or more of a 'free starbucks wifi" approach.
And why is this bigger than Google Fiber? Couldn't Google bid on this contract?
"But Google Fiber in its current form wouldn't be considered. "They would have to change their business model," Reneker said of Google. "They only run residential. We're requiring a component for the business. That would be a new market for them."
usually RFPs of this nature are published for due diligence purposes when someone already has a plan ready to go and they need it to not look like a slam-dunk selection process.
It doesn't mean there can't be higher free tiers if it makes economic sense, just that those are the minimum required free tiers. The network will be open access. How about you open a free 100 Mbit ISP of your own ontop of the fiber network?
And to me they sound fine - enough of a connection that those living in poverty aren't cut off from access to social services like job hunting and news, but low enough that anyone who actually wants to get use of the internet will become a customer.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
I've had this discussion a couple of times with various city council members and candidates in Sunnyvale. Network connectivity should be a community infrastructure, just like roads. The argument I attempted to establish was that "network" was a thing that connected our community, "roads" connect our community. If you can establish that the city puts in the network to every business and home, they can have them all terminate at a city connectivity building (or buildings) and all of the vendors can offer services there, from Comcast to AT&T to Sonic to NetFlix. You pay "network taxes" as a citizen and as a provider which cover the maintenance of the system. Just like taxes cover the cost of roads.
The downside of course is that it makes it easier for the City to tap into your network connection. And perhaps connect commerce tax revenue with transactions originating out of your network port. Sophisticated users would use VPNs or what not to disguise that of course. But it would put all of the vendors on a level playing field.
[1] http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2008/apr/22/comcast-sues-...
[2] http://www.annarbor.com/business-review/comcast-att-may-thre...
[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1pn4cl/comcast_is_dona...
[4] http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Time-Warner-Continues-Leg...
[+] [-] nostromo|12 years ago|reply
"Come build us a super-fast network. You'll have to pay for it all. You'll also be required to sell access to your competitors (those guys that didn't pay to build the network) once you're done. We're also favoring companies that happen to be current cell network providers in the city (all two of you). Please respond to our RFP!"
[+] [-] josh2600|12 years ago|reply
The fact that LA is soliciting bids might mean that they provide easements on the entry rights (which are the main thing that prevent rollouts of this nature). The common carriage clause is great and is actually the only way to build networks like this if you want competition. I don't know if you know this, but Fiber is not subject to common carriage laws like Copper and thus the only way to have shared fiber networks is with regulation or commercial interest (with the latter being unsurprisingly limited to the old boys club).
In short, this is actually the way to build a fiber network if you want competition. Alternatively, raise a bond and build it yourself.
Source: I rolled out a fair amount of fiber for Comcast in San Francisco. Each square foot of street we tore up was about $300 and crossing a cable car track was prohibitively expensive. These costs were the main limitations in fiber optic rollouts (pushing the payback period on buildings over 30 years made them unbuildable). In fact, the main advantage Google Fiber got in Kansas City (which was arguably unfair and anti-competitive) was easing of street cutting costs.
edit: grammar.
[+] [-] jsun|12 years ago|reply
1. No one else is going to come in after you and lay more fiber, it's just not worth it
2. Your competitors are going to buy from you but you're still the one earning revenue from the network. In a competitive market your competitors will earn their value-add (marketing) and you'll earn yours (infrastructure + servicing)
3. You'll displace existing infrastructure competitors. Immediately. All that infrastructure Comcast built? useless, no one is going to be buying shitty internet from them anymore. If they want to continue to operate in the market they'll come just another marketing affiliate for you, which is a game that has much lower barriers to entry.
4. They say they won't give you any favorable treatment but they will. This is now a high priority issue that the city explicitly said they'll do. Which means you saving millions on just the legal costs of figuring out if its feasible in this jurisdiction. They won't contradict themselves (too much).
[+] [-] callmeed|12 years ago|reply
- There are about 1 million households in LA (3M+ population but 3 people per household in LA County)[1]
- Assuming the vendor got 75% sign-up for the free tier, that's 750K households
- I'll give them a generous freemium-to-paid conversion rate of 10% (sorry but 5Mbs is fine for many people). That's 75K households.
