Where is the Internet, Actually?

People wondering where the Internet is can look out their window. It’s on public property, on those poles on the street, or in those holes in the street. This is the “outside plant” (outdoor cables and cable connection boxes) of the Internet service providers, the telephone and cable companies. Ninety-five percent of the telephone and cable plant is outside plant, located on public property. The rest is “inside plant,” the swift but dumb routers inside the cable and telephone buildings that open pathways (routing) for customer computers. The cables and routers inter-net-work customer computers, big and small, home, business, government, and education.

“Inside plant” (indoor equipment, in company offices) is a small part of plant, and is not complicated, because the Internet doesn’t need intelligence inside the network. Customer computers (all of them, big and small) program the intelligence into the packets, using the universal Internet Protocol. Historically, telephone phone calls needed network intelligence (to translate a number to a cable location), but today Internet messages zip through without that help.

(Robert Kahn invented the Internet Protocol in 1973. To overcome the personality-clash of differently intelligent networks, he stripped out the need for network intelligence. Yes, he made it all “a series of pipes.”)

The Internet Service Providers provide the service, and do not provide the Internet. The Internet we experience is rather from the subscribing customers, big and small, from your iPhone to the Googleplex, all chattering with the same Internet Protocol packets. The packets do not dwell long with, nor interact significantly with, the service provider equipment. That is neutral (may this be ever so). Routers are fast, and get the packets through and off the network to the customer in milliseconds. But Internet Service Provider routers are not intelligent. A router’s IQ is somewhere between a stop sign and a traffic light.

The Internet hides in plain view in the public space, on the cable and telephone lines strung along and beneath public property, the public rights-of-way, mostly city-owned. The provider pays 5% of gross to the city in rent, and gets a monopoly position. What other business in town gets a deal like this?

Today, school children cannot do homework, and senior citizens cannot renew Medicare, without the Internet. Poor children are apt to have fathers who “forget” to pay the cable bill. A typical senior single woman in town gets $850 a month on Social Security, and another $140 a month in food stamps. $140 won’t cover a month’s food, so she cannot afford the price of access to the Internet public space. Internet access costs $60 a month, in my town, New Rochelle. The ads say $30, but the providers will only sell $30 Internet “bundled” with $30 TV or $30 landline phone — inessentials for the Spartan life.

The FCC doesn’t regulate the Internet, nor the states, nor the counties. Providers are franchised by the property owners, the municipalities. It is time for the municipalities to step up and set things right, beginning with low-cost access for those who cannot otherwise pay. Philadelphia, through Comcast cable, has this, for $10 a month, at least for schoolchildren with lunch cards.

(The FCC states that it does not regulate the Internet up front, on its web site. But it is fiddling with weakening “network neutrality.” This term means that the Internet Service Providers strictly route by reading packet headers only, and do not do “deep packet inspection.” In the post office, this means deliver the mail, don’t read it.)

A dirty little secret, according to a former Comcast executive (who wishes to remain confidential), is that Comcast makes money on the $10-for-low-income program, called “Internet Essentials.” Comcast is offering it up front to New York City, to sweeten its Time-Warner buyout. We can probably have it in my town, New Rochelle, from Verizon and Optimum, our Internet service provider duopoly, if we ask for it. Click here, and see if you wouldn’t rather be in Philadelphia, and a Comcast customer. http://www.internetessentials.com/