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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

#101

Post by otakucode »

ereyes01 wrote: post #98
briandear wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "publ…

Exactly. This is why Internet access is a public utility. No municipality wants 50 lines going pole to pole. I was curious about the idea of Internet as a public utility, so I did some research. I wanted to know what made people declare electricity, water, natural gas, etc to be regulated public utilities instead of just a free market setup. After reading some beautiful quotes from people opposing the establishment of such things (including many quotes from people certain that no reasonable person could ever want, much less need, a telephone in their own home when they could walk to a local store (because businesses were the only ones with legitimate need) and use theirs), I found that it comes down to one single question:

Does the benefit gained by society by having the service be ubiquitous amount to something greater than the damage done by the elimination of competition? If the answer is yes, then it should be made a public utility. I don't know how anyone could honestly argue that the private oligopoly setup we have now is so valuable to preserve that it provides more value to society than would ubiquitous Internet access. Just the fact that we could actually write laws on the assumption that people have Internet access would provide such tremendous benefit and enable us to get rid of some much duplicated junk as to be monumental.

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

#102

Post by otakucode »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #97
otakucode wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>A bit of an exaggeration of course; running an ISP is har

I think you misunderstood me. I did not mean to say that being an ISP was something a clever kid could pull off. I meant to say that a clever kid can run circles around the established players when it comes to media distribution. That clever kid can upload whatever media needs to be distributed to a CDN and it's done. The entrenched players have to manage maintaining a byzantine maze of distribution agreement contracts that they entered into long ago, invent ways in which they will prevent becoming a "simple dumb pipe" (as they call it), manage how the availability of the content will affect the success of their other media properties, etc.

And you are correct about the municipalities being the ones who granted those exclusive contracts originally, and that is where change needs to happen. And it has in a few places! A friend of mine works for a municipal ISP in Florida. But.... each and every single municipality that has ever tried to go that route faces years and years of protracted litigation. Comcast and their compatriots litigate vigorously in their attempt to prevent the establishment of municipal ISPs. Many municipalities simply can't afford to spend 10 years and $100 million just to get out of a contract they foolishly agreed to that gave exclusive rights to providing telecom services to a company for 99 years (a common arrangement).

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

#103

Post by otakucode »

otakucode wrote: post #86
gz5 wrote: post #16

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

That leaves nothing for those "service providers" to do except skim profit. Why should they get a cut? Because they have a router?

My question is an honest one. A modern ISP needs to only run a router, really. They don't need to provide email accounts. They don't need to provide a Usenet server. They don't need to provide free web hosting space. They don't need to provide hardly any of the things ISPs once did. They don't even need to provide DNS servers. They need to provide DHCP and a route to the Internet. That's it. Where is competition going to occur? Wherever an open network that honestly permits competition exists, one would hope to expect the establishment of such a barebones ISP offering simple access at speed only limited by the customers equipment, with no throttling or restriction (since we're splitting that fiber amongst a potentially infinite number of ISP companies, this will work out great), for maybe 1% over the price they have to pay to the muni for access to the network. And then who competes with them and how?

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

#104

Post by analog31 »

Ask HN: If I wanted to create a very small cooperative ISP for my family and a handful of neighbors, it doesn't seem like rocket science, except...

At some point it has to connect to the Internet, meaning I have to buy some sort of connection. How's that work?

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

#105

Post by afeezaziz »

analog31 wrote: post #104

Ask HN: If I wanted to create a very small cooperative ISP for my family and a handful of neighbors, it doesn't seem like rocket science, except... At some point it has to connect to the Internet, meaning I have to buy some sort of connection. How's that work?

I have been wondering about this. Appreciate it if anyone provide some idea.

I mean it it quite easy nowadays to set up a network both wired and wireless to share among neighbours. I did that. But lastly, it needs to be connected to the internet/first mile. If I can negotiate enough numbers and do the fiber laying work myself, how can i get the internet connection at wholesale?

