The real snag in net neutrality, and "saving the internet" in general is not in getting a bunch of pop-up isps. The real crux of the problem has always been in peering relationships. It's not that hard to start a wISP. It's not that hard to even lease telco copper or fiber and run a local wired ISP.
Right up until your local customer wants to access Google, or Netflix, or something in Japan or Europe, or anything that isn't one of your local customers. Then you have to find peers who respect NN. And you have to build some connection to those peers.
Peering is expensive. A little ISP running out of a local data center has to find some other little ISP nearby and they have to build a connection between their data centers.
Building a worldwide network of such ISPs is very expensive. Sooner or later, the two little guys combine with each other, then with two others. And then you get exactly what we had in the '90s, which leads to what we had in the '00s. Unless you get very luck and get some superpower that builds out the infrastructure without losing sight of all that is good and right in the world, you end up where we are today.
Oh, and you have to get the masses to understand the issues and penalize cheaters. Good luck with that.
I'm not sure small ISPs are a viable business model like it was in 10-20 years ago, but if you want to build a small regional ISP, I don't think peering relationships are going to be the problem, you can simply purchase transit bandwidth from the big guys. To do that cost effectively you do need to be renting rack space at a carrier hotel though.
The really hard part is the layer-2 last-mile infrastructure to end users. For the most part this means dealing with the local incumbent telco (leasing copper/fiber/DSL/ATM backhaul) or building your own wireless infrastructure. Except in rare circumstance I think the regulatory environment is going make it infeasible to build out your own physical infrastructure to compete with the telco or with the local cable franchise.
Google Fiber was an attempt to roll out a new last-mile infrastructure and it hasn't faired well. It isn't going to be easy to disrupt the last-mile infrastructure market.
I'm don't think that's true. US Internet[0] here in Minneapolis is privately-funded and they've been slowly building out an in-ground FTTP network. It's cheap (50Mb/$35, 100Mb/$45, 1Gb/$70, no contract), reliable, and fast.
They buy transit from a couple of different providers[1] and are co-located in an exchange downtown (MICE/Cologix) that's got the usual suspects like Google and Netflix.
I think the key is that they are growing responsibly and not trying to be everything to everyone but are just offering a pipe. Granted, this is a dense area so it's a lot different than trying to get fiber to a rural area, but so far that's what all the other fiber providers have been concentrating on.
They're certainly doing better than CenturyLink's pathetic rollout, and CenturyLink can just use poles instead of burying fiber.
The US Internet model of "growing responsibly" in response to demand works. That model is also illegal in nearly every U.S. city. Municipalities require you to cover every neighborhood within some usually comically short time frame like 5 years. Indeed, US Internet has come under fire for this: http://www.citypages.com/news/us-internet-appears-to-be-redl....
> Municipalities require you to cover every neighborhood within some usually comically short time frame like 5 years.
That is pretty unfortunate, because the USI model definitely seems to be working.
I don't buy the Powderhorn "redlining", their COO has been upfront about that neighborhood being on their map and the biggest issue with rolling out there has been finding a property for their network gear (which they finally seem to have found this year)[0]. Although I do get that it would be frustrating living there and watching the coverage map fill in around you.
Dense urban areas are a special case and in these locations it may be possible to roll out your own fiber but the details are going to be very geographically specific (regulatory framework, conduit availability and ownership, etc.).
Sure, that's all true, but dense urban areas let you cover the most people the quickest. And it doesn't explain why CenturyLink's rollout has been a disaster (although with USI undercutting them on price maybe they just gave up).
I visited a ___location this week where there were 2-4 houses per mile along country roads. The residents had a choice of ISPs. The house I visited had dialtone from a VOIP service.
Yes, it costs money to build out last-mile infrastructure. But even in very low density areas, it can pay off. Recurring revenues of $50-100/month per customer can in fact pay for the initial investment. Especially if the investment was a wifi tower. It's the kind of thing one motivated local can pull off.
Building a worldwide network of peers who all respect NN is much much more difficult. Even if you could set up some organization like EFF to define some "Bill of Rights" and then certify conformant ISPs with a cool logo of approval, customers will not choose ISPs based on that logo. Average American consumers will not demand NN.
So your local ISP--even a well-intentioned one--will do as you suggest: "Simply purchase transit bandwidth from the big guys." There ends NN.
