Mark Ansboury, the president of Gigabit Squared, chatted with me on Wednesday morning about the company and its plans to lower the cost of deploying and operating a broadband network. His goal is to bring gigabit speeds to as many places as possible, and along the way he may join firms like Google, Sonic.Net, Allied Fiber and several municipalities in changing the way broadband is deployed and operated in the U.S.

Bypassing red tape keeps projects in the black

For the Gig.U project, Ansboury is offering to spend up to $200 million helping build broadband in six selected communities. The money comes from a combination of vendor financing provided by companies such as Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Corning and others who are working with Gigabit Squared as well as Chicago investment bank Stern Brothers. Communities that apply are expected to contribute too, but instead of cash they will have to make commitments that will lower the cost and headache of deployment.

Communities should work to offer easy-access utility poles, making right-of-way access discussions fast and painless, and may even commit to becoming primary customers for broadband or helping Gigabit Squared sign up new customers. Google has said the municipality’s willingness to help lower its deployment costs as well as smooth the political process was one of the reasons Kansas City, Kan., was chosen as the place where it would deploy fiber.

So in that way, Gigabit Squared is taking a page from the search giant. However, it also plans to work with cities to develop programs that will take advantage of the network, which is something Chattanooga, the nation’s first gigabit network, is trying to do. Creating programs that use the network will help drive residents to use it and engender support among different members of the community, from teachers to public safety officials.

Ansboury is even happy to bring on local ISPs if they want to come to the table to help build networks, although he does expect the first six projects done with Gig.U will be owned and operated by Gigabit Squared. But he’s not averse to a municipality or other network provider taking over, he said. “We think of ourselves like a developer. We have a road map we’ve created to help deploy these networks. We lay out a path for communities to follow,” Ansboury said.

Can this new model work?

Currently Gigabit Squared employees have experience consulting on gigabit networks, but the company doesn’t operate one. For example, Ansboury was the former SVP and Chief Technology Officer of One Community, which helped build high-speed broadband networks in Ohio. Other executives at the company have a variety of roles in infrastructure development and finance, but not everyone has broadband experience, according to their bios.

Ansboury says the company is involved in some broadband stimulus grant efforts and may even make some investments in those networks, providing the private equity for those public-private partnerships. Like someone who has somehow managed to discover an entirely new way to lose weight, he seems excited to bring his models and theories to smaller cities around the country and put them to the test. Unlike Google or even Sonic.net, an ISP in California that’s deploying fiber on top of its existing DSL network, Ansboury is going big and getting there fast.

But, its unclear how much a city can promise under a model like this (or how much it will matter in the end for Gigabit’s Squared’s ROI). Google’s fiber project hit some delays while the city’s utility and Google came to terms on how and where Google would string its fiber on the poles. There is also always the possibility of messy citizen battles over ugly equipment or rights-of-way the city can’t really ignore. For example, residents in San Francisco have sued to stop the placement of AT&T’s fiber-to-the-curb termination cabinets.

An open network means anyone can access that gig

Ansboury says city involvement is just one element of cutting costs, although he declined to get into the specifics of the cost per home passed or the details of how GB2 would build its networks. He did say there are several elements that will enable Gigabit Squared to not only deploy a network for less but also sign customers and achieve a penetration rate that offers a return on Gigabit Squared’s investment. Part of that return might come from Gigabit Squared’s commitment to running “open” networks, by which Ansboury means he will resell capacity on the network to others.

“We realize that if we want to get high take rates and be hyperlocal, we have to think differently and part of that means you have to change that paradigm,” Ansboury said. “You have to be a triple-play provider with broadband video and voice but that’s not only it. With the emergence of over the top services and big bandwidth sucking applications we are creating an open access strategy that allows for a town to have a something like a digital economic development service model.”

He used the example of Netflix coming in and buying capacity to deliver its service to customers directly and confirmed that other ISPs could buy capacity on its fiber. The model looks like a last-mile network that might be as innovative as what Allied Fiber is trying to do nationally for the middle mile. Ansboury expects we will see the first network in the early part of next year as part of the Gig.U program. The Gig.U project communities have two application windows; one closes in July and the other in November, so interested communities should check it out.

