I applaud the comparison with electricity. This is almost exactly how I look at it. I would compare Internet providers with utilities providing water, roads, sewage and even the post.

To think at one time we had telegraph data lines that were little more than a mud battery and a pole. The wire would run up the pole, go though a relay switched by the previous pole and continue to the next pole where it would switch its own relay. The mud battery provided very little power, just enough to switch a relay but the technology was good enough to bridge almost unlimited distance.

Without comparison with other services I would be tempted to argue my ISP provides really great services. Its 75 Euro for 300 Mbit and the package comes with a phone line and hundreds of channels of something called television.

However, when compared honestly with similar services their service is terrible. People working there told me the entire network is ready to provide 1 Gbit to everyone and the employees don't know why they didn't make the switch. I can easily guess why, I'm not willing to pay much more than 75 Euro, 3 times the speed wont bring in 3 times the money. What it will do is reveal glitches in the network that would require fixing. If I remember correctly the people who created the ISP were very passionate about the technology but ended up selling the business. Not sure if that was related but if I was passionate about my business but couldn't upgrade because of a hunger for money I would get bored fast.

Using more of this rather ignorant guess work I started to ponder how an ideal ISP should be implemented. What would it really cost? Which type of contract is best for the network rather than the user or the provider?

Surprisingly, in some areas where big money hungry ISPs refused to deliver services people had to rethink and do it themselves.

Like this one here!

http://www.buergerbreitbandnetz.de/fernsehen-ueber-glasfaser...

The "Glasfaser – für nur 9,95 € im Monat" translates to fiber optic for 10 Euro (?!?)

My German almost isn't but from reading around I gathered they needed 65% adoption but got 94%, each end user had to pay 1000 Euro in advance. 900 in the form of a lone and 100 worth of shares.

To guess some numbers with that... 7 and a half years worth of 10 Euro/month does seem to add up to 900 Euro while profit made after that should increase the value of the investment. IOW, if it takes 20 years to repay the debt it would work out just fine for the investor/customer.

Some quote from speedtest: "With an average Q2-Q3 2016 download speed comparable to that in Bulgaria and Moldova, Germany’s fixed broadband is slower than you might expect from Europe’s largest economy. At 40.38 Mbps, Germany ranks 29th in the world for average fixed broadband download speed and 72nd for average upload."

A different page mentions: "Expect a 35€ bill on average for a broad-brand connection"

Most important to keep in mind, the big ISPs refused to service the area. It makes a great proof of concept. (Assuming buergerbreitbandnetz delivers 1 Gbps) in this worse case scenario 10/35 buys 1000/40.38 times the bandwidth. Or 29% of the cost for 2476% of the service. Or the 2 figured combined their service is 8438% better than the conventional urban offering.

Rural UK ISP https://b4rn.org.uk happened when big business "could" only provide crappy services at crazy rates. B4RN charges 30 pounds for 1 Gbps.

speedtest writes: "according to the Connected Nations 2015 report from the UK’s communications regulator, Office of Communications (Ofcom), 48% of rural areas don’t have access to broadband speeds of 10Mbps or higher."

Of course our germans and these brits had money to make their own ISP happen.

My Spanish and my Greek are even worse than my German but from reading around, apparently Guifi is the worlds largest Mesh network in Greece that originally started in Spain.

http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet

Trying to make sense of this document...

https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

...it seems they are actively fighting a tax per meter that guberment is trying to inflict on their fiber optic cables. If I understood correctly they are mainly offended by established businesses putting their cable in before the tax was invented. It seems big business did more than seal the ground after digging in their cables.

How different this is from the mundane consumer perspective where we all pay some corp as much as we can for as little as we would accept. We live in a world that is a bit like: when one asks why a carton of milk costs 200 Dollars the answer would be that if they charge 300 USD for it they wouldn't sell enough milk to justify the higher price.

Our entire western society works like this (I almost called it a civilization) one delivers 12 Dollars worth of labor that is sold for 40 Dollars, etc, and eventually it becomes 1000 dollars as part of a mortgage or infinite dollars as part of someones rent.

If that is the mentality or indoctrination that comes over these roads, in these letters and though this internet tube it might just be not worth having any of it.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/4/42/20150...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CPO4R8o5M