...it's expensive, but he has it. Every time I hear someone say we can't have blazing fast Internet in San Francisco, it's never phrased as a question like "would you be willing to pay $MONTHLY_PRICE for 1gps fiber?" So far, I've only heard "Building fiber in San Francisco isn't possible because of $UNAMBITIOUS_EXCUSE."
That stuff was all part of the Obama era stimulus bills. Many folks with the ability to lay fiber did so with substantial capitalization from the Feds. Many municipal governments and counties built fiber rings as well.
The result was mostly institutional connectivity. Rural prisons, hospitals, government, factories, and schools got connected. But local franchise agreements make the last mile pretty much impossible.
It looks like ToledoTel is a "Local Exchange Carrier" (LEC). These entities have existed for a long time and are effectively the local incumbent telco and are quite common in more rural areas.
Purchasing IP connectivity from ToledoTel is the same thing as purchasing IP connectivity from Verizon -- they are both the incumbent telco in their respective geographic areas.
Perhaps I should have said "analogous to" and not "the same thing as". I'm not trying to put forth an opinion here, just trying to point out that ToledoTel is the phone company in its service area.
I'd be interested in knowing who was really providing the layer-2 connectivity. In most places your options are the local telco and the local cable company. What were the other options here?
It is possible in some places to get IP transit from someone other than the telco or cable company but almost always that is happening using the layer-2 infrastructure from the telco. I've never heard of that happening via cable but I suppose it is possible.
I've been out of this for a while, but in Connecticut it used to be possible to lease layer-2 connectivity from the telco and then provide the IP services on top of that. This was done via DSL to the end-user with the layer-2 traffic aggregated and backhauled via ATM virtual circuits to the ISPs router in some data center. It was still difficult to compete with the local telco -- who also was selling IP transit of course via the same methodology. Mainly the problem was the economies of scale. The pricing favored high-volume which is hard for a small company competing against the market visibility of the local telco.
An Internet that is completely decentralized and independent of gatekeepers is the only long-term hope that I can see, and it's a very remote hope at that.
There are too many powerful, vested interests in controlling people and their communication to let that happen. The only reason the Internet was ever as free as it was that it slipped under the radar of those very interests and wasn't taken seriously enough at first. So its users had a decade or two of relative freedom that's now steadily being chipped away.
> An Internet that is completely decentralized and
> independent of gatekeepers is the only long-term
> hope that I can see, and it's a very remote hope at that.
How do you see this happening? Some big interconnected mesh network? At some point there needs to be a backbone connection right? Or do I misunderstand?
I, personally, could go to Level 3 and get my own fiber circuit in my house for around $1700/month and act as a gateway for all my neighboring houses but then aren't I subject to laws/rules that big ISP's are?
What freedom are you talking about that has been lost?
There has always been a problem with the last-mile, layer-2 infrastructure but if you are talking about IP layer services and higher it seems like there is nothing preventing you from providing what ever service you can imagine.
IP transit is a bit difficult to compete in because of the layer-2 problem but providing higher level services is much easier now because you don't even have to build a data center, just deploy on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, etc.
Maybe suing ISPs for blocking content (or slowing down content) could work too? Imagine if they would deliberately block content that would eventually cause loss of life
It's not just web apps; TCP itself behaves badly under high-latency conditions. If you have no other choice but to use high-latency links, you are better off with a protocol like QUIC that includes forward error correction. If you need to send a lot of data over a high-latency link you need to start looking at less common approaches; for example, this:
When the link is unreliable -- as it is in most wireless systems -- TCP also tends to behave suboptimally as it assumes lost packets are due to congestion. Again, if you need to deal with unreliable links, forward error correction is your friend.
Have a look at Google's BBR congestion control algorithm [1]. This is perhaps a solved problem now (although it's still not supported on all platforms, but only the side sending the bulk of the data needs to have it).
No, BBR does deliver significant performance improvements in high packet loss links. It is designed as a general purpose algorithm (not just for high bandwidth links) - they are using it on the YouTube (and other) content servers as well as between their datacenters. I believe trying to optimise delivery of content to high loss, high latency mobile users was one of the use cases they designed for.
It sounda similar to fiber latency. Ive never thought about this before but the amount of time for a round trip to a leo satellite, shouldnt that be in the range of 10 m/s. (1200 km / 300,000 km/ s) = 4 m/s x 2 i wonder whats the complete breakdown, is most of it inter satellite optical communication? Does this offset the additional 8 ms because its a simplified topology?