As for why this effort matters, Blair Levin, the executive director of the Gig.U project, summed it up nicely in a chat with me on Wednesday. “The problem isn’t that we don’t have a gigabit everywhere. The problem is we don’t have it anywhere,” he said. “And if we need it, we’ll need it in university towns first so let’s get on with it. It’s too late when we discover we need it everywhere because then we are pure consumers of what everyone else [namely places with existing gigabit networks like the Netherlands, Hong Kong or North Korea] else is producing.”

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According to leading analyst firm, Point Topic, the country’s alternative network operators have increased their residential customer base by 85 percent since mid-2011, and had around 8,400 fibre-based superfast end user connections at the end of 2011. These include fibre-to-the-cabinet, fibre-to-the-premises and fibre-to-the-building providers whose customers are receiving download speeds of at least 25Mbps.

Companies such as Call Flow Solutions and Rutland Telecom are providing service in suburban and semi-rural areas of the U.K where large ISPs such as BT or Virgin are not. Analogs in the U.S. would be networks from Sonic.Net, BendBroadband in Oregon, Google’s efforts in Kansas City, and an array of municipal networks, such as those in Chattanooga, Tenn., and Lafayette, La. But ultimately, while niche superfast networks are great for those that have them, a patchwork broadband strategy isn’t ideal.

Huge differences in speeds can create chicken and egg problems for towns with superfast connections and no one to connect with, as Chattanooga is finding. Additionally the economics of rolling out superfast broadband mean that dense areas are less expensive to wire, while rural and spread-out areas cost a lot, especially in the U.S. A national plan helps average out the costs, while cherry picking dense areas means any provider trying to connect rural or suburban areas will have to pay more and possibly charge more to offset those costs.

That being said, the investment in superfast broadband at a national level is expensive — for the U.S. the high-end network estimates come in at $100 billion – so perhaps we’ll have to take what we can get and hope firms such as Sonic.Net and Google, or cities like Chattanooga can help upend the traditional telco model.

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I spent some time talking to Dane Jasper, the CEO of Sonic.net about how he plans to take on the incumbents, the cost of a fiber build out and the natives of a city that already have sued to stop AT&T from building out fiber to the node broadband. We also touched on caps and why Jasper can’t see himself offering businesses gigabit services in the near future.

They may be rivals but Sonic.net and AT&T share a common enemy.

When it comes to building out infrastructure, from broadband to roads, someone, be it environmentalists or neighbors leery of the project’s components, are bound to raise a fuss. When it comes to better broadband, the cabinets holding the electronics raise the ire of residents who would rather not have refrigerator-sized boxes on their lawns. For example, residents of San Francisco have banded together to sue to stop AT&T’s planned U-verse deployment, which requires more than 700 cabinets to hold the electronics gear be placed around the city.

Jasper says because Sonic.net is deploying fiber to the home, he will use fewer cabinets (he estimates 188) but he’s still worried that San Franciscans will step up to hold up or halt his permits. AT&T originally had received its permits, but those permits were halted by the court while this suit goes forward.

Jasper is worried that the suit could take another three to six months, and will hold up his deployment, but he’s hoping that fewer cabinets and a willingness to share Sonic.net’s infrastructure with other providers might make city residents view his cabinets with a bit more favor. After all, instead of building new cabinets, competitors interested in the market could share space in the existing boxes. Jasper understands that cabinets aren’t ideal, but he’s also hoping that if he plays it straight with the city, he can convince them that fiber-to-the-home is worth the potential of a couple hundred eyesores.

The Economics of broadband and fiber to the home.

The Sonic.net employees. Look for them in your neighborhood, San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Jasper declined to disclose his costs for providing fiber to the home in San Francisco, but he did say the fiber deployed would be a mix of aerial and underground cabling. Aerial deployments are cheaper because there’s less labor associated with stringing the cable. Jasper said he hasn’t chosen vendors yet, but he is currently using ADTRAN, Clearfield and Corning in the fiber-to-the-home build out he’s building in Sebastopol, Calif. Sonic.net is profitable as a company, and has been in business for 17 years.

The question is if Jasper can keep Sonic.net in the black while building out and selling fiber to the home to consumers for $70 a month. Sonic.net today offers two products in most markets, a $40 ADSL service with one phone line and a $70 a month 40 Mbps bonded DSL service with two phone lines. Replacing the copper with fiber adds costs, but Jasper plans to keep the rate the same. Sonic.net’s well known for declining to cap its broadband service and for adding a variety of services to its bundle without charging more. Jasper says, “fundamentally we recognize that as a competitive service provider we need massively differentiated products and we have done that with our fusion copper products and uncapped service.”

