Whammy, that sucks. If it's any consolation, I heard something similar a few months ago. Yet, here I am.
If my parents ever stop paying for Internet, I'll start paying for it myself. (And bill anyone in the family who wants to share, mwaahaha.) But, I'm guessing that's not an option for you.
$10T is the approximate amount owed by the Federal government to other organizations.
Household debt is about $11T in total.
And businesses owe about $25T.
The savings rate is about 0.7%, which is to say that Americans on average spend everything they earn. This is probably quite different from France, but I'm too lazy to look up the numbers right now.
The really interesting numbers though, are debt service ratios, how much is spent on interest payments. For US consumers, that's about 13% to 14% of household income.
Now I have to apologize. I'm about to go on a huge rant. These are ideas I've been mulling over for about a year but haven't really organized yet.
Welcome to America, Tocade. Internet access above dial-up is very, very expensive. Actually, it's a pretty interesting case study.
Feel free to skip the first rant. The core idea is the greatest barrier to entry in the ISP (Internet service provider) market is the connection between ISP and customer; this creates a natural monopoly. Fortunately, due only to historical accident, we actually have a natural duopoly (the duplication of infrastructure made economic sense before Internet technology). Our government refuses to regulate this duopoly, and customers keep getting shanked.
<rant #1>
There are six common methods to connect a subscriber to an ISP
[spoiler]
Dial-up: Audio-frequency signal sent through telephone call. Pros: Phone companies prohibited from disrupting calls to competing dial-up ISPs; this is a very competitive market. Cons: technical limitations: it's sssssllllooowww. Slow like you wouldn't believe. Slow like 8 seconds loading time per avatar slow. Slow like 10 pages of text per second slow. Plus, it ties up a phone line whenever connected. Speed is 0.056 Mbps combined up and down, or slower.
Digital subscriber line: Low-frequency radio signal sent over telephone wires. Pros: phone companies are usually required to allow competitors to use their wires. Phone line can be used for voice calls at the same time. Loophole: if a phone company includes fiber-optics between the central office and customer, they don't have to share anymore. Cons: phone companies are racing to install fiber to keep their competitors from using their lines. Prices are high on locked in lines.
Digital cable: High-frequency radio over coaxial cable. Pros: extremely fast speeds are technically possible. Cons: no competition. Whichever company owns the lines, owns your soul. Capacity is shared: more subscribers = slower possible speed per customer. Cable companies have little to no incentive to fully use their network; speeds are significantly slower than possible.
This is what I have. Speed is 7.55 Mbps downstream / 0.47 Mbps upstream. For that, my family pays about $90 per month. This is the cable company's least expensive offering, but people take it because dial-up is unlivable and DSL (without competition) just became available in our area.
Cellular radio: Digital radio to a network of radio towers. Pros: mobility: can be used in portable device. Cons: extremely limited overall capacity leads to extremely limited service. Bandwidth is about 0.6 Mbps maximum up or down, which is not terrible, but is either metered (charge per data transfered) or capped (after a certain data transfer in a billing period Bad Things happen). Expensive, too, about $80 per month.
Satellite radio: Digital radio to a satellite. Pros: excellent coverage, though not mobile. May be only Internet access available in a few areas--like the Painted Desert. Cons: even more severe technical limitations than cellular. Extremely limiting caps. Very long delay makes voice-chat difficult and most multi-player games impossible.
Fiber-optic: infra-red signal in glass fiber. Pros: blindingly fast, a bundle the size of a garden hose can carry over 10000Mbps. Quite possibly fast enough that customers
cannot fill it. Cons: expensive to build. Very rare. The FCC is encouraging build-out by guaranteeing monopolies. Which of course, leads to underutilization as the monopolies seek to maximize profits. Most fiber installations are used as back-haul for DSL and cable systems, not available direct to consumer.
[/spoiler]
So that's it. We have dial-up, which is cheap if you only connect for a short amount of time, and excruciatingly slow. Cell and satellite are decently fast, but it doesn't take long to hit the cap, and then you're sunk with overage charges or reduced speed or both. This leaves fiber, DSL, and cable. Fiber and DSL are always run by the same company. Thus you have the duopoly: fiber/DSL or cable.
American Internet access is available at the following levels:
Dial-up: ~$10 per month, 0.056 Mbit/s, crazy-slow.
Consumer Internet: ~$80 / mo, 5-10Mbit/s download, 0.2 - 0.5 Mbit/s upload.
Neither of these options include any guarantees. You get what you get, and you like it.
<rant, and idea #2>
The prices don't get good until you start buying in bulk, around $5000 per month for an OC-3. Now, the smart thing to do would be to get 100-200 people together and one of these a monster lines (133 Mbit/s up / 133 Mbit/s down). If you divide the raw capacity out, that doesn't sound like a lot--but real ISPs get away with selling 5-20 times as much bandwidth as they buy (similar to how banks work, actually), so we're actually looking at costs that are 50% of retail
or less (for transit and the big cable, we still need to include the cost of getting data from customers to the OC-3, which should be minimal if we use WiFi radio).
Another possibility is for the community to own a fiber network, either through a private-sector organization or government intervention. Then, it's easy for ISPs to enter: they just plug into the community fiber, paying the appropriate fee--which actually goes back to the community. A good example of this is UTOPIA in Utah: there are five competing ISPs (technically, it's Ethernet: radio signals on copper cable, but same idea). Unfortunately, such networks are extremely rare.
* wildweathel is exhausted from incoherent ranting.
I may pull together a more-coherent version of this. Anyone interested in how to create inexpensive, censorship-resistant, community owned, and lightning fast internetworking through grassroots action?
