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Obama calls for municipal broadband

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Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#231

Post by justizin »

WalterBright wrote: post #198
justizin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree, and this is one reason I advocate against overly harsh or vindictive rules that are unbalanced against ISPs because of our feelings about AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner - it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband. Sure, we can change the law, but we would have regulations in place that could interfere with the government entering the market, we might have gotten…

If the government was your ISP, what are the privacy implications?

This is a very valid concern, but what if a private small business provides me an encrypted broadband connection over municipal fiber, which saddles the city / county with the _physical_ problems, and sacrifices a little bit of latency and total bandwidth to keep my relationship with my transit provider separate from my municipal interconnect provider.

Obviously there are continued risks with the crypto arms race, but if Google is being beam-split by the NSA, why would we choose a solution that uses more power, provides less overall individual freedom, costs more, and is slower, to guard against a bogeyman that's getting in anyway.

We must always assume we are being wiretapped.

Let's get a discount on being wiretapped, eh? ;)

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#232

Post by swombat »

curun1r wrote: post #180
justizin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree, and this is one reason I advocate against overly harsh or vindictive rules that are unbalanced against ISPs because of our feelings about AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner - it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband. Sure, we can change the law, but we would have regulations in place that could interfere with the government entering the market, we might have gotten…

> it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband. Municipal broadband doesn't mean shutting out ISPs. If done right, it means that the municipalities own the last mile infrastructure and charge a per-customer rate to ISPs that serve residents. But what that does is significantly lower the bar for ISPs to offer service. It can cost millions of dollars to build out that infrastructure in a cit…

That's kind of how it works in the UK, with BT being that last-mile provider for every UK ISP.

Let me tell you: BT sucks. They are technically a private company, but operating with all the ills that a large governmental monolith has accumulated over decades. With the system you're proposing, you're basically creating a BT. Hopefully it's a small, city-specific BT so at least if one city has a very shitty infrastructure you can move to another city to avoid it... but still. Caveat emptor...

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#233

Post by mseebach »

curun1r wrote: post #180
justizin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree, and this is one reason I advocate against overly harsh or vindictive rules that are unbalanced against ISPs because of our feelings about AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner - it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband. Sure, we can change the law, but we would have regulations in place that could interfere with the government entering the market, we might have gotten…

> it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband. Municipal broadband doesn't mean shutting out ISPs. If done right, it means that the municipalities own the last mile infrastructure and charge a per-customer rate to ISPs that serve residents. But what that does is significantly lower the bar for ISPs to offer service. It can cost millions of dollars to build out that infrastructure in a cit…

> If done right

That's a pretty big if. There's a very real possibility that the same municipal governments that granted the cable monopolies in the first place, will either license the network to an ISP that will either become Comcast-like (monopoly lazyness does that), be bought by Comcast or actually just simply is Comcast (remember, the municipalities have a "good working relationship" with Comcast) or they will setup their own ISP, which might get off to a decent start, but will either make money, and then go on to be milked hard, or it will lose money, and will have to fight with the fire service and the water utility over every last penny for infrastructure upgrades ("What do you mean you need a $5000 router? I have a $30 router at home and it works just fine! In fact, I'll go to Best Buy myself and get you a few of those tomorrow. What the next item on the agenda?").

But IF they do it right, it would be a great solution.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#234

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

aqme28 wrote: post #81
WillNotDownvote wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thought that occurs to me is that if the government is providing internet access, various pressure groups will leverage that for various kinds of censorship. Why is my government providing access to porn? To religious sites? To sites that violate copyright? To sites that contain many sorts of 'unsavory' content? Allowing children uncensored access to many things? I don't know how those complaints would fare, but I'…

It's definitely an issue that will be raised, so I don't know why you're downvoted. Ideally, people would realize that it's roughly the equivalent of using public electricity for unsavory things.

Except that filtering/censorship/monitoring don't have to work at the municipal level.

The UK's (big) ISPs are already required to 'offer' Internet filtering to all customers, collect activity logs, and prevent access to certain torrent sites.

None of them have had a problem implementing this at a national level.

(Setting up a DNS blacklist/redirect isn't hard - you do it in your network/backbone gateways, which aren't anywhere near your subscribers.)