I had Google Fiber installed in my apartment a year ago. I was walking through the parking garage and I caught one of the techs doing alignment splicing. I asked him where the nearest Google Fiber Hut was and he said about the quarter mile away near a Taco Bell. I remarked that's pretty good, but he said well it's even further than that because it's not line of sight. He pulled out a tool that could measure the total length of installed fiber via refection... It was over 20,000 feet. And that was just to go from the garage to fiber hut 1/4 mi away. I don't know how the topology of Google's network works, but I thought that was crazy.
Granted leo satellites are 1200mi away but it's worth remembering that.
So thats a ping of 240, minimum. That's assuming everything else in the system happened instantaneously.
If you can however manage to solve the whole aiming at a moving target 360 kilometers away then maybe you could do a LEO network, and yeah the ping would be closer to 1.2 assuming again literally everything was instantaneous.
As you note, LEO is very different from geostationary. Moving target doesn't strike me as impossible. A LEO satellite has a very predictable path, a stationary dish has a predictable movement relative to that path and a mobile phone knows where it is at all times.
There are several companies building (and a few shipping) flat-panel phased array antennae that can "point" at a moving target 360 km away. They also can switch to a new satellite instantly.
Capacity would be a huge problem though, even with 5000 satellites, if you wanted to rival fixed-line or cellular wireless networks for a significant part of the world's population...
To put that in perspective, in Australia we have 13,400 cellular towers [1], with an extra 9,000 proposed to be built, to cover just 26.3 million subscribers [2]. This is to deliver 2.8% of the data downloaded over the last year (97.2% having been delivered over fixed line) [2].
So, with an LEO constallation, you might have a few dozen satellites over the populated parts of Australia at any one time, each of which has a finite amount of capacity (both uplink/downlink spectrum and capacity back to the ground station) shared between all the users.
I think this network could see a massive benefit for rural areas, developing countries, maritime markets, etc. but to think that the network would have the capacity to deliver anything rivalling cellular networks in metro/suburban areas to most subscribers is very far fetched.
> a 2015 proposal from Samsung has outlined a 4600-satellite constellation orbiting at 1,400 kilometers (900 mi) that could provide a zettabyte per month capacity worldwide, an equivalent of 200 gigabytes per month for 5 billion users of internet data
That is actually surprisingly low. How many of those towers are due to georgraphic constraints rather than capacity constraints? Each town tends to have its own tower, and then a tower often exists between towns to fill dead spots. I can get 3g or 4g from almost the entire length of my state, and I can imagine in a few of those spots it's just me and a handful of others that are connected.
Really interested to see how this plays out. Given the number of satellites needed to make this happen, and the number of companies launching similar initiatives, it seems low earth orbit real-estate is about to get pretty competitive. Anyone know if there is a limit on the number of satellites that can occupy LEO? SpaceX alone wants to launch around 5,000.
That just means SpaceX will become one more giant ISP that is not required to support NN in the US. I love SpaceX, and I'm optimistic that they will be a much better provider than, eg, Comcast (low bar, I realize) ... but they are not the solution to the FCC/NN debacle.
however , the ISP market is a market hated by its cutomer base for decades. So you got to ask why hasnt this been done before at a reasonable scale or more often?
Didnt even google fiber run into epic hurdles due to monopolistic regulations setup by the telcom oligarch?
if Google fiber struggled how is a small startup going to be able to play?
I'm skeptical in the success of this , but i will be folowing and possibly get involved and hope they succeed.
It's not just monopolistic regulations. Outside of dense urban areas there is not much room for competition among ISPs. At some point it is never going to be profitable to compete; and in some places it will never be profitable to even build the infrastructure in the first place. The only reason DSL is widely available is that phone companies were forced to build the copper network even in unprofitable places, so adding DSL service was not too hard for them.
If we really want a market-based approach we need infrastructure sharing rules. Prior to 2003 we had lots of competition in the DSL market; after the sharing rules were eliminated competition vanished almost overnight and we wound up with the monopoly situation we face today. Infrastructure sharing requirements have worked very well in France, where fiber optic service is more widely available and costs consumers less.
> At some point it is never going to be profitable to compete; and in some places it will never be profitable to even build the infrastructure in the first place.
