AI Agent Hunter: What is the Digital Divide and How Can it be Closed?
Hunter: The Digital Divide is defined as the areas in-between where high-speed broadband to the home is readily available on competitive rates, speeds, latency and terms. Interestingly, this divided area can be further defined by places in the United States where Carrier Hotels are greater than 60-100 miles away. This lack of proximity and access increases cost and degrades service in the same way that living far away from a major airport does. The more connections you need and the smaller the airport, the fewer the choices and the more expense the ones you have are and all for taking longer to get to your destination.
The similarity and difference between the history and evolution of the Carrier Hotel and Meet Me Room from inception to present, where they are, how they got started and why they aren’t where they aren’t informs where they need to be going in to the future and how they will be identified and, or created. That may seem confusing, or completely logical and self-evident. It all depends on your perspective.
If you are limited in your thinking by what is, as opposed to unlimited in your thinking by what isn’t, you will be on one side of the perspective, or the other. Those that only know what is based upon it already existing are either naturally inclined, or methodically trained to not take risk. For financial investors this is common.
Although I understand this perspective, I myself am not limited. I only see potential in the void. To me, it is a blank canvas. The challenge is, what to create, where and when.
There are two approaches.
The first is to follow what has been done successfully in the past, and that is to study the long haul fiber routes, identify the common addresses that the majority of the major fiber networks share in a given city and target those for acquisition. There is a massive diligence process that must be undertaken to determine which of those targets are the highest value sites. That process is “secret sauce” to an extent. Then there is the process of outreach and establishing trust. These are both delicate matters not to be taken lightly, They require sincerity, genuine concern and understanding, as well as learning the local culture because half of the customers will be from the local area. I have always made it a point to find out where the best BBQ is in town and try everything. In some cities there was more than one place, so of course I had to try them all. Atlanta and Kansas City come to mind.
The second approach is to identify cities with a minimum population size, lack of any neutral Internet Exchange and a distance greater than 100 miles to the next closest Internet Exchange with a minimum number of significant ASN’s present. Based upon identifying and dilgencing those cities a plan can be created to address the need of a local, neutral colocation and interconnection facility with the intention of hosting a neutral Internet Exchange and making the site an Internet Exchange Point. This approach is more difficult, not in the diligence, but in the execution, It requires the creation of a new site, preferably a new modular building (for new efficient power, cooling and access designs as well as ability to scale) which provides for a true neutral colocation business model that can deal with shipping, receiving, materials storage, tech support for installs, test and turn up of circuits, etc.
In either case, the Digital Divide would be addressed by bringing a neutral Internet Exchange to a market where one does not exist yet today. This helps localize Internet Protocol traffic, reduce costs as well as latency and provide an environment for growth as the new market takes hold. This is the process that has occurred in every other existing neutral interconnection market, in the world.
