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CollegeTerrace.net
College Terrace Internet Cooperative
We will run on a non-profit basis. When we have all cost information in
hand we intend to verify our financial model before proceeding.
The goal is to be able to provide service that is of the same or
higher quality than DSL or cable modem (i.e. higher bandwidth) at lower
cost, so that households can see financial benefit in participating
instead of paying for commercial broadband service. Note that
currently the cheapest DSL home service costs $50 per month, for
about 1.2 Mbps "down" and about 100 Kbps "up". We expect the initial price to be $20 per month per member login. Over time, as more members sign up, we expect the price to drop. Also, as we add more members, we will increase the bandwidth of the system to keep up with it.
For households not willing to pay for broadband service, we wish to
provide free sub-broadband service as a community benefit. This will be near dial-up speed.
Universal access should help encourage even non-paying participants to support
the effort in ways such as installing wireless nodes to extend the
network.
Equipment costs for this project are expected to be a mere fraction of the monthly recurring costs, except for the wireless nodes which we assume participants will provide themselves (at a cost as low as $130 each). Our equipment needs are minimal and from some vendors we can even obtain deeply discounted or donated equipment as a non-profit.
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