- I'll be generous and say that most paid households will get some kind of bundle and pay $150/month
MONTHLY HOUSEHOLD REVENUE: $11,250,000
- There are 250K non-farm businesses in LA County. I'm not sure how many are in the city limits, but let's say 25K buy a paid. Since we know ISPs love to gouge offices with higher prices for the same service, let's say they get $250/mo from each business.
MONTHLY BIZ REVENUE: $6,250,000
- Quick search puts Comcast's ad revenue is about 4% of total (Charter is 5%). So I'll throw in an extra $1M/MO in ad revenue from this deal, which I think is generous.
TOTAL: $18.5M/MO
TIME TO RECOUP $5B: 270 Months (22.5 years)
[1]http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06037.html
EDIT: Updated with ad revenue numbers
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|12 years ago|reply
SALT:
1. You estimated revenues - let's multiply that by AT&T's 5.7% 2012 net income margin [1]. Y1 earnings: $12.7 million.
2. That seems low - let's double your business revenue estimate. Adjusted Y1 earnings: $17 million.
3. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim real GDP grew at 2.4% a year between 2009 and 2012. Assume that continues into perpetuity. AT&T pays 5.3% and 3.7% on its 2041 and 2029 debt, respectively - let's say you can borrow between those.
--> Present value of cash flows: $0.6 to $1.3 billion. Quadruple your revenue estimates and borrow at 3.75% to hit $5 billion.
CAYENNE:
1. $5 billion to roll out fibre across Los Angeles seems optimistic. The issue is compounded by the city council having no skin in the game, even with regards to bureaucratic inefficiencies (e.g. some land use or environmental commission jamming the entire project for 5 years).
SUGAR:
1. Your revenue estimates look pessimistic - businesses could pay differing rates based on usage and more than 1/4 of the population could sign up. You also don't include government demand. But it's thorough enough to look closer than 4x off.
∴ The RFP in its present form looks more like a political stunt than a serious proposal. Not sure what the LA electoral calendar looks like over the next 3-6 months.
[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=T+Income+Statement&annual
[+] [-] gibybo|12 years ago|reply
I'm thinking they'd be lucky to be able to use half of $18.5M/MO to pay off their $5B investment. We're now at 50 years! And that assumes they can keep their price high despite technological advancements over the next half-century (imagine paying $150/mo for an internet connection using technology from 50 years ago). Oh, and they have to wholesale it to their competitors. There is 0 chance this is happening with these numbers.
[+] [-] josh2600|12 years ago|reply
Source: See my other comment, I did fiber rollouts with telcos including Comcast in the Bay Area.
[+] [-] dakrisht|12 years ago|reply
I remember two years ago when I was the CTO of a 100 employee company in Beverly Hills just how difficult and annoying it was to get a single 10/10Mbps Fiber link to our offices.
It took 6 months from the date the order was placed to the provisioning. And it took another 2-months to go from 10-20Mbps. It's totally insane that these things take so long and it was 50% the fault of AT&T and I kid you not - 15 employees at AT&T dealing with this - and 50% the fault of the building who didn't even know what Fiber was and thought it was a back link from their telco room to our servers.
Insanity
[+] [-] OvidNaso|12 years ago|reply
What am I not seeing? The census link states population: 9,962,789, Housing units: 3,449,273.
[+] [-] sker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altoz|12 years ago|reply
> The new fiber network would offer free Internet access of 2Mbps to 5Mbps (possibly subsidized by advertising) and paid tiers of up to a gigabit.
Am I missing something? If the vendor is paying for the network and they're offering free internet, is the only source of revenue advertising and tiers above 2-5 Mbps? Seems like a money-losing proposition to me.
[+] [-] crusso|12 years ago|reply
How is this even remotely something that a vendor would want to pursue?
[+] [-] spankalee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|12 years ago|reply
Personally I don't think any company should eb able to 'own' something that runs along city lines under the street. -- just like they can't own the airwaves..
Imagine just taking 200 billion + some equal investment from Google, ATT, Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner, etc- - and it'll be owned by the gov't and all 5 major carriers...
Also let users buy in early @ monthly rate they're willing to pay say $5 per month -- which will accrue --so say it takes two years, they'd have $120 in donations to the cause, and a $120 credit for fiber. If they did $100 a month they'd have $2400 in free fiber credit, etc... Let's crowdfund the hell out of this thing and just make it happen... The future is literally waiting on the speed of our broadband pipes.
