Small town takes important step.

I was reading La Presse a couple of day's ago. And I saw a short article on the 23 rd page about how this small rural town, that was going to offer wireless internet access to all 1900 of its inhabitants. After reading this I felt like finally someone had taken a step in the right direction. The cost of the service would be $250.00 for a repeater that would go on the roof of the house and $50.00 a year after that. That's right I said $50.00 a year for high speed wireless access. In my mind internet access should be like radio or TV, it should be paid for by advertisers. I think that in North America we have enough daily web users to sustain a service that would be free to the consumer and paid for by advertising. Large companies who need huge bandwidth would still have to pay, like if they were using a premium service.

Most people use the web on a daily basis to communicate with others or to do research; I think that keeping high speed internet access expensive is doing our society a disservice. I understand that if advertisers pay for our access like TV and radio, they might want to censure what is available through this service but as with TV people who would want access to questionable services such as porn and gambling would have to pay a little extra as they do now for cable TV. This surplus paid by users could be used to maintain the infrastructure needed for such a project. If a town of 1900 can do it why can't larger cities such as Montréal do something like this? You would think that with the population density of this city one tower would serve many more people the one in a small rural town, making such a project viable. But what would the large Telco's and cable companies have to say about that, all of a sudden they would go from making a profit from providing access to spending money to advertise on the system. I believe that sometimes companies have to make small sacrifices for the grater good.