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F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

nytimes.com

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Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#641

Post by dionidium »

zerohm wrote: post #592
jmcgough wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But otherwise, be clear-eyed: elections have consequences. We elected the party of deregulation. Take the bad with whatever the good is, and work to flip the House back. What I'm bitter about is that my vote, as a californian, is worth a tiny fraction of a vote in a swing state. Republican lawmakers have zero incentive to care about me, and red states are overrepresented in congress in relation to their small popul…

Republicans aren't pushing deregulation of the internet to make swing states happy. They are pushing for deregulation because that's what several billionaire campaign contributors want them to do.

Why is it so hard for people to take the other side at their word? Republicans push deregulation because they think it's the right thing to do, because they believe the market is a better regulatory mechanism. Perhaps you think this view is mistaken. Good, great, fine! Then argue against it.

But there's no crazy hidden motive here. Republicans just disagree with you.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#642

Post by LeifCarrotson »

Corrado wrote: post #458
crisdux wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always surprised that folks on here don't think about the future of last mile connectivity being wireless, instead of wired. Next generation wireless networks (5G) are poised to have broadband like speeds, faster latency, and high bandwidth. Wireless operators have been pretty explicit in that their plan to get into the home broadband game. These networks are a few years away from a broad roll out, AT&T is starti…

I agree, to some extent, but I'm not sure if wireless will ever be able to give me gigabit speed with sub 10ms latency. If that's possible, then I'm ready to sign up right now!

Wireless can give you gigabit speed with sub 10ms latency, for sure! With a few assumptions and caveats. You have to work out a compromise involving spectrum width, power usage, transceiver positions, etc. etc. etc. to get optimal performance, for all the various definitions of optimal.

And there are lots of games you can play with QAM, channel-hopping, frequency division, and I am sure that future DSP experts will invent still more ways of getting more data to more people faster with less power. But the basic compromises still need to be dealt with. Using a wired link, you can blast data as fast as you want to yourself without messing with other people, on wireless things are more complicated.

But enough of that, to answer your question: here's a product that can get you 20 Gbps and 0.2 ms latency over hundreds of kilometers:

https://www.ubnt.com/airfiber/airfiber24-hd/

https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-airFiber-AF-24-Worldwide-Lic...

Easy as that! ...but you're not about to mount one of those on your cell phone.

In an ideal world, all wireless access points could adjust their configurations as required. They'd share information on their physical locations, transceiver capabilities, power status, and bandwidth usage, with the data flowing across the landscape like electrical current in a sheet of metal or water in the shallow riffle of a stream. And of course all these devices would contain unimaginably brilliant and complex software that would manage all this with high efficiency, and they'd all interoperate seamlessly. And since this is the ideal world, no one would ever use the transceiver information from the network for nefarious purposes, and we'd all share the burden of keeping adequate transceiver power available, and the power would be generated from renewable energy sources.

But that ideal wireless world would still have far less capacity than the ideal wired world. The question is whether you think a user-driven wireless setup can be superior to the crappy wired situation we have now.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#643

Post by nxsynonym »

0xJRS wrote: post #261
tspike wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access to information like you describe would be very useful in a free market, but the ISP market is not. If I get a report from my ISP outlining how they throttled me, how am I supposed to act on that information?

You'll get the "vote with your wallet" speech. Which for most people, and like myself, your only other option in order to do just that is to buy an LTE wifi or get satellite internet.

Exactly. It's damn near impossible to vote with your wallet when your choices are Comcast or nothing.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#644

Post by tbabb »

equalunique wrote: post #579
maxsilver wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a private citizen, can I (snip) just lay a super long fiber cable straight to (the internet). Yes. I worked on a startup ISP for a few years, which attempted to do this. It's actually really easy to do : 1) Pick a point where you can get connection to the internet. (Backhaul). This is usually a phone companies central office, but it can also be at a data centre or other point of presence. 2) Run fiber cable from…

"Some cities / municipalities have signed agreements for monopoly rights to a telephone or cable provider. Many (but not all) of them can be worked around by simply not selling telephone or TV service." Isn't it ironic that the only way for a startup ISP to get around the local monopoly agreement is to not provide services which are regulated by the FCC? Yet somehow, Google, Amazon, and Facebook have convinced most y…

Ladies and gentlemen, behold astrotrufing.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#645