If there are no regulations here's how it goes: first ISPs compete in urban areas, this is very profitable with traditional active fiber to the building and ethernet to each apartment. It takes like $50 CAPEX per customer. But at some point as competition increases margins get lower and certain ISPs start looking into rural areas where they can have no real competition, i.e. DSL or radio is not a competition to fiber. New ISPs emerge too as people see an opportunity to profit from temporary geographical monopoly. So they start building in rural areas, enjoying huge margins. Today they'd use something like GPON, which is very cheap compared to the old days. It goes on until at some point the hard part becomes finding areas from where they can profit the most and where there is no real competition. This is when some start competing with other ISPs in rural areas. But as margins start to shrink in some areas due to competition they prioritize investment into areas competition unlikely to reach. There will be far away neglected areas still, but here's a twist, since there is a lot of competition people who are willing to pay will be able to find a whole bunch of ISPs willing to build fiber or at least radio links with them. In other words - it's always profitable, regulations really is the only problem.
Forcing to share infrastructure is also not necessary. It helps only if monopolies share it with everyone, not small players. With no regulations market solves this pretty well.
It almost seems like semi-rural areas are a better place to start, as they're less regulated (no "cable monopoly", no NIMBYs) and the properties are too far away to have the options of Cable/DSL.
Verizon's site will say that Fios is available where I used to live in Haymarket VA, but when I call them up and ask for it, they say it was an error on their site.
All major infrastructure such as roads, power, communications etc needs to be owned and run by government upon which is then a level playing field on which free enterprise can then compete.
When you have any major infrastructure essential to running a business in private hands you no longer have a democracy or free enterprise.
Main difference between digital platforms and government owned utilities it that utilities require access to land. No one is stopping you from rolling out your own digital platform, while there is no practical way to get any land to lay your own gas pipeline. Therefore the answer to your question is "no, Google search cannot be considered public infrastructure, and one for the reasons is that it does not require any public land to operate".
What is sad is the internet used to be run by the small time guys. I bought my internet off a guy down the street in the 90s who had a rack of servers and routers in a closet. The future we want is the past we had.
One thing I've wondered, if the big regional monopoly ISPs actually violate our net neutrality on a large enough scale, can enough new ISPs pop-up who have net neutrality in their company charter (or otherwise are non-profits) to keep the old internet alive? Can municipalities drop existing exclusive contacts citing "loss of net neutrality" as a material change? How will regressive districts take it when other states are keeping NN and prospering? If net neutrality can be restored from the bottom up, has anyone explored strategies and methods to protect ourselves from regional monopoly ISPs and how it will actually roll out over time and regionally? How will the top resist a bottom up change?
No. Because people love cheap and free stuff. Non NN ISPs will be cheaper and consumers couldn’t care less as long as they get their Netflix, which the will.
> internet infrastructure that is locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people who connect to it
In theory our public transit is “locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people” rather than shareholders. Yet public transit is almost uniformly awful in the US. If you live in San Francisco, do you really want your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?
But are the odds in your favor? I live in the DC area. What are the odds that the public ISP is going to be run better than WMATA, where trains are catching fire on a regular basis? Or the roads, which are chock full of potholes. Or the water system, where the system is full of lead pipe? Or the sewer system that dumps untreated sewage into the local rivers after heavy rains?
The difficulty in an ISP is going to be about initial funding and being sued by regional monopolies. An ISP, specifically one that does not require additional hardware/software to organize and power tiered net neutrality violations logic, has orders of magnitudes less moving parts and disruptive needs for real estate/infrastructure. Maintainence labor could be simplified by training existing city electrical teams to work on both wire sets. We're talking about something with a lot less toes to step on. The failure scenarios for an ISP are so miniscule they make public transportation look like Chernobyl. Does a public ISP need to be ran better than those other things? There's just so much less to mess up and the consequences are just so much smaller and less permanent. Even if the mayor explicitly sells you out to the NSA or acquires someone's browsing history abusively or somehow the internet is out for a day, that's pretty much nothing compared to lead water, out of service rail line, environmental disaster, etc..
Either your utilities are run by big businesses who don't care about you, or they're run by local governments, which in turn are beholden to special interest groups who don't care about you, some of which are big businesses.
Your premise forgets that the Muni and all other public transit is not funded directly by its citizenry or riders. It's funded thru a mix of fare income, city and state taxes, federal appropriations. This is obviously different from something that is "locally owned and operated" since it is owned, operated, and funded by an organ of the city and/or state government.
Meshnet type stuff is comparable (in terms of the economic system it might "ideally" thrive within) to leftist ones like anarchism. (Any connotations a reader might be applying, like black masks or throwing shit, are simply connotations - I'm not advocating for anything political, either - I'm referring mostly to the anarchist concept of "just building things you want without asking anyone"). But you are missing the point if you are asking "do you really want your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?" without acknowledging the fact that publicly-owned transit authorities in the US are 'extra-ordinary' structures within the free-market capitalism they inhabit, and are therefore limited by it. In other words, there's no reason one couldn't have a great Muni, but you're pretending Muni exists in a vacuum when it doesn't.