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#236

Post by vidarh »

swombat wrote: post #232
curun1r wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband. Municipal broadband doesn't mean shutting out ISPs. If done right, it means that the municipalities own the last mile infrastructure and charge a per-customer rate to ISPs that serve residents. But what that does is significantly lower the bar for ISPs to offer service. It can cost millions of dollars to build out that infrastructure in a cit…

That's kind of how it works in the UK, with BT being that last-mile provider for every UK ISP. Let me tell you: BT sucks. They are technically a private company, but operating with all the ills that a large governmental monolith has accumulated over decades. With the system you're proposing, you're basically creating a BT. Hopefully it's a small, city-specific BT so at least if one city has a very shitty infrastructu…

BT is not the last-mile provider for every UK ISP. For starters there's Virgin (cable), but there are also a growing number of smaller providers that bypass BT/OpenReach to provide both fibre and wireless services (LTE in particular) without it.

And while I agree with about BT as a whole, OpenReach - the subsidiary of BT that handles the last-mile network - is very different from BT as a whole even though they certainly share a lot of history and baggage. For starters, OpenReach is vastly more tightly regulated (leading to, for example, all prices being publicly available on their website), but OpenReach is also subject to a lot of additional scrutiny and pressure from the 500+ companies that rely on their network to provide services, especially because many of said 500+ companies are directly competing with Virgin for business.

The baggage of BT is also less of an issue simply because while most ISPs uses OpenReach for their backhaul services (relying on OpenReach to provide an IP connection from the subscriber to the ISPs network), OpenReach also provide raw access where the ISP can put equipment in BTs exchanges and get a direct physical connection to the subscribers line, and a number of providers have and do make use of this to provide faster connections than what OpenReach offers for backhaul.

With LLU unbundling the only limitation provided by OpenReach is down to physical constraints of a network they inherited and was not endowed with enough cash to somehow instantly upgrade.

But most ISPs are not willing or able to cover the costs even of taking advantage of the LLU unbundling, which should illustrate that there really isn't a willingness for most to pay for much faster rollouts of higher speeds.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#237

Post by vidarh »

jzwinck wrote: post #184
ksk wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so you could to break down the ISP vertical into companies that only supply service and companies that only do the last-mile infrastructure. It would allow the government to regulate the industry without being involved in the supply side of things. One other option is to opt for a consumer ownership model where the each home pays for the bit of fiber that connects them to the neighborhood hub or w/e.

> break down the ISP vertical into companies The UK did this with British Telecom (BT). In a word, it sucks. It creates confusion for consumers: * "I get internet from Twinkle but they say they can't repair my line." * "I signed up for service with Floyd's Internet but a truck showed up at my house that says Ben's Broadband." * "Decker offered me fast fiber, but when I called to sign up, they said WestLane only has c…

I've never been confused about it.

OpenReach (the BT subsidiary operating the line network) has a clear (available on their website) policy for how their engineers should interact with people that includes guidelines for informing ISP-customers about who they are and who they represent (OpenReach and the end-user ISP) and how to deal with customers in a way that represents the ISPs well (the customer of OpenReach is the ISP - they're a service delivery company working on behalf of the ISP, not the end-user).

A few years ago some of this may have been confusing, as customers used to have to deal with BT directly, but now "everyone" knows about BT/OpenReach handling the installation on behalf of a lot (not all) ISPs, and every ISP I've had in the last decade has explained this to me when I signed up, and these days customers do not have to deal directly with BT other than OpenReach engineers. And people are used to outsourced service companies dealing with utilities. E.g. I get power from Npower, and over the years a dozen different companies have done meter readings on their behalf where I live.

As for your "Twinkle" and "Decker" examples, blame your ISPs that have decided to use this as an excuse for their own problems. In the Twinkle example, the ISP is a customer of OpenReach, not you, it is their responsibility to deal with OpenReach, not yours. If they're trying to push OpenReach in front of them, that's their bad customer service.

As for your "Decker" example, it's Decker's fault they've not checked coverage prior to making promises they can't keep. And "aren't allowed to run the fiber" == "we've decided (as most, but not all, UK ISPs) that OpenReach provides a good enough network for us, so we won't make any investment in rolling out our own, sorry". Nothing prevents UK ISPs from trying to build competing networks, other than the capital investments needed, and the low projected rate of return for most of them outside of the most densely populated city cores.