But, as Jasper says, “we recognize that copper is not a long term solution ten to 20 years from now and it’s logical to build fiber out.” So while there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation to building out fiber in terms of the customer demand not necessarily being there right away, Jasper believes that the demand will come and he can deliver the capacity and afford the build out. Jasper is using ist Sabastopol buildout to help model the costs and demand for fiber in San Francisco.

Why businesses won’t get Sonic.net’s Fusion products anytime soon.

No caps and no meters for Sonic.Net

To help keep costs in line, the fiber links are for consumer accounts only, at least so far. Jasper has been an ardent foe of broadband caps, where ISPs place a limit on the amount of data a customer can use each month. However, when it comes to delivering broadband to businesses, he recognizes that a superfast gigabit connection to a business will have a very different usage pattern than one delivered to a consumer. Yet currently Sonic.net only charges businesses a bit more than residential services at $45 and $90 respectively). Under a gigabit network, that lack of price differential and the possibility for a business to use all of their connection (or even half) becomes unsustainable.

“We haven’t built our fiber past any businesses yet, and we did it intentionally,” Jasper said. “With our stance on no capping, I have a little bit of concern delivering 1 gig to a business at $89.95 and them using half of it, because that could really happen.”

Sonic.net has a decade and a half modeling usage for consumers at lower prices than rivals offer, but with businesses and their demand for broadband, Jasper says there are a lot of unknowns. For example, the lack of applications for gigabit networks probably helps Jasper here, as does the fact that most consumers typically use downlink services to consume content. And currently there’s a limit to how much they can consume, even with three or four TVs downloading or streaming HD content.

“Consumption is still constrained by the number of TVs and hard drives and even though everyone eventually has more stuff, practically speaking it really does end up normalizing down to a reasonable level,” Jasper says. He points out that the inbound bandwidth costs and middle mile bandwidth costs are getting less and less expensive, which means that customers downloading content isn’t a giant cost suck. But a business might hook a data center or several servers up on a gigabit connection and use that to send a lot of traffic out. And that could get expensive.

So for those watching U.S. broadband policy, between Google’s plans to deploy fiber to the home in both Kansas Cities, a few municipal networks, Verizon’s FiOS network and Sonic.net’s plans, we’re getting more people to a gigabit. It can be done, so let’s see what we can learn as these companies push ahead. And when others say it can’t be done, perhaps we’ll have the information that proves them wrong.

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The Sonic.net employees. Look for them in your neighborhood, San Francisco.

Sonic.net, an independent Internet service provider in San Francisco, has said it plans to roll out a gigabit network to the city, putting the hub of today’s tech and web community on equal footing with Chattanooga, Tenn., and eventually both Kansas City, Mo., and Kansas City, Kan., where Google plans to build a fiber network. Sonic.net has applied to lay fiber to 2,000 homes in the Sunset District and plans to reach most of the city’s buildings within five years.

Perhaps the question of which needs to come first, the gigabit network or the applications that will cause customers to pay for such a network, can finally be put to rest. If the geeks in San Francisco have such a sandbox to play in, as well as a few gigabit hubs in the rest of the U.S., surely we will get to answer the question of what a gigabit can do.

The eventual all-fiber network would be served from approximately 188 outdoor utility cabinets, and construction of the network will begin next year if Sonic.net can get the permits. That is not a given, considering San Francisco’s reputation for frustrating technology projects. Sonic.net is a familiar entity for many Bay Area residents, as the company has been offering copper-line DSL and telephone service to people. Its CEO, Dane Jasper, has also been very outspoken on several consumer issues such as broadband caps and ISPs’ trying to use deep packet inspection technologies to try to deliver ads. From the release:

“San Francisco is our fastest-growing market for copper delivered Fusion Broadband+Phone service today, so we are very excited to bring our Fiber-optic upgrade process to the city,” said Dane Jasper, CEO & Co-Founder of Sonic.net. “There is a huge demand in San Francisco for higher bandwidth services, and fiber is the only long-term way to meet this demand.”

