Comment Re:Why - why $1 billion a year? (Score 1) 70
Then stop buying from AT&T and start buying from someone else - if you're in or near a large city, paying over $10/mbit/month is absurd.
Of course, if you're in a rural are that may be a different story as there may be no competition, in which case, yeah.
Something else that some providers are willing to do is provide a single Internet connection/gateway at a single location and then connect satellite sites to it via some form of LAN (exactly what is offered may vary by provider) - so you might have 1 library connected with say 500mb of Internet access on a gigabit port (preferably in the cheapest market for that) and 9 satellite campuses connected to the primary campus via private lines with some load balancing and voila* - you might save yourself 30 or 40% over getting 10 separate 50mb connections**
*My description is a bit simplified, but you should get the jist. We were going to be doing something like this to connect a few offices of the same company - some of which were in different states - together and route everything through a single Internet gateway. The performance hit of a few extra milliseconds involved in routing were not significant enough to outweigh the cost savings.
**Educated guess - your mileage may vary.
As an added bonus, the networks connecting each campus might even be considered internal and thus eligible for a subsidy (maybe).