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We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

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Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#51

Post by iamnotlarry »

zzzcpan wrote: post #38
betterunix2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 add…

> 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 i…

As a little experiment, I picked a random dot in the middle of Nevada--northern Nevada, far away from Las Vegas.

I landed on this house: .

This looks pretty rural to me.

Then I went to their telco and the first thing on the homepage was a link to check for fiber availability.

Fiber is available for this home.

You might have to rethink your plan for competition. I'm guessing the result won't be too different for Mississippi, Texas, Ohio, etc.

EDIT: I tried again and landed in Batesville, AR. It seems there are three Fiber ISPs here.

Edited for courtesy to individual property owners.

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#52

Post by gwright »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #47

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 tha…

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.

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#53

Post by justicezyx »

stephen_g wrote: post #35
betterunix2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_code When the link is unre…

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). 1. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3022184

Bbr is about high bandwidth latency product network with low error rate.

Any window based retransmission protocol just breaks under high error rate, that what happens in wireless links.

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#54

Post by gwright »

pmoriarty wrote: post #6

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 fir…

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.

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#55

Post by zeep »

pmoriarty wrote: post #6

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 fir…

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

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#57

Post by iamnotlarry »

gwright wrote: post #52
iamnotlarry wrote: post #47

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 tha…

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 use…

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.

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#58

Post by amorphid »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #57
gwright wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use…

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 wi…

A relative of mine lives in a rural area of Washington State, USA. He has fiber internet through ToledoTel...

http://www.toledotel.com/our-services/internet/

...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."

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#59

Post by foobarian »

vorotato wrote: post #17
vandweller wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on this? Do you think latency is the limiting factor for a LEO network?

A geosynchronous orbit is ~36000km 36000 km / speed of light = .12 seconds 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.

One has been online [1] since '98, so it's definitely possible. Question is probably in details around bandwidth and handoff performance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#60

Post by gwright »

amorphid wrote: post #58
iamnotlarry wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

A relative of mine lives in a rural area of Washington State, USA. He has fiber internet through ToledoTel... http://www.toledotel.com/our-services/internet/ ...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 Sa…

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.

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