Sonic.net also has deployed fiber to the home in Sebastopol, Calif., at two price packages — one delivering 100 Mbps (and voice) for $40 per month and one delivering a full gig for $70 per month. The company also plans to expand its operations out of the state, Jasper told me earlier this year. Regardless, other San Francisco providers such as Comcast and AT&T should be worried. They are getting some real competition, and I can’t wait to see the results.

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The xTVFusion 5 platform is designed with that latter case in mind, and was created specifically to enable live and on-demand video services to be deployed over low- and high-bandwidth IP networks. Specifically that will enable new entrants to take advantage of their existing networks to roll out new services.

For customers with high-bandwidth connections, Minerva’s platform lets carriers deliver IPTV services including whole-home DVR, remote scheduling, and blended pay TV and over-the-top video capabilities. That lowers the requirement for ISPs to add new video service options to their customers.

More importantly, xTVFusion 5 can also be used for networks with as little bandwidth as 5Mbps, over which ISPs can still offer broadband TV services. That means ISPs offering DSL services — and even those running some high-powered LTE 4G mobile networks — should be able to launch streaming TV services over those networks, Minerva Networks CEO Mauro Bonomi told us in a phone interview.

Today, its average ISP partner can only reach about 20 percent of its customer base with IPTV services due to bandwidth constraints. But the new offering can expand that availability to up to 80 percent of its customers, Bonomi said.

The combination of IP connectivity and new managed networks could create interesting new business models for ISPs looking to boost sales and add new services. Take Sonic.net, for instance: the broadband provider has filed a video franchise application with the California Public Utilities Commission, and is expected to launch a low-cost streaming TV offering over its existing network. With technology like xTVFusion 5, more ISPs could follow suit.

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Here’s what the company said about the chart on its blog:

The answer is that yes, there is a substantial increase in traffic the day after the update was released. We host the Apple update content locally on AkamaiCDN servers in our datacenter, so this doesn’t affect our network edge, but you can see the bump in traffic from the CDN cluster itself here.

Last Wednesday Apple released the latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 5. Apple confirmed that 25 million users had already upgraded to iOS 5 by Monday. Localytics then reported Monday that one in three devices that could be upgraded to iOS 5 were, within five days of the OS’s release.

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Already the 17-year-old ISP is building out networks outside its Bay Area home base, with plans to begin serving Los Angeles and Sacramento this year, says CEO Dane Jasper. He won’t disclose where he plans to build, but stresses that dense populations are important for his economic model. “Look to the top 20 MSAs in the country, and some of those we will be likely to build in first,” he said. “We need to look at the cost to cover a certain number of square miles and whether there’s 50,000 people or 5,000.”

Sonic doesn’t sweat its assets.

The rest of the country should get excited, because his company is a fairly unique broadband provider; it doesn’t cap speeds. It’s currently in the news for fighting a government request for subscriber information. And it’s much, much cheaper than most wireline broadband services provided by the large cable and telecommunications firms.

Sonic.net offers customers wireline voice and 20 Mbps broadband connections for $40, or two phone lines and 40 Mbps down for $70. Most cable companies charge about $70-80 for a single digital voice line and some form of 12-14 Mbps service. Of course, for a little more, the cable company will also throw in TV. Many will also seek incremental revenue in the form of additional features as they seek to raise the amount subscribers pay each month. Jasper explains that for incumbents who have invested in physical assets over time and need to grow revenue from an existing base of customers, they’re stuck trying to squeeze their customers for more money in order to get their growth.

“If you don’t engage in market segmentation, if you offer uncapped, unlimited and the fastest broadband at the entry-level price point, that is not economically efficient [for incumbents],” he said. “It’s not the way to ‘sweat your assets,’ which is what the dominant incumbents with limited customers need to do.”

For Sonic.net, growth comes in the form of new subscribers, who are attracted by the lower price points. Because he doesn’t have this expensive triple play revenue to protect and grow, he can afford to charge such low prices. It’s not the capital expenditures of building out a network, but the operational ones that force the incumbents into protecting their video business using caps or offering metered service, he says.

“Our products are profitable at their current price point, and fundamentally if you adopt a simple product design, you have a lower cost of customer acquisition and operations,” Jasper says. “The cost structures around a simplified product are substantially lower and we are willing to accept lower margins. But [Sonic.net's products] are wildly profitable either way.”

Preparing for broadband’s Sonic boom.

