I posted the following on a Stupid Network discussion over at Isen’s blog.

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On the industry aspect, the role of a pure ISP (ie, the middleman that provides IP connectivity only by procuring infrastructure from a telco) is already dead by 1996 to 1997 when the telco woke up to the idea of Internet.

Pure ISPs started disappearing, either moving up layer (like AOL) or down the layer to build infrastructure. They are been squeeze by both side afterall, with a cost squeezed by telcos and revenue squeezed by telcos.

Will such business model comes back? Maybe it will come back as a provider who can roam across multiple infrastructure (2.5G, 3G, Wifi, cable, DSL etc) but not likely in the near future given the FCC policy direction US has taken to drive infrastructure growth by removing “open access” requirements.

So the question is not who is going to build a dumb network – the telcos is; The question is how to convience the telcos that building a dumb network is in their best (business) interest.