> In theory our public transit is “locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people” rather than shareholders. Yet public transit is almost uniformly awful in the US. If you live in San Francisco, do you really want your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?
Public transit is terrible for a specific reason. The majority of people don't use it which means the majority of people don't care that it's terrible and don't want to spend a lot of tax money on it.
But the majority of people do use the internet, and the funds would come from subscribers rather than taxes so you don't have to convince non-users to pay for it.
The level of public support is not the problem. The NYC MTA and DC Metro get about 40-50% of their funding from the public (taxes and grants). Boston MBTA gets over 60%. Transport for London gets just over 25%. JR East, in Japan, is fully private and not subsidized at all.
One difference you can see with London is that fares can range from a little higher than the NYC MTA to almost double. That combined with operating costs more than 50% higher explain the challenge: https://www.google.com/amp/s/ny.curbed.com/platform/amp/2017....
These same problems would absolutely affect any public internet system you built in a place like NYC or DC. On the one hand, wireline telecom is both highly labor intensive, and a heavily unionized field to begin with. So costs would be high. On the other hand, while everyone uses the internet, few people really use the kind of bandwidth people on HN do. There would be huge pressure to limit capital investment to keep prices low. If we’d built out fiber in DC in 2005 under the municipal, we’d still have 50/50 BPON for $50/month instead of gigabit GPON for $70-80/month. At least fiber cables can’t catch fire.
> The level of public support is not the problem. The NYC MTA and DC Metro get about 40-50% of their funding from the public (taxes and grants). Boston MBTA gets over 60%. Transport for London gets just over 25%. JR East, in Japan, is fully private and not subsidized at all.
But now you're listing places where public transit actually works and lots of people use it. It fails in SF because it's chicken and egg. As long as most people don't use it, most people don't care or even realize how bad it is.
It also makes little sense to compare costs in NYC to costs elsewhere to try to prove municipalities are bad at things, because the lower cost one is also a municipality. And even NYC is doing something right because they actually have a popular subway system.
> On the one hand, wireline telecom is both highly labor intensive, and a heavily unionized field to begin with. So costs would be high.
How is that any different than when provided by Comcast et al?
> On the other hand, while everyone uses the internet, few people really use the kind of bandwidth people on HN do. There would be huge pressure to limit capital investment to keep prices low. If we’d built out fiber in DC in 2005 under the municipal, we’d still have 50/50 BPON for $50/month instead of gigabit GPON for $70-80/month.
Why do you assume it would cost $20-30/month more per customer?
ISPs have huge capital costs, but a huge part of that isn't network upgrades. It's a fleet of trucks that wear out and have to be replaced, and equipment strewn all over the city exposed to the elements, and tons and tons of UPS batteries, and other things that have to be replaced not because they're obsolete but because they don't last forever.
Even overall capital costs don't include all the regular staff, rent, utilities, etc.
The cost of upgrading a network switch to support faster links is a small fraction of their overall costs.
I half suspect the reason the incumbent ISPs don't like to upgrade is that it makes it harder to price discriminate. You can't charge $1000/month for a symmetric 100Mbps connection while offering gigabit for ~$50/month.
> But now you're listing places where public transit actually works and lots of people use it. It fails in SF because it's chicken and egg.
It doesn’t work well in NYC and DC. Here in DC, lines have been shut down for weeks at a time due to deferred maintenance. Several lines are completely unable to keep their scheduled time. The New Carrollton to Foggy Bottom trip is listed on the timetable at 36 minutes. (It used to be 32 minutes.) On a typical day it takes 45-50 minutes. And forget about service upgrades! Due to decades of wasteful spending and deferred maintenance, the most recent schedule change made everyone’s commute worse by decreasing rush hour train frequency. NYC is having similar, though less severe problems. They’re way behind European countries in automation and signaling despite spending substantially more money.
And yes it makes sense to compare to other municipalities. If you were proposing to have the Barcelona government run my internet here in DC, I’d say have at it. But I don’t live in Barcelona. I live in America, where our local governments re uniquely incompetent and wasteful compared to those in other developed nations.
> I half suspect the reason the incumbent ISPs don't like to upgrade is that it makes it harder to price discriminate. You can't charge $1000/month for a symmetric 100Mbps connection while offering gigabit for ~$50/month.
