Google broadband in Portland

Not exactly Server Sky, but the Google community nomination process doesn't permit notes.

I work with the Personal Telco Project, providing hundreds of open community access points on the Portland Metro area.

Here in the burbs, the Verizon Terms Of Service are silent about the free sharing of our bandwidth with neighbors. Comcast does not permit this, perhaps because their network and backhaul is oversubscribed and underpowered.

In whatever community Google chooses, you should encourage WIFI sharing in your terms of service. Not as a philanthropic gesture, but as low cost marketing. A PTP node recruits neighbors into high bandwidth Internet, saving the initial cost of saturating neighborhoods with $2K/end ONTs, and eliminating the need for 24 month contracts to defray installation costs.

This also takes some of the wind out of the sales of your competitor Clear Networks, squeezing their price point from the bottom, costing you no more than a little more backhaul.

Once people get a taste of the internet over a shared and relatively low-bandwidth and somewhat unreliable WIFI connection, they are more likely to pay for a higher speed direct connection. Many of the small businesses we work with appreciate PTP, because they can provide their patrons with WIFI without having to maintain it themselves, or devote the resources to the high reliability expected from the paid services.