Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The internet should be a public utility

qz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 265 posts

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#251

Post by gkremen »

hkmurakami wrote: post #217
zbrozek wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to their most-recent meeting. I have some hope for the project, but I don't think it's likely to make it my way before I'm part of the 20-mbps-is-ok elderly population. They've really got to figure out how to be a real ISP and use the preexisting utility easements rather than try to get new ones. As for the cost, they were talking about $1-3k/house depending on how many signed up in a "corridor". That's peanut…

So iirc LAH doesn't have (or has very few of?) conduits that the town itself owns. The part that'll likely happen first is a "dig once" installation of the Utility tunnels that are publicly owned. Gary Kremen (of match.com fame, who's on the water district as well) has been fighting hard for this, and I'd encourage you to reach out to him. There's an utility undergrounding effort over near the Foothill college fire s…

It’s Gary Kremen here - hit me up for info - gkremen @ gmail or check out - https://www.nextlevel.net/

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#252

Post by schwartzworld »

bgorman wrote: post #69

The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down. We had nationalized telecommunications for over 70 years and customers could only have one brand of phone, and we're limited in the number of phones available in their houses. In addition, long distance calling was cost-prohibitive. The monopoly only started cracking when MCI introduced mi…

> customers could only have one brand of phone.

Don't most areas of the US only have one cable / internet company? I live in a major city and we have 2 choices.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#253

Post by est31 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #244
est31 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the combination of that doesn't leave much left for cellular to do. you know how big the starlink antennas are? They don't fit in smartphones, not the directional ones.

Probably fit on your car though, which then gives you a hotspot for your phone wherever you are. I suppose if you're out in the middle of nowhere away from both any building with fiber and any vehicle with Starlink then cellular might be useful, both those are also the kind of places without any cell reception.

Currently not every building's WiFi is accessible to you. Second, WiFi only has a limited range. If your house is at the edge of settlement for example and you take a walk in nature (or just the nearest park!), you won't get any WiFi after the first dozen meters. That area may very well be covered by cellular though. Cellular has a much higher range and will still be very important.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#254

Post by Lammy »

wpietri wrote: post #38
zbrozek wrote: post #4

I talked with the mayor of Los Altos Hills, CA yesterday where I advocated for a municipal fiber ISP. It seems crazy to me that in Silicon Valley, and specifically in one of its richest towns, that broadband is not available to every residence. She makes a good point: the residents don't care. Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population. And further - that for those who find that inade…

I don't think her DSL argument is coherent. The only reason DSL is available to most houses is that those wires were put in by a municipal phone company or highly regulated monopoly. Anybody who has talked to a DSL tech knows that a lot of that infrastructure is creaky, many decades old. We need to figure out what to do for the next century. Personally, I think we should at least look at the local loop as a natural m…

Of course it's not coherent, it's just a roundabout way to say they don't want to give anyone any reason to move to LOH. Read between the lines.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#255

Post by bgorman »

bananabreakfast wrote: post #142
bgorman wrote: post #69

The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down. We had nationalized telecommunications for over 70 years and customers could only have one brand of phone, and we're limited in the number of phones available in their houses. In addition, long distance calling was cost-prohibitive. The monopoly only started cracking when MCI introduced mi…

Not true at all. There has never been nationalized telecommunications in America, ever. Gets your facts straight.

You are correct, I misremembered. However I don't think there is really much of a difference in this case since the federal government chose one company.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#256

Post by tobylane »

mulmen wrote: post #232
gumby wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walkable,neighbourhoods designed for people rather than having them designed for cars first.

Ok but even pedestrian first residential neighborhoods need roads. It’s not like power lines where you can completely get rid of them.

Those few roads can be tiny and out of the way, see this Utrecht redevelopment. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/15/forward-thinki...

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#257

Post by jessriedel »

dingaling wrote: post #233
jessriedel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so crazy because if you have ever seen the same neighborhood with and without power lines, the difference is dramatic. Power lines are horrendously ugly. But after people got use to them, they can barely be bothered to pay 10% extra on their power bill for the lines to be buried. Likewise, people would instantly forget about the green boxes after a few year.

