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.
We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom
81–90 of 108 posts
Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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. See slide 33 here f…
I stand corrected.
Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom
#83I'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 suit…
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.
Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom
#84Earlier 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'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 th…
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.).
Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
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).
Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom
#86I'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 suit…
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 fa…
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.
Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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 operatin…
> 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.
Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom
#88Maybe 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.
I'm sure someone will explain how they believe that is stupid, dangerous and impossible.
Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom
#89> 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?
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. Seems like you can't win.
At least there is a chance of competition with private operations.
Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom
#90All 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.
Yes, because absolute control of the internet is what we want government to have.