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Harvard Study Shows Why Big Telecom Is Terrified of Community-Run Broadband

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Re: Harvard Study Shows Why Big Telecom Is Terrified of Community-Run Broadband

#91

Post by briandear »

otakucode wrote: post #85
jsoc815 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Be careful... in many places, it is illegal to offer a telecom service that competes. In many places, Comcast and similar have exclusivity contracts with the municipalities. And of course if you're going to be digging trenches and running lines, you need legal right-of-ways through properties or pole access rights to run lines on poles. In most places, they don't want any more cables run than are already present, so…

See, THIS is what we should be fighting. NN is unnecessary if we have actual competition. Those exclusivity contracts, to me seem like Sherman Antitrust Act violations, since they are effectively creating cartel-like conditions to limit interstate commerce (i.e. commerce over "the wire.")

Re: Harvard Study Shows Why Big Telecom Is Terrified of Community-Run Broadband

#92

Post by sethrin »

I have for many years suspected that the US telecoms have colluded to set a price floor for broadband service at $60/mo, and for mobile data services at $40/mo. It strains credulity that data services would be markedly cheaper in nearly every other country.

Re: Harvard Study Shows Why Big Telecom Is Terrified of Community-Run Broadband

#93

Post by briandear »

pascalxus wrote: post #28
mschuster91 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are community-run broadband providers cheaper because they are subsidized by taxes? No, they are cheaper because the local monopolists/duopolists can charge the customers through the nose, as they don't have any alternative. Any form of competition leads to a reduction in costs for the consumer. In addition, stuff like eight-digit compensations (Comcast: 37.5M $ for the CEO alone, https://www1.salary.com/Stephen-B-…

And let's not forget their grand incompetence as well. At&t and comcast spend huge amounts on wasted advertisement. I get ads for At&T all the time. I hate them so much, I repeat click on their ads just to waste more of their marketing dollars. Obliviously, they keep sending me the same ads.

Why do you want to make things more expensive? Wasting their marketing dollars means they have to charge a higher price for their services. It's like going into a grocery store and taking all of the advertisement circulars and throwing them into the toilet. A pointless exercise that drives up costs.

Re: Harvard Study Shows Why Big Telecom Is Terrified of Community-Run Broadband

#94

Post by grahamburger »

asabjorn wrote: post #2

Living in Oakland I wish I could replace my slow, expensive and high-latency Comcast broadband connection with Fiber. It is crazy that we in silicon valley practically have no competition.

What part of Oakland? You might check out common.net. We can cover some parts of Oakland now and hopefully more soon. I work there.

Re: Harvard Study Shows Why Big Telecom Is Terrified of Community-Run Broadband

#95

Post by grahamburger »

jsoc815 wrote: post #39
acd wrote: post #10

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.

I've been building https://startyourownisp.com - it's a (free) guide to starting a small ISP in your garage. I've been working with companies doing that for almost 15 years in the US.

Re: Harvard Study Shows Why Big Telecom Is Terrified of Community-Run Broadband

#96

Post by gnopgnip »

amazon_not wrote: post #75
gnopgnip wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the urban, and dense suburban areas fiber is a great option and has much higher potential. But there will always be a large portion of the US that is not profitable to run fiber, and already has phone service. We already have multitenant access in the US for all phone service. Just extending the current regulation to cover DSL is all that is needed to allow for competition and improved internet speed. You can get…

There's no way there's going to be subloop unbundling after the Supreme Court killer local loop unbundling.

It could happen just for DSL. The big ISP don't really want to service rural areas anyways.

Re: Harvard Study Shows Why Big Telecom Is Terrified of Community-Run Broadband

#97

Post by toomuchtodo »

otakucode wrote: post #84
toomuchtodo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It can be observed that they are a hostile party who have no place in our local communities and are not welcome. They can have their exclusive contracts to pole access and provision of telecom services revoked by municipalities who then construct an ISP as a regulated public utility like water or power. A private company runs the utility, one legally required to base their fees upon the actual cost of providing the s…

The very government you expect to mandate universal service availability is the government that approves exclusive franchise agreements with predatory cable/internet providers.

Unless you're ready to run for local office and champion municipal/coop internet, or find incumbents who support your cause, you will not succeed.

> Any clever kid can run circles around them and provide a better service. And we let them have their hands on its throat?

A bit of an exaggeration of course; running an ISP is hard, and the margins are razor thin unless you have regulatory capture. It can be done, but that's a governing issue. See what I said above.

TL;DR Run for office. Fix the problem.

Re: Harvard Study Shows Why Big Telecom Is Terrified of Community-Run Broadband

#98

Post by ereyes01 »

briandear wrote: post #91
otakucode wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful... in many places, it is illegal to offer a telecom service that competes. In many places, Comcast and similar have exclusivity contracts with the municipalities. And of course if you're going to be digging trenches and running lines, you need legal right-of-ways through properties or pole access rights to run lines on poles. In most places, they don't want any more cables run than are already present, so…

See, THIS is what we should be fighting. NN is unnecessary if we have actual competition. Those exclusivity contracts, to me seem like Sherman Antitrust Act violations, since they are effectively creating cartel-like conditions to limit interstate commerce (i.e. commerce over "the wire.")

Digging trenches and laying out cables over entire neighborhoods is probably natural monopoly territory... i.e. it's not easily achievable without proper regulation / governemnt involvement. Therefore, another way to look at this is:

Proliferating internet access has been a big public/private partnership, and therefore we need NN to ensure that it continues to serve the public good. We shuld be fighting for the "public" part of the public/private partnership to not get fleeced.

Re: Harvard Study Shows Why Big Telecom Is Terrified of Community-Run Broadband

#99

Post by saas_co_de »

jessaustin wrote: post #53
msla wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's no monopoly in backhaul, in fact various market shenanigans have reduced long-distance data profits to pennies. The internet is designed entirely with the idea of making it easy to connect the first mile to the rest; that is a solved problem. In USA the remaining problem is local service provided by monopolists. This problem will persist in general until FCC is forced, kicking and screaming, into allowing mor…

Yes, wholesale broadband rates are dirt cheap and falling like a rock forever because of improvements in technology.

What you pay for for broadband in the home is: 1) last mile connection (expensive to install) 2) bribes (sorry, "franchise fees") 3) advertising to maintain the illusion of competition 4) customer support to help you deal with your anger and cancel/activate you when you switch between various shitty providers to maintain the illusion of competition

Re: Harvard Study Shows Why Big Telecom Is Terrified of Community-Run Broadband

#100

Post by tzs »

Jemmeh wrote: post #24
bronco21016 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re mis-interpreting the overbooking ratios. My understanding is that a 20:1 ratio means that for 1 mbit you can serve 20 customers 1 mbit. Your point still stands though. That means if 1 mbit cost $1 then it costs $0.04/customer. The real cost is in deploying the wires and countless studies have shown the ROI on that, especially given the exorbitant rates, is typically 5 years or less per hookup. Can you…

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...

The author of the book that makes that claim has a tendency to exaggerate. Here is some discussion of his earlier book, when it was just $200 billion he was claiming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556
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