Jasper’s business started out reselling service from the existing telephone companies after the Telecommunications Act of 1996. However, unlike a lot of the other companies that got into that business and were thwarted by uneven enforcement of the law, Sonic.net managed to build a base of customers. And since it doesn’t have a TV business to protect, its policies are a lot more consumer-friendly than those of Time Warner Cable, Comcast and AT&T.

However, caps do make sense for businesses that can look ahead and see the future of TV and music is streaming content over the web. “ISPs are using caps and congestion as an obstacle on the track miles down the road to derail the over-the-top video train,” he says. “But if you’re a triple-play operator, that’s the right thing to do.”

Much like Google and its fiber to the home effort, Jasper is looking for those next generation applications such as TV and trying to build out an infrastructure that requires customers to buy higher speeds and can support his profit margins. And despite all the FUD from ISPs, he’s not concerned about the cost of access and is fine building out infrastructure to match his customers’ demand. It’s not breaking his bank. “The cost of transit is moving to zero,” he says.

Jasper’s company doesn’t offer TV yet, although it has applied for a video franchise from the California Public Utilities Commission. It has also started overlaying fiber to the home on top of its existing ADSL2 network to offer 100 Mbps speeds and gigabit speeds for the exact same price it’s offering the ADSL service. It will upgrade homes with fiber after take rates in its markets get above 30 percent, and it’s beginning in San Sebastopol, Calif. It’s possible that some areas won’t make it, but that’s not stopping him from continuing to expand his ADSL2 network to more cities in California and to those beyond.

He wouldn’t give out his revenue or profit details but he did assure me that he does make money selling broadband, which he puts back into the business to pay for expansion and network upgrades. So today, he says that the company’s network reaches 60 percent of the homes in the Greater Bay Area with construction occurring in Sacramento and in Los Angeles. After that he’s taking on other parts of the country. Broadband lovers should stay tuned.

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It’s a question that analysts posed of Verizon, when they pressed the company that deployed the nation’s largest fiber-to-home network, about take-up rates and boosting subscribers for FiOS. It’s a question Google seeks to answer with its own plans to build out a gigabit network in Kansas City, Kan. and Kansas City, Mo. And it’s also a question we need to focus more on even as the siren song of mobile connectivity and apps tempts developers to think smaller.

“It’s ironic that the app that is having the most effect and making a big difference is Twitter, which is the most narrow band application imaginable,” says Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.Net. “Something similar has to occur in broadband as it gets faster and faster and it gets more ubiquitous.”

Jasper’s ISP is overlaying fiber to the home in Sebastopol, Calif. where it already deployed an ADSL2 network. Subscribers can pay $40 a month for wireline voice and 100 Mbps FTTH broadband, or they can pay $70 for two lines and get a gigabit. Those seem more like the economics that Google is looking for when it sells its network, but until later this year when it should announce pricing, we’re still unsure what it plans to offer.

But tests from Jasper’s initial deployment speak to some problems the industry will need to overcome if we want gigabit networks to become the norm. For starters, there’s the equipment. Computers today aren’t geared up to support gigabit connections and current Wi-Fi networks couldn’t offer those speeds either. Jasper says the first trial of the gigabit network was a speed test on a generic laptop that showed off 420 Mbps down; the laptop couldn’t handle a full gig.

That’s fine, because there aren’t that many applications that need those speeds. Perhaps the most compelling use case I can think if right now is if you wanted to subscribe to a new online backup service and upload your images, music and movies all at once. A gigabit could help you complete the task in minutes as opposed to hours or days. But that’s a one-time kind of benefit — consumers will need everyday benefits if they are going to upgrade their broadband. Yet, network operators have a hard time justifying an investment in a network that will get few subscribers and application developers have little incentive to develop programs for the few on gigabit networks.

So we’re stuck at a point where a gigabit — or even 100 Mbps – sounds awesome, but it’s not exactly worth the prices most companies want (or need to charge). This is why Google’s and Sonic.Net’s plans to expand moderately priced 100 Mbps and gigabit networks will be so important.

“If every consumer has 100 Mbps, we’d have some better applications,” Jasper said. ” At 100 Mbps, high-def video conferencing becomes a reality and you don’t need local storage anymore. You don’t even need local computing.” He pointed me to this awesome video as an example of what might happen, ya’ know, just in case anybody wants to build those next-generation applications.

