81–90 of 151 posts
I think it's quite obvious and doesn't require a "Harvard" study. Community broadband can offer customers something big telecom won't: Reliable, honest, responsive service.
'community-owned broadband networks provide consumers with significantly lower rates than their private-sector counterparts'
is it cheap and fast because they are run efficiently? or because they are subsidized by taxpayers or they are not burdened by the same rules that potential competitors have to hoop through? Having worked for a small gov't agency in NYC and personally witnessed all sorts of waste and incompetence, I'm a bit skeptical that this is at all possible. I don't think efficiency or cost-effectiveness is not something that co…
They have incentive to keep things running well and efficiently because well it's you and your friends and neighbours!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the less dense areas the most economical solution for great connectivity is definitely mesh networks. They are even being deployed in very rural areas at a very low cost! http://owni.fr/files/2011/09/Building_a_Rural_Wireless_Mesh_... Obviously there are better (commercial, prepackaged) mesh network solutions
Mesh networking hasn't really worked out. WISPs, i.e. Wireless Internet Service Providers, do a great job at serving rural (and other) areas.
Have you heard of CJDNS[1]? or BATMAN[2]?
Hyperboria[3] is multiple sizeable deployments of CJDNS. Maybe you heard of Freifunk[4] in Germany, with over 40k access points so far.
[1] https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But we taxpayers already paid $400 billion to have fiber ran throughout the US, just never happened. ISPs took payment but didn't deliver. https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c5e97/e...
Right. So what can be done about telcos taking that money, and giving it to shareholders instead of delivering the infrastructure they committed to? Very little. That money is gone.
Overnight government would be able to mandate universal service availability, and count on citizens having Internet access. That would mean being able to close physical government offices and let the clerks work from home. Billions saved right off the bat. It would mean less spying, as municipal people are not going to just bend over when the feds show up, they will actually demand to see a warrant - unlike any large American company who derives large amounts of their own income from being granted government contracts. It would mean no ridiculous upcharging for "business" connections (just like we don't charge restaurants more for tap water because they make soup out of it and sell it). It would also mean no more asynchronous connections which only exist to prop up the expensive business connections. It would mean an ISP that serves as infrastructure that improves society in a multitude of ways rather than a luxury good fed off of by a greedy tick that was lucky enough to hold exclusive sway over pole access rights and telecom rights when their single biggest competitor, the Internet, appeared on the scene.
Letting companies like Comcast, Time Warner, etc run ISPs is sheer madness. They are media distribution companies. Their empires were built on that. And the Internet makes media distribution worthless. Any clever kid can run circles around them and provide a better service. And we let them have their hands on its throat?
Most broadband providers work with overbooking / contention ratios, so if you sell 100/100mbit you buy 20:1 to 50:1 less from the upstream provider. Overbooking ratios for consumer internet can be between for example 20:1 to 50:1. That means for 20mbit of bandwith to consumers you buy 1 mbit of bandwidth from a upstream provider. Buying one megabit of uplink at current market rate is typically less than a dollar from…
> You can buy commercial Internet uplink and link up your neighbours... Thanks for this. I've been wondering about this for the last few years now. Guess the idea isn't completely nuts and will have to research further.
Also, if you live in a nice permissive place and you get all set up, don't be surprised if Comcast techs cut all of your lines and claim they didn't realize they shouldn't have done that. It wouldn't be the first time.
The only way to get the last mile competition we need in the US, and make net neutrality irrelevant, is for org-run fiber builds in which the org doesn't offer services. The org operates a multi-tenant fiber infrastructure in which you and I can pick (n) "service providers"...part of what I am hoping is a 2018 full of decentralization and distribution: https://goo.gl/DkpmU5
We can easily be running our own internet. I recenlty discovered CJDNS[1] (protocol for encrypted p2p address allocation and routing for mesh networks, so essentially OSI layer 3) and project Hyperboria[2] (a community of local WiFi initiatives) while exploring scuttlebutt[3]. Confirmed my suspicions that we could probably be getting waaay better internet connectivity at way lower prices. Decentralized tech is going…
> CJDNS[1] (protocol for encrypted p2p address allocation and routing for mesh networks, so essentially OSI layer 3) and project Hyperboria[2] (a community of local WiFi initiatives) None of this addresses the big point, which is the backhaul, the transit networks, the big networks which knit together all of the smaller community networks and make them more useful. In short: If you make a nice little mesh network in…
2. feed it with a few links to the central net, but mostly transit the data locality
3. wait until ISPs goes out of business
4. plug isolated nets into new dark fiber lying around.
done.
Though I'm skeptical at how accurate their maps are. It SAID that another provider covered my area, but when I called them that turned out to not be the case.
'community-owned broadband networks provide consumers with significantly lower rates than their private-sector counterparts'
is it cheap and fast because they are run efficiently? or because they are subsidized by taxpayers or they are not burdened by the same rules that potential competitors have to hoop through? Having worked for a small gov't agency in NYC and personally witnessed all sorts of waste and incompetence, I'm a bit skeptical that this is at all possible. I don't think efficiency or cost-effectiveness is not something that co…
And while it's true that government bureaucracies tend to drift toward inefficiency, private monopolies are very similar. Comcast is basically so bad that they're unfixable.
1. 'Big Telecom', has all the problems of publicly traded large companies: Focus on creating shareholder value, complexity, inertia, etc. This is inefficiency due to objectives and organization.
2. Payoff horizon. It's easy/cheap to buy technology and set up a network for today, but are they charging enough to update all the hardware in a few years when technology improves? In Canada, even with aggressive government subsidization, multiple attempts to create new independent wireless carriers(Fido, Wind) have failed when they could not afford to grow their network beyond initial investments.
It'll be very interesting to see how this develops and find out whether 1 trumps 2: will small community organizations be sufficiently efficient, or will they struggle with faster obsolescence than expected and be forced to acquire more capital.