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WavesMesh: Pay-what-you-can community-owned ISP for Baltimore

projectwaves.net

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Re: WavesMesh: Pay-what-you-can community-owned ISP for Baltimore

#41

Post by jancsika »

Zeing0Ch wrote: post #21

This should be illegal, how could private enterprises possibly compete with community organized ISPs? You have to take into account the increase in profit every ISP has to make every year. How is the industry going to survive if you allow competition from ISP's that do not need to make profit? Many cities are already making this illegal, hopefully Baltimore realizes how damaging this truly is for business.

+1

My uncle worked for a community organized ISP and you cannot imagine the amount of corruption. Basically a race to the bottom with slave laborer (ehm, volunteers) who don't even know how to provide proper service with trivial things like data caps, etc.

States like Maryland really need to pass right to assemble laws so that citizens can organize on commercial ISPs without fear of their internet being collectivized by a bunch of cultural marxists.

Re: WavesMesh: Pay-what-you-can community-owned ISP for Baltimore

#42

Post by Zeing0Ch »

jxf wrote: post #27
Zeing0Ch wrote: post #21

This should be illegal, how could private enterprises possibly compete with community organized ISPs? You have to take into account the increase in profit every ISP has to make every year. How is the industry going to survive if you allow competition from ISP's that do not need to make profit? Many cities are already making this illegal, hopefully Baltimore realizes how damaging this truly is for business.

This doesn't seem like a very compelling argument to me. They serve different purposes. Do Habitat for Humanity stores put Home Depot out of business? Do food banks put grocery stores out of business? Does offering free water as a drink put bars out of business? Same product category, very different markets.

I think your comparisons are terrible, they are either not the same product at all or exactly the same argument applies. Of course food banks should (and are in many places) be means tested, so as not to compete with grocery stores. You can't compare water with booze, there may be an argument of tab water competing unfairly with bottled water though.

In this case, 25 MBit/s is 25 Mbit/s there is no difference in service between a community ISP and a commercial/public company ISP except the price.

Re: WavesMesh: Pay-what-you-can community-owned ISP for Baltimore

#43

Post by IggleSniggle »

Zeing0Ch wrote: post #21

This should be illegal, how could private enterprises possibly compete with community organized ISPs? You have to take into account the increase in profit every ISP has to make every year. How is the industry going to survive if you allow competition from ISP's that do not need to make profit? Many cities are already making this illegal, hopefully Baltimore realizes how damaging this truly is for business.

I get this is satire, but for anyone who doesn’t:

I live in Baltimore. I pay $130 a month for an extremely unreliable high latency “DSL” connection from Comcast. There is no other reasonable option at my home. When I need a strong and reliable connection with low latency, I switch to tethering from my phone. The only thing that makes a wired connection preferable to the cell network is data quantity.

The number of hours I’ve spent on the phone with Comcast and with incompetent technicians is staggering. I am using my own modem, but am now also “renting” a modem from Comcast for $30/mo because they will not even attempt to provide any support for fixing their own network if you don’t use their spyware modem. So I plug it in whenever I decide to give it another go-around with their tech support in a futile attempt to get reliable service.

Re: WavesMesh: Pay-what-you-can community-owned ISP for Baltimore

#44

Post by jtxx »

this is awesome. really excited to see more community owned ISPs picking up.

if you’re interested in community owned meshes, there’s one in NYC [0] and after searching I see Miluwalkee [1] and LA [2] have projects in progress. I’m sure there’s other projects happening in other places too, and they’re usually looking for volunteers - check out what’s going on in your town, and maybe start something if you can’t find anyone!

[0] https://www.nycmesh.net/

[1] https://mkemesh.org/

[2] https://laxmesh.net/

Re: WavesMesh: Pay-what-you-can community-owned ISP for Baltimore

#45

Post by vorpalhex »

digdugdirk wrote: post #33

Would it be possible to add a blockchain (/blockchain-like) layer to a network like this that is tied to your node's provided throughput? I.e. - I pay for a node in the network, and get paid incrementally every time someone accesses the network via my node? The payment being slightly higher based on the speed/bandwidth of the node I've provided. I imagine the payment could be a combination of a "pay what you can" don…

That would not be free, that would be very expensive - it just wouldn't be expensive in direct billing.

Re: WavesMesh: Pay-what-you-can community-owned ISP for Baltimore

#47

Post by jxf »

Zeing0Ch wrote: post #42
jxf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't seem like a very compelling argument to me. They serve different purposes. Do Habitat for Humanity stores put Home Depot out of business? Do food banks put grocery stores out of business? Does offering free water as a drink put bars out of business? Same product category, very different markets.

I think your comparisons are terrible, they are either not the same product at all or exactly the same argument applies. Of course food banks should (and are in many places) be means tested, so as not to compete with grocery stores. You can't compare water with booze, there may be an argument of tab water competing unfairly with bottled water though. In this case, 25 MBit/s is 25 Mbit/s there is no difference in serv…

> 25 MBit/s is 25 Mbit/s there is no difference in service between a community ISP and a commercial/public company ISP except the price

No difference except the price, really? So, you don't think any of the following are differences?

* What the provider is permitted to do with your data

* Whether there is a soft cap on usage before throttling begins

* How aggressively they do traffic shaping

* What you're allowed or not allowed to do as per the terms of service (e.g. run a server)

and so on.

It seems like you're hand-waving away a ton of stuff and dismissing it as unimportant.

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