Who pays for the operation and maintenance of an I-Net?
As with construction costs, cable operators, local governments and users of I-Nets employ many different methods to allocate the costs of operating and maintaining I-Nets. As discussed above, local governments generally play a substantial role in operating I-Nets and bear the costs of doing so. Cable operators typically maintain the I-Net, particularly if it takes the form of channel capacity on the subscriber network, and charge their costs to the local government and/or users. Where the I-Net consists of the optical fiber provided by the cable operator and end-user electronics provided by the local government/or users, each entity is usually responsible for maintenance of the facilities it provides. User charges are calculated in a variety of ways, ranging from per capita charges to charges reflecting bandwidth used.