> Likewise, people would instantly forget about the green boxes after a few year. I disagree, as a pedestrian I have to walk around FTTC and terminal boxes every day. Imagine if they were installed off the kerb, on the road instead of the pavement. There would be uproar.

That's not an aesthetic complaint.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#258

Post by derefr »

mulmen wrote: post #249
derefr wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Walt Disney's opinion, you could bury the streets, too. Utility corridors (or "utilidors" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_utilidor_system ) are essentially the road equivalent to a subway systems' rails. There are some existing pedestrian-only underground city corridor systems, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATH_(Toronto) ; and there are many vehicle-only road tunnel networks underlaying modern "wal…

It's definitely an interesting thought exercise. Do those tunnels actually go to individual homes? I can understand subterranean arterials but would each house actually have direct access to a tunnel? How does that work? Is my garage underground? Does everyone have a basement with an "outside" door? How does a fire truck or ambulance get to my house? Do deliveries get dropped off underground?

> Is my garage underground?

Not the whole garage (unless that looks better, or is more space-efficient), but it’d probably exit underground, yeah.

I would expect that under this model, due to the costs of digging and the economies-of-scale of shared digging, most housing developments (even single-family housing developments) would lean away from SFH garages, and toward neighbourhood autopools (like the parking floors of condo buildings, but not attached to any one building), where you could walk (underground) from your house to the autopool, then drive (underground) from the autopool onto the auto-tunnel.

> Would each house actually have direct access to a tunnel?

Probably not. Big condo buildings would. Townhouse developments might, since you could just build one tunnel “across” a stretch of homes with regularized entrances. (Though these might necessarily be clumsy, tight stairways.)

I would imagine, in suburban areas where you’ve mostly got individually-developed single-family housing†, you’d likely have above-ground pedestrian walkways connecting a neighbourhood’s worth of houses to a ground-level pedestrian utilidor access point. Like a street-corner subway entrance, but without the subway. (I mean, the subway would be there, but you’d get to it with more walking through the utilidor.)

† Not that “suburban” makes much sense to talk about in this context, for various reasons, but it might be relevant to retrofitting projects.

But, presumably, the utilidor would be “shared public/private infrastructure” just like the road system is—so if you wanted a direct access from your house to the pedestrian utilidor, or from your garage to the auto-tunnel, it’d just be a matter of spending the money to get it dug out yourself, rather than about getting the city to do it for you. (Presumably you’d have to hire city-certified engineers to do the work, but that’s true of any digging you do in city limits today.) And that means that you could probably find developments with their own private utilidor access as an amenity.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#259

Post by greyhair »

dingaling wrote: post #233
jessriedel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so crazy because if you have ever seen the same neighborhood with and without power lines, the difference is dramatic. Power lines are horrendously ugly. But after people got use to them, they can barely be bothered to pay 10% extra on their power bill for the lines to be buried. Likewise, people would instantly forget about the green boxes after a few year.

> Likewise, people would instantly forget about the green boxes after a few year. I disagree, as a pedestrian I have to walk around FTTC and terminal boxes every day. Imagine if they were installed off the kerb, on the road instead of the pavement. There would be uproar.

Fiber boxes (and cable boxes) here are all at least twelve feet above ground level up on a pole. You never 'walk around them' unless you are levitating.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#260

Post by int_19h »

zbrozek wrote: post #12
dylan604 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that running physical cable to all locations is expensive, and if there is not a guarantee of minimum customer buy in it makes no financial sense for companies to do that. I grew up in the 80s and should be of the MTV generation, but because of the economics I never had an option for cable until I moved away from the parental units. I couldn't imagine not having access to the internet in today's society.…

Comcast offered to connect my place for something around $22,000. When I asked them to write a bid, they vanished. So as far as I can tell, they were bluffing and did not expect me to call them on it. And on 5G? I have little hope. At least here in the US where we've decided that it should be millimeter-wave, the range is insufficient to circumvent NIMBYism and FUD around installation and RF emissions.

I thought there's already a bunch of low-band deployments in US?
Post reply on HN