Residential Broadband, Second Edition

Funding Models

Where will the money come from for residential broadband networking deployment? Billions of dollars will be required in central sites for the production and distribution of content, for networking infrastructure, and for consumer electronics devices.

Four classes of funding can be considered:

• Work-at-home subsidies

• Subscription

• Transaction

• Advertising

Work-at-Home Subsidies

Businesses (or the government, through tax deductions) often pay for some high-tech consumer products for business use. This was true of personal computers, fax machines, pagers, and ISDN, which were originally paid for by companies for use by their employees at home. In turn, the companies wrote these purchases off as business expenses, so the tax-payers ...