The price discrimination point actually cuts against municipal broadband. When the city runs things, prices become a social justice issue, which forces prices too low. NYC subway fares, for example, are just $2.75 regardless of distance, while the London Tube ranges from $3-6 (the minimum fare was over $5 using exchange rates from a couple of years ago). That’s despite the fact that operating costs for the NYC Subway are 60% higher per mile. If 50 Mbps is seen as “good enough” by voters, there will be a huge incentive to do the minimum required to hit that speed in order to drive down the price. And if you can’t price discriminate, there might not be much room in the price structure to offer higher tiers for more money. (Indeed, people hate tiered pricing for public services. See the recent outrage over congestion pricing of I-66 express lanes in DC.)
I don't know what private ISPs are like outside the D.C. area. I can push 700/700 on my FiOS regardless of time of day (and I suspect my limiting factor is the fact that my only wired machine is an Atom mini-pc with realtek nic). I find it totally not believable that DC/NYC/Phila/Baltimore (to name the last several places I've lived) could give me a similar level of service. I think it'd be more about oversubscribing OLTs until speeds during prime time dropped to just above what's necessary for Netflix. Because that's what all our other public services are like in these cities.
> When the city runs things, prices become a social justice issue, which forces prices too low. [...] If 50 Mbps is seen as “good enough” by voters, there will be a huge incentive to do the minimum required to hit that speed in order to drive down the price.
This is demonstrated by Albany, NY, where I live. [1]
> [Mayor] Sheehan said Albany must create a policy that could move this forward, with a focus on it being affordable to residents.
> “We would provide a certain bandwidth to every home at no charge,” she said.
The study we commissioned[2] focuses on providing free low-speed access to everyone with an option to upgrade to "high-speed" (>= 100 Mb). The idea of actually laying fiber to everyone's homes is considered, but mostly just to show how unappealingly expensive it is, especially when only a small minority of people will pay for the upgraded service.
> Here in DC, lines have been shut down for weeks at a time due to deferred maintenance. Several lines are completely unable to keep their scheduled time.
DC is uniquely screwed because the city is under the jurisdiction of the federal Congress, so you have the problem of representatives elected by far away constituents not caring even when the subway has high usage.
> If you were proposing to have the Barcelona government run my internet here in DC, I’d say have at it. But I don’t live in Barcelona. I live in America, where our local governments re uniquely incompetent and wasteful compared to those in other developed nations.
That's fair. And installing municipal fiber in DC probably is a bad idea. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea in every US city or anywhere the local government is better managed.
> The price discrimination point actually cuts against municipal broadband. When the city runs things, prices become a social justice issue, which forces prices too low.
This is only true where it's true. For example, any town without a huge income disparity wouldn't have this problem, or anywhere that redistributive policies aren't locally popular. And where redistribution is popular enough to control local policy, it can be satisfied in the same way it is for food or housing -- taxpayer subsidies to low income people. Or, ideally, a UBI; but that's harder at the local level (where you can't control local immigration), and taxpayer subsidies are obviously still preferable to underfunding infrastructure. Then if the taxpayers later choose to spend less money, they can reduce the subsidies without underfunding the network.
It's not as if price discrimination is actually desirable. The profit-maximizing pricing for a food cartel is charging twenty odd times as much for normal food and then capturing the low end of the market by offering a miserable gruel for 90% of the previous average price, which is intentionally so bad it will ward off anyone who can afford to pay more. The takeaway from that can be that a food monopolist would allow the poor to lower their food bills by 10%, but only if you count solely dollars and not value for money. And that's assuming the gruel would be 10% less than now rather than 10% more -- anyone with enough market power to price discriminate tends to also have enough market power to capture more of the surplus from everybody.
> I don't know what private ISPs are like outside the D.C. area. I can push 700/700 on my FiOS regardless of time of day (and I suspect my limiting factor is the fact that my only wired machine is an Atom mini-pc with realtek nic).
90+% of the country doesn't have that. In many places you can get 50Mbps/20Mbps from Comcast, but plenty of unfortunate souls are stuck with Frontier as the only provider.
And even if you're "lucky" enough to have Comcast, their reliability is terrible. They've having an outage right now.
> I find it totally not believable that DC/NYC/Phila/Baltimore (to name the last several places I've lived) could give me a similar level of service.
These are not instances of well-managed cities. NYC is probably the least worst, but even that's more because of high density and wealthy people making up for government waste.
