The Mercury News: Comcast told him it would cost $17,000 to speed up his internet. He rallied neighbors to build their own fiber-optic network instead

The San Jose Mercury News tells the story of the tech-rich but internet-poor Silicon Valley neighborhood that was fed up with slow broadband and frustrated by the take-it-or-leave-it attitude of internet providers. Sean Gonsalves of ILSR is quoted advocating for a solution that isn’t reliant on telecommunication giants. An excerpt from the article, written by Elissa Welle and originally published on November 21, 2023, follows:

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The status quo of broadband communication — the passing of large amounts of data from one place to another at the same time — uses telephone wires or copper coaxial cables owned by big companies like Comcast, Spectrum and AT&T.

This copper-based internet is all that’s available to nearly 60% of the homes in the United States, according to the Fiber Broadband Association. Four in 10 adults earning less than $30,000 a year did not have broadband internet access at home in 2021, according to Pew surveys. And many Americans have no internet at all.

“We can’t keep begging the Comcasts and the AT&Ts of the world to build out a network that ensures everybody in our community has (internet) that is reliable and affordable,” said Sean Gonsalves, who works on community broadband networks at the Institute for Local Self Reliance.

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Read the full article here.