Homes with tails: What if you could own your internet connection?

America?s communications infrastructure is stuck at a copper wall. For the vast majority of homes, copper wires remain the principal means of getting broadband services. The deployment of fiber optic connections to the home would enable exponentially faster connections, and few dispute that upgrading to more robust infrastructure is essential to America?s economic growth. However, the costs of such an upgrade are daunting for private sector firms and even for governments. These facts add up to a public policy challenge. In this paper, the authors propose and describe a new way to encourage broadband deployment. Most proposals have focused on deployment as a problem for firms and for government. For firms, the question is how a company can justify investments in a fiber infrastructure without a ?killer app? ? a new and proven revenue source that is different from what is available from existing copper wires. For governments, the questions consider how they might build and operate their own networks, convince or pay existing carriers to do so, or encourage market entrants to arrive and save the day. The intuition of the authors is that an innovative model holds unrealized promise: household investments in fiber. Consumers may one day purchase and own fiber connections that run from their homes. They would then be able to connect to a variety of service providers, including today?s Internet, television, and telephone services, as well as ultra-bandwidth intensive services of the future. Consumers would have the opportunity not only to get a fast broadband connection, but also benefit from greater competition and lower prices in the retail service market. The authors call this property model ?Homes with Tails,? for the fiber would form part of the property right in the home