Is a nationwide WIMAX a way to preserve Net Neutrality?

[Igel]

3. Probably not.

Unless they build the backbones necessary to connect cities and different areas of the country and world and don't use pre-existing backbones.

There are two parts to getting the packets to your computer: How they get from the trunklines to your house; how they get from wherever in the country to your local provider.

Most of the big anti-net-neutrality companies own a lot of the major trunkline infrastructure.

Take where I work. We have intranet on intranet on intranet. My part of the building is one intranet; it's routed locally. But the building has two parts, built years apart, with their two intranets connected to form a larger net. My school district has its own server; that's another intranet, but it's composed of a lot of intranets so it's like a small-scale "Internet"--with a district-internal cloud and web resources. If the connection to the Internet goes down some of us wouldn't notice it all day if we just look for local resources and email. Been there, done that.

I live near Houston. Email to someplace in Houston is routed locally. That's a sort of intranet--a given subset of intranets. What connects *them* is probably entirely owned by ATT or Comcast. This is where Big Data starts getting moved and where Netflix really starts to move lots of data. To avoid that, my district's intranet blocks Netflix and Hulu and all kinds of other big-data providers.

And when you get outside of Houston and want something from Oregon or Maine or Thailand you have a whole new set of "owners" where dataflow is in terabytes if not petabytes.

Piddle all you want at the twigs and buds of the tree, the really important parts are the big branches and the trunk.