The ideal place for municipal fiber isn't huge high density cities that already have FiOS and two other providers, it's cities with population ~200K with enough density to be worth the candle but not so much that multiple incumbents are already providing symmetric gigabit for affordable prices.
> I think it'd be more about oversubscribing OLTs until speeds during prime time dropped to just above what's necessary for Netflix. Because that's what all our other public services are like in these cities.
The difference is the proportion of the total cost needed to add capacity. To add a subway line you have to spend a billion dollars digging tunnels, buy more subway cars and then pay to operate them indefinitely. To make the internet faster, you have a one-time cost to upgrade the terminating equipment but can reuse everything already in the ground and thereafter your operating costs are the same as before, if not lower when newer equipment is more efficient.
It's less expensive to the point that not doing it is typically either incompetence or for strategic reasons, e.g. for price discrimination or because purposely not upgrading transit links hampers video competitors and forces Netflix to pay for peering.
These are good points. I like the idea of municipal fiber in theory. In particular, I think Stockholm's model of a publicly-owned but otherwise loosely regulated dark-fiber utility is the right one as a theoretical matter. I just think many big U.S. cities lack the political discipline necessary to implement such a policy properly.
Maybe someone can make a FSOC (freespace optical communications) kit that is cheap and safe and we can install them on our rooftops and start beaming our packets all over ourselves.
And we need food that isn't grown by big farming. And we need news that isn't reported by big journalism. And we need entertainment that isn't produced by big Hollywood. And we need government that isn't...wait, we need big government. Never mind.
Those of you who have seen me post over the years know that I am passionate about this topic. I wind up linking to my own project to provide more info but let me know if that's bad form on HN.
In 2011 I started a company to decentralize facebook. I thought there was no reason that signals needed to go through server farms in California just to organize a local dinner, have a local marketplace, classes, dating, or a host of other things. I wanted to build a platform like Wordpress that communities could host and then install social apps the same way they install wordpress plugins.
The developer model would be pretty cool, too: no gatekeepers to kick you out of the app store or revoke your API keys while they compete with you. Instead, you sell your apps to entire communities. Over time we built apps like:
Group rides (uber for friends)
Group activities
Group chat
Collaborative docs
Marketplace
Pitching in for a gift
As time went on, I realized that eventually communities will have their own mesh networks and we would have built the social software they would need to run on them! Right now, they don't really have software uilt to run on the local networks, they still need to connect to centralized services on the global internet.
We asked some guys to build router firmware for us, so that we can have local software run on the wifi networks of cruise ships, classrooms etc. It is great for taking attendance for example, as phones automatically connect to the wifi and the cookie does the attendance bit.
You can literally have a superfast social network for a university or company or whatever, and signals go over the internet only when they have to.
Now we went one step further and made a spinoff company, Intercoin Inc to allow communities to issue and democratically manage their own local currency! (https://intercoin.org)
IPFS and SAFE a great fit for an even further future where no elites control anything. But that's a little further on.
I'll provide my two cents, in the case of group activities. It seems awfully convenient to have a single site (e.g., meetup) for, say, if I'm traveling to a new city and looking for something to do.
It'd seem like an unnecessary barrier to entry to have to find the locally hosted instance of every particular problem, every ___location I go.
Knowing I can use Yelp or Groupon etc to find local restaurants or deals anywhere is actually pretty helpful.
To get to the core of your premise:
> I thought there was no reason that signals needed to go through server farms in California just to organize a local dinner, have a local marketplace, classes, dating, or a host of other things.
You might think there is no reason for this; but users of these services aren't concerned with this problem. If your selling point is "Hey, don't you hate how this one big corporation has a monopoly on <marketplace> <group activities> etc?", you're going to hear crickets. This isn't a customer problem.
Our customers are the directors of organizations and on average communities pay us tens of thousands of $ each to put an app for their members in the store.
For example a university realizes that if they give an app to their students while they are still actively studying there, as alumni they will be part of a social network across the country where they can get job and business opportunities, date or just meet someone for an activity. They are more likely to donate and participate when the university posts their own events.
As for the users - you're right. A user doesn't necessarily want to have one app for each community. That's why the process should be seamless.
Ideally, an app should be usable across many communities. So think for example of Meetup.com as an app on our platform. It would be on the app store and you'd automatically see meetups across all the communities where you are a member.
