Are you tired of shoddy and expensive service from your ISP?
I know I am. Here in the U.K., when it comes to the Internet, the term “service provider” has been elevated alongside “military intelligence” and “jumbo shrimp” in the lexicon of oxymorons. But when you are reliant on a small number of alternatives (in my case, two) and it’s a pretty uncompetitive market, what are the options?
Well, the Internet is all about communities, and I’ve discovered there is one place where the community seems to have taken action into its own hands.
Romania has emerged as one of the fastest growing and most vibrant markets in Europe.
It is also home to the retele de cartier, or neighborhood network. This is effectively a micro-ISP serving anything from individual buildings to entire city blocks. These businesses have been called “the only economically spontaneous phenomenon in Romania” by Varujan Pambuccian, chairman of the Committee for IT and Communications of the Romanian Parliament.
According to Romania’s Association of Neighborhood Internet Service Suppliers (Interlan), in 2007 these micro-ISPs drew approximately €30 million from nearly 300,000 users. Collectively, they have become one of the largest and most important players in Romania’s broadband market. After spiking 400 percent in 2006 over the previous year, their revenues increased 200 percent in 2007 and around 150 percent last year.
Originally born in the late 1990s out of frustration with the expensive and slow dialup services available, Romania’s micro-ISPs grew from groups of users willing to rent a leased line and share the speed and the costs of building a network. Now providers bring fiber to a building in their block or area and connect customers up with an Ethernet link.
Most have evolved into genuine legal businesses with thousands of users and revenues of hundreds of thousands of euros. They work pretty much the same as any ISP, just on a smaller level, although some still exist as informal associations operating somewhat outside of the legal framework.
One resource, Retele.net, lists over 800 neighborhood networks in Romania, and some in the industry claim the capital, Bucharest, has up to 580 micro-ISPs providing around 150,000 Internet connections.
The neighborhood networks vary in size enormously. Tiny micro-ISPs p20 and SNET have only 4 and 8 subscribers, respectively, and many list only 1. The largest ever, C-Zone, had 35,000 subscribers at the time it was sold last year to leading operator RCS & RDS. The biggest micro-ISPs in Bucharest, including DCN Telecom, Synco, Madnet, and the Gemenii Network, average 3,000 customers.
The Gemenii Network is a typical example of a Romanian neighborhood network. It has over 4,000 subscribers. It offers international Internet access between 8 Mbit/s and 25 Mbit/s, national access at 100 Mbit/s, and additional services such as IPTV and VoIP. In 2007 its revenues were just over $920,000. The company has 25 or so employees.
Interlan’s president, Aurelian Stancu, says triple-play services are now an essential part of the neighborhood networks. "Diversification of services has been one of the biggest changes this year [2008], besides reducing the subscription price by about 30 percent to an average of around 8 Euros per subscription. Also, in terms of the Internet, access speeds have increased to around 6 to 10 megabits per second, from 1 to 3 megabits per second last year.”
Inevitably, the big boys want in on the action, and the large operators went on a concerted buying spree of micro-ISPs last year. Despite a slowdown in takeover activity lately, a neighborhood network subscriber is currently worth between €200 and €400, so they are not inconsequential businesses.
The large operators have also had to improve the competiveness of their offerings. They have introduced bundled deals or even free laptops.
In Romania you can get a high-speed connection with multiple services for far less than the slow, mediocre, and surly service I have to put up with from BT at around $50 a month.
If the Internet is all about communities, then perhaps it is time for more communities to take back ownership of the Internet.
— James Lambie is the Producer/Director of the online documentary series "Web Wide World" on Internet Evolution.
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