The relative lack of competition for OpenReach is a good demonstration that the market doesn't share your assessment of them. Many are unhappy with them, but not unhappy enough to pay for anything better.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#238

Post by vidarh »

digikata wrote: post #175
ksk wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so you could to break down the ISP vertical into companies that only supply service and companies that only do the last-mile infrastructure. It would allow the government to regulate the industry without being involved in the supply side of things. One other option is to opt for a consumer ownership model where the each home pays for the bit of fiber that connects them to the neighborhood hub or w/e.

I think that kind of structural split you mention first could be a nice low-regulation/high effectiveness solution, at least compare to other alternatives. However, I haven't seen any kind of willingness to impose that kind of regulation by agencies for at least the past two or three decades. As a matter of fact past structural regulatory market walls have been getting consistently removed in other industries.

I find it a quite amazing situation. It's a good demonstration that US politicians are not interested in free market competition. In Europe, this structural split was a key part of the de-regulation of the telecoms market.

In the UK alone, OpenReach, the BT subsidiary that inherited the last mile network, counts more than 500 companies as customers that provide telecoms and ISP services to end-users. Many of them are business focused or offer only specific subsets of services, but there are a huge number of nationwide ISPs using OpenReach's services.

Especially because the starting point is very simple: You can start out using their "backhaul" service which lets you integrate with OpenReach a couple of places and be able to offer broadband nationwide in the UK and have OpenReach provide you with IP connections to each customer for you to do whatever you want with. You can then if you want "graduate" to local loop unbundling where you put equipment in local exchanges as/when demand justifies it, allowing you to connect directly to the local loop (line) of each of your subscribers, which allows you to offer services in excess of what OpenReach does (e.g. some ISPs offer higher speeds).

Once you go the LLU route, you can turn around and offer backhaul services yourself if you wish, in competition with OpenReach.

If even that isn't enough, and you have the capital, you can look at laying your own lines. E.g. in some cities we're starting to see alternative fibre connections to many apartment buildings etc. as providers are capitalising on the density to bypass OpenReach.

So it encourages competition massively by creating a very low barrier to entry, while allowing larger providers to compete with OpenReach itself.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#239

Post by jrochkind1 »

biot wrote: post #117
jrochkind1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they effectively have to compete with the terrible speeds and service of the muni, which conspires to improve nothing Wait, shouldn't that be easy for them to compete with, then? You say it like terrible speeds and service are somehow challenging competition for the cable company? Of course, they would prefer no competition at all, as all companies would.

> Wait, shouldn't that be easy for them to compete with, then? Oh, but it is. If the municipal service can only offer 1.5Mbps for $40/month, the private ISPs can offer 2.5Mbps for $70/month, 5Mbps for $125/month, 10Mbps for $199/month, or the ultimate in performance of 25Mbps for $350/month. They're effectively free to gouge people if the only alternative is the crappy, low-speed government service.

And if there is NO other alternative, what are they free to do? Many, many, locations have only one option for broadband service. Here in Baltimore, our only option is Comcast. (Verizon chose not to deploy FiOS in Baltimore, and won't sell you DSL anymore in Baltimore, although they have some legacy DSL customers).

The suggestion that having competition which is 'crappy' somehow encourages worse service than having a monopoly with no competition at all, seems bizarre to me.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#240

Post by phireal »

xamuel wrote: post #167
davidgerard wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This works really well in the UK. OpenReach, the bit of BT that operates the infrastructure, is part of a private company, but operates like part of the civil service. They are completely impartial. It is so illegal for OpenReach to offer BT anything they don't offer anyone else, that both BT Broadband and OpenReach staff cringe at the very concept. tl;dr public wires that many ISPs can supply service over.

Internet in the UK has downsides too (I learned when I moved here). BT lets all these other ISPs use its infrastructure, but the actual installation is still BT, and they've no incentive to do it in a timely manner. It can take weeks or months after requesting service before you get connected. In my case it took three weeks after signing up with an ISP, despite living a stone's throw from London. Especially bad for f…

Note that getting pay as you go mobile broadband requires no such documentation, so in a pinch, you can use that in the interim.
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