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Until recently, Sonic operated as a standalone broadband ISP that competed with local cable Internet and DSL providers. But it has gradually increased the number of services that run over its pipes. Last September, Sonic launched a combined broadband and voice-over-IP voice offering.

Now, a year later, it’s adding video to its service offerings. While waiting on video franchise approval, Sonic.net has partnered with DirecTV to offer a bundled broadband and satellite “triple play” offering. And the filing with the California Public Utilities Commission shows that it could soon introduce its own TV services, which would be streamed over its pipes.

Sonic CEO Dane Jasper has hinted at the possibility of rolling out an over-the-top TV offering in the past, surveying web users asking whether they would pay for a low-cost local TV service streamed to an Internet-connected device like a Roku box. In the most recent poll, Jasper received 227 votes, with nearly half of all respondents (49 percent) saying they would pay $5 for such a service, and an additional 16 percent saying they would pay $10 or $15.

“The DirecTV triple play gives us a compelling multichannel lineup, while the franchise application moves us toward offering local channels over IP,” Sonic CEO Dane Jasper wrote in an email.

According to Jasper, the TV service would be a limited offering of local channels and would be mainly offered as a complement to other over-the-top services like Netflix and Hulu Plus already available on the streaming devices. While final pricing and content availability are still up in the air, Sonic’s proposed launch of a streaming TV offering could pave the way for other local ISPs to launch similar services.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Esparta Palma.

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Fiber is the future, and North State is on board.

North State, which includes Greensboro in its service area, began deploying fiber to the home in 2009 because it was losing out to the cable companies with its DSL-only option. Tucker declined to tell me how many customers it currently has, but he says it’s now the No. 1 provider of broadband in a region that includes Time Warner Cable and AT&T as well as smaller cable companies. “We said we want to be the broadband market leader and the way to do that in late-2009 was with fiber to the home,” Tucker said.

Now North State offers an 80 Mbps down/30 Mbps up for consumers at a 12-month introductory price of $49 a month, which is about what I pay for 12-13 Mbps down/ 2Mbps up cable broadband from Time Warner here in Austin. However, the most popular package North State sells is a 30/30 Mbps symmetrical package, although he didn’t disclose penetration or take rates. Tucker also noted that the company is still supporting its 10 Mbps DSL business in its service area, but he doesn’t plan on making more investments in the technology. “Back in 2003 and 2004 and 2006, we were out there shortening loop lengths, building out fiber to the node and all that, but now we’re going to stick with maintenance,” Tucker said.

To cap or not to cap? That is the question.

North State doesn’t currently have a broadband cap, as Tucker believes the fiber network can withstand the speeds that today’s traffic requires. However, Tucker says, “We believe ultimately that is the direction the broadband market will go.” When pressed on the subject, Tucker says, “As over-the-top video becomes more and more prevalent and there’s more HD and bigger broadband requirements, the broadband market will move to some kind of cap or metered service.”

However he couldn’t explain precisely why this would need to happen. “The networks are expensive. We are providing bandwidth for all these wonderful things that are showing up on the Internet and that is costly,” he said. “This market is highly competitive and we have to get some money from somewhere to pay for these networks. All of it is not falling on the user.” But when asked if his financial models could support the delivery of more traffic he said that, “in a multi-product scenario, yes it does. We look at the whole household and the revenue we’re getting out of the households.”

When I asked if that meant North State could only recover costs and make money off a user that subscribed to multiple services, Tucker appeared to backtrack. A user that subscribed to broadband alone would suffice, he said. He then implied that part of the issue around capping was because some people use so much more than others. “All the rich content that’s showing up on the Internet is driving tremendous demand on our network, and we want our customers to have access to that.” He continued, “There are those that are more bandwidth-heavy users, and we need to strike a median on who’s paying for what, and that’s where we see that capping may come in.”

However, Tucker was very clear that North State wasn’t capping service now — and that it may never cap or meter service. However, one could hear the amazement in his voice when we discussed what people were doing over the network.

“I don’t think anyone could see what we would drag across these pipes, and people thought the unlimited model would be fine,” Tucker said. “But this is evolving and it’s something that we’re all having to deal with. We’re a broadband company, and we want people to do what they want to do, and we want to deliver value to our shareholders.”

As people consume more bandwidth, it may well be smaller ISPs such as North State that are answering to private shareholders in highly competitive markets, that show us exactly what networks are capable of, both in terms of technology and in delivering profits.

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