[+] [-] Scramblejams|12 years ago|reply
Those would both have been transformational accomplishments, and the $950B or so spent in total could have probably done it all thrice over. Bitterly disappointing.
[+] [-] dakrisht|12 years ago|reply
These two telcos (the worst in the world most likely) base their entire business and offerings on providing high-speed internet of yesteryear. AT&T UVerse service is a step up from traditional ADSL with speeds up to 25Mbps (I get 19Mbps regularly and live about 2 miles from the CO). Telco execs have been quoted as saying "consumer just don't need higher speeds." And most probably do not, the niche consumers (probably the HNers) would love 1Gbps speeds for reasons unknown (perhaps to host their own in-house EC2/S3!) but the niche consumers are the 1% and telcos don't care about us.
The biggest problem with this concept of Gigabit internet in Los Angeles is who will pay the bill, which will most certainly exceed the estimate.
AT&T already has plenty of fiber running to the pole with copper to the household. There are tens of thousands of old buildings in LA that make it impossible or extremely difficult to run fiber to the home. Not to mention, a ton of landlords will simply not care to tear up their infrastructure even if it costs them nothing. There is a VERY serious disease people in LA have which is "We just don't care."
Additionally, the "free" access of 2Mbps - 5Mbps is redundant since these are quite frankly ancient speeds regardless of their price economics. So with that said, if you do a simple analysis of how many customers would actually pay for high-speed (>100Mbps) access vs. the "free hoarders" it would be dismal. And would never cover the costs of the roll out.
Finally, EVEN if the economics made sense, the telcos would simply fight it, create problems for potential bidders, collude enough to force bidders out and continue their shitty business.
[+] [-] josh2600|12 years ago|reply
There's no financial model that will support building fiber networks except the obvious societal benefit. Having fast fiber everywhere is incredibly valuable from both a social and economic perspective. To put it bluntly, GDP goes up when internet gets faster.
Now, the costs will always be wrong for a fiber network. I question why LA would do this instead of building a WISP (wireless ISP) that would deliver speed over radiowave. Forget tearing up all the streets, just put radio towers on the buildings! The costs are lower, the bandwidth is fast and the rollout is asynchronous (you roll the radio towers as you sign people up).
Source: I come from the Internet and stuff. My credentials: Comcast fiber rollout, AT&T sales, Avaya consulting and 2600hz (open-source telco infrastructure).
[+] [-] kalleboo|12 years ago|reply
Really? Here in Sweden, I haven't seen any problems with running fiber to at least ~80 year old apartment buildings (I recently went apartment hunting, and literally zero of the apartments I looked at didn't have fiber internet)
[+] [-] callmeed|12 years ago|reply
Which is enormous.
You can fit St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Boston, SF, Pittburgh, & Manhattan inside of LA: http://laist.com/2012/06/30/map_how_many_major_us_cities_can...
It makes me skeptical that $5 billion would cover the cost unless it was done by a vendor who could piggyback existing infrastructure ...
[+] [-] Ryanmf|12 years ago|reply
Greater LA aside, there's no chance in hell they lay fiber to every residence in the Valley (the communities that the 134/101 run through and everything else north of that), there's no chance in hell they lay fiber all the way down to San Pedro. Not for five billion dollars, not for five trillion dollars.
Anyone who has so much as casually observed an LA infrastructure/works project in recent history knows that this ends in tears.
[+] [-] shmerl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxmcd|12 years ago|reply
Subsidized by advertising? The only way I can think of doing this is by injecting ads into internet traffic. Is that what they're thinking, or more of a 'free starbucks wifi" approach.
And why is this bigger than Google Fiber? Couldn't Google bid on this contract?
[+] [-] antimatter|12 years ago|reply
"But Google Fiber in its current form wouldn't be considered. "They would have to change their business model," Reneker said of Google. "They only run residential. We're requiring a component for the business. That would be a new market for them."
[+] [-] sentinel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] beachstartup|12 years ago|reply
i wouldn't put too much stock in it.
[+] [-] kvinnako|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elwell|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scramblejams|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callmeed|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pothibo|12 years ago|reply
Driving innovation forward.
[+] [-] philwelch|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xfactor973|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalleboo|12 years ago|reply
And to me they sound fine - enough of a connection that those living in poverty aren't cut off from access to social services like job hunting and news, but low enough that anyone who actually wants to get use of the internet will become a customer.
[+] [-] ars|12 years ago|reply