Post by jasonkostempski »

juris wrote: post #135

This wouldn't be a problem if ISP's weren't de facto monopolies. If there was competition in this space, then there would be incentive to improve the infrastructure and Internet speeds. However, ISP's kill competition by making legal arrangements with local governments to only do business with them, and by cutting competitors' cables. Since we have no way to guarantee reasonable speeds to small time websites now, we…

It would still be a problem. Maybe if one of those providers is benevolent enough to have a sanely priced "package" that promises to treat all data neutrally there'd be a shot, but I think greed would prevent that from lasting if things start moving away from neutrality.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#646

Post by SnowProblem »

ansible wrote: post #545

There was a discussion about all this during NPR's Morning Edition. The FCC chair talked about how there was very loose regulation of the Internet back in 1996 during the Clinton Administration. And this should be a model for regulation of the ISPs going forward. Except that the world was quite different in 1996. You actually had a lot of competition with ISPs, because most people were doing dialup. If I didn't like…

I agree the answer is either more ISP competition, or more regulation. The middle ground is hell.

Any chance this repeal lead to more ISPs? Ajit Pai mentioned it would in interviews, but I don't know enough to say whether that had any merit.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#647

Post by adventured »

socrates1998 wrote: post #492

Slowly but surely, our open internet will get choked. This is just one step in horrible path that will lead to our largest corporations controlling almost everything in our lives with very little competition. I am blaming the tech giants for this ruling. They are the only ones with enough power to challenge this horrible ruling and they sat idle and watched it happen. They may have given lip service to net neutrality…

21 of the last 23 years of the Internet in the US, there has not been net neutrality. Turned out really bad huh.

Net neutrality didn't exist in 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#648

Post by dragonwriter »

ansible wrote: post #545

There was a discussion about all this during NPR's Morning Edition. The FCC chair talked about how there was very loose regulation of the Internet back in 1996 during the Clinton Administration. And this should be a model for regulation of the ISPs going forward. Except that the world was quite different in 1996. You actually had a lot of competition with ISPs, because most people were doing dialup. If I didn't like…

> The FCC chair talked about how there was very loose regulation of the Internet back in 1996 during the Clinton Administration

Of course, the web was a few years old and the internet was just becoming used by the general public. Pointing to the state of broadband regulation in 1996 is kind of like pointing to the state of automobile safety regulation in 1912.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#649

Post by twothamendment »

oflannabhra wrote: post #547
komali2 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking this over for the past couple months, because I was pretty sure this would be the outcome - that we would lose our net neutrality protection. So let's play out the worse case - Comcast, AT&T etc wait out the shitstorm and then start throttling traffic and packaging the internet, releasing cable-esque "plans." Is it feasible to just start running our own fiber to hubs? I want to learn more about the…

This is essentially how cable worked in the beginning[0]. In lots of rural areas, it is still the case that communities band together into co-operatives to provide power, cable, and broadband[1]. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television#History_in_th... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative

Co-Ops (at least mine) are awesome. I have fiber to my home and I live in the "middle of nowhere". The other two are the power company and the propane company. They act like a company - except they only try to provide a service and provide jobs, not reap huge profits.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#650

Post by ian_rees »

quasse wrote: post #390
tcheard wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So an open-access network ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network ). This is done quite successfully in other countries around the world, like New Zealand where we mainly have one infrastructure provider (selected and monitored by the Government), who must offer fair and standard pricing to any ISP who wants to add value to the network. As a result, we have many ISP options throughout the country and comp…

What value do the ISPs actually add to the market? It seems like a government granted middleman position to me, where I'd rather just purchase service from the government or the government's selected infrastructure manager. Presumably there's already some base price for service that this infrastructure provider is charging everyone (a controller monopolist), what are you gaining on top of that by having a second midd…

> What value do the ISPs actually add to the market?

They're the main point of contact for the end customers; as a typical customer, you only interact with Chorus (the public company that provides the fibre/copper in most of NZ) when they send technicians out to work on the connection upstream from your house.

So, the ISP handles billing, tech support, DNS, email, liaising with Chorus, etc. Different ISPs offer different service tiers, billing arrangements, options for buying/leasing the modem, etc.

Our residential electricity works similarly, which leads to retail companies offering both - for example I get one bill each month to pay for both fibre and electricity.

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