I just loaded this article on my mobile device. An ad on the website triggered with auto playing audio that stopped background media playback of my device. I class these type of ads as a type of vermin, and generally avoid any website that contains them. Why should I trust an organisation that chooses to run user hostile ads on their site line this to make a better internet?
This is a literal ad hominem fallacy. Whether someone is honest or good doesn't have any bearing on any individual statement's veracity. A statement is true or false regardless of who says it. Additionally the article was written by an author who is not responsible for the advertisements, or really any actions of this establishment which are entirely outside of their control.
All being said, yeah that sounds horrible, and you probably shouldn't trust them as they are a for profit, but that's not an argument as to whether they are wrong or not.
This is rather a problem with the author who is benefiting from the ad-driven Internet while preaching for something else. It's like a weapons reseller advocating for peace.
This author is paid by advertisers. That's their business model but there are plenty of other publishers out there available to you that would probably carry a version of this story under another business model.
ISPs are paid by end users directly. And now also competing content companies who don't want their content throttled. And a top-up from the end users again to access those services. And whatever scummy deal they can get from selling every last detail about you and your browsing habits.
And unlike this publisher, if you don't like it, you can't just shop around for a well behaving one. Most ISPs in the US appear to operate as local monopolies. There's no separation between hardware and service and that causes issues.
Is there some non-ad-driven web ecosystem that I somehow missed? Just because the web currently depends on ads to pay for things does not mean that it is an OK situation or that we should tolerate every intrusion by advertisers.
To be clear I am not saying they’re wrong. It’s like being told to recycle everything in a magazine that is full of adverts funded by the toxic waste industry. Yes, I agree with recycling (and do so myself) but it’s hard to trust the source. I guess this is more of an idea than an organisation though, so I hope they will do some good and wish them luck.
I am pro net neutrality, and would like to see a completely decentralised internet. It is not nitpicking to question the integrity and veracity of the messenger.
I've noticed that when Trump detaches a thing from government control (Paris agreement, net neutrality), the populace and media go full on chicken little sky is falling.
Then as the dust settles, people start having conversations like this one. Private and corporate entities, wealthy individuals, organizations, step up and attempt to fill the gap.
So. Isn't that the whole point? That society as a whole is better suited to solve these problems than the largest centralized node on the network?
Edit: K I'll just absorb downvotes for having an opinion which doesn't actively oppose trump in one particular case.
You have it exactly backwards, By privatizing, Trump will increase the size of the government. After the USSR collapsed and Chicago style economists pilfered the place, the size of the government went up! You ended up with more bureaucrats than ever. Why? Because when you add markets to things that didn't have markets, you add regulators and all sorts of other score keeping to make sure the markets function.
It is far more efficient not to use markets in most cases. When the Federal government privatized the internet in the late 90s, the regulatory system went up! Also of course corporations love regulations when it benefits them. Don't forget most regulations are written and pushed by the industry that is being regulated.
Surely you're the one getting this backwards somehow? You're talking about privatisation, but the OP discusses deregulation.
You don't mean to say that deregulation leads to more regulation, do you?
EDIT: Also, your thesis that using markets is inefficient due to more regulation, it sounds rather that you mean to say that more regulation is inefficient. How is this a failure of the market and not the state?
Deregulation often leads to more regulation. By allowing a whole class of actions to happen, you will find exceptions will start popping up and laws will be written to patch market failings.
If you allow X, you will find overtime it will turn into 100 different 'Allow X but' rules.
Example, Cable companies can now charge more for Netflix, then netflix lobbies and gets a new regulation 'Can charge more for traffic Except by accredited content providers'.
On and on exceptions will be lobbied and won and eventually you end up with more regulations and a larger government administering those regulations.
Net neutrality is a far more efficient regulation.
The only way this could be true is if the number of regulators for a company is larger than the number of total employees. With a few exceptions, I doubt most companies are that small.
Right up until your local customer wants to access Google, or Netflix, or something in Japan or Europe, or anything that isn't one of your local customers. Then you have to find peers who respect NN. And you have to build some connection to those peers.
Peering is expensive. A little ISP running out of a local data center has to find some other little ISP nearby and they have to build a connection between their data centers.
Building a worldwide network of such ISPs is very expensive. Sooner or later, the two little guys combine with each other, then with two others. And then you get exactly what we had in the '90s, which leads to what we had in the '00s. Unless you get very luck and get some superpower that builds out the infrastructure without losing sight of all that is good and right in the world, you end up where we are today.
Oh, and you have to get the masses to understand the issues and penalize cheaters. Good luck with that.