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

#106

Post by dboreham »

mnzaki wrote: post #68
dboreham wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively go get a pile of money and prepare to set fire to it. Source: did this for 10 years.

I would be very interested to hear more about your experience dboreham! I'm assuming you mean you ran a small/local ISP and it was an overall loss? What do you think of something like Hyperboria ( https://hyperboria.net/ ) which is based on CJDNS, so there's no "ISP" really, but each peer sort of is a very small very local service provider to whoever they decide to peer with. I was imagining some peers will charge ot…

Mesh networking is completely useless for providing anything other than last-ditch service. It originated in a) academia where it's a nice thing to tinker with and write PhD theses and b) in the military where having a network connection no matter how crappy can make the difference between life and death. It has no place imho in delivering any kind of service that someone would use day-to-day and certainly not one that anyone would pay for.

WISP networks are built with point-to-point links: the appropriate technology for delivering good QoS. Since radios and antennas are extremely cheap this is the way to go.

The rock you'll flounder upon is that you need to buy a pretty beefy connection to serve any number of customers (even 1). The cost of said connection in most places is quite high. This places a lower bound on the number of paying customers you need to break even. That number is somewhere around 100. This is before you factor in the cost of customer support, schlepping around on people's roofs, finding and negotiating leases on repeater locations, etc. The number of places where there is not a better competitive offering available to customers (or a high likelihood one will show up before you recoup your investment) is low.

Current wireless technology (and according to Shannon, any wireless technology we can imagine) has quite a low upper bound to throughput -- much lower than is achievable with coax for example. So you can't complete on speed with anyone except DSL and Satellite.

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

#107

Post by hinkley »

mnzaki wrote: post #31

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…

People tried a long time ago. What was needed was an access point with two radios (so you can bridge without interference) and with enough range to hit a few neighbors (in case your nearest aren’t participating).

I think we are there now but the people who were interested in mesh have lost interest.

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

#108

Post by jeffwilcox »

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…

Our condo building in Seattle is one of the first to land a landmark experience... we have 3x coax cable providers in our building; per unit, we can select and move between the providers.

They are all playing in this space because they want the customers and revenue, but it took a long time for the gentlemen's agreements between the firms to start.

The installers for Comcast (the most recent to enter our building) were super professional, friendly and did a great job.

Hope other cities are able to fight down the exclusive contracts etc.

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

#109

Post by jeffwilcox »

mnzaki wrote: post #69
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…

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

For buildings (offices, condos, apartments), air fiber solutions are way better and often faster than fiber pulls. 60 GHz microwave, building-to-building if needed, all are in the big cities... why waste time fighting rights to run fiber in dense urban cores?

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

#110

Post by wahern »

bronco21016 wrote: post #26
walshemj wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ignores that the USO does require some mind blowingly expensive links I doubt that laying new local plant is a positive roi in 5 years.

According to NRTC [1] fiber deployments to the premises cost approximately $800/deployment. Ignoring uptake, operational expenses etc that’s $13/mo per deployment to recover cost in 5 years. I have no idea what the average consumer pays their residential provider but I would estimate it’s over $100/mo on average. It seems like it would be fairly easy to get return in 5 years. These are numbers for fiber. [1] https://…

In San Francisco Sonic charges $50 + taxes for 100Mb/s fiber service, and they're profitable. IIRC, the CEO of Sonic has hinted their connection cost per house is closer to $400 (at least during a roll-out in an SF suburb), though I can't find any references.

They forced AT&T's hand, which began rolling out their service in the city about a year later. AT&T charges $70 or more, I think.

It's cheaper to do this stuff than the big companies let on. The problem is that they can make even _more_ money investing in other services and products, like cellular and cable TV. Worse, fiber eats into their cable TV profits and jeopardizes their wet dreams about 5G cellular data plans.

[1] It's $40 + $10 router rental, or $50 if you have your own router. But $50 for the service alone isn't promotional, whereas the $40 + rental is technically promotional and might become $50 + rental down the road.

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