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

Obama calls for municipal broadband

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 289 posts

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#271

Post by Nikker »

yourapostasy wrote: post #269
exelius wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, it is a pretty big if. Here's what I foresee actually happening: these networks will work great for 10 years or so. But eventually the maintenance costs will catch up, and you'll have service outages that take days to fix because it's run by lazy government workers with a guaranteed pension. Customers will complain, but nothing will happen until the city goes broke (as happens to nearly every city every…

The useful life of fiber installs can be even shorter than 10 years in specific cases [1]. What if the municipality owned, laid, and maintained the physical conduit/poles/enclosures but not the actual network physical plant itself, which is then deliberately designed to be replaceable so commercial providers fish through the cabling they want to municipally-owned physical hubs that are equipped and operated by the pr…

When you are dealing with a city of millions does it really seem right to fish one wire at a time? That means terminating the wire at the home too. With multiple ISP's how many of them would need access to the "Main St" section at a time? The cost of booking a time, sending a worker out to fish and terminate possibly kilometers of wire per customer as each customer signs up would be a logistical nightmare. Then what happens when the customer leaves you for the other guy? Never mind the cost differential of running one wire vs bundle of wire.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#272

Post by FireBeyond »

gfdgh54yhgf wrote: post #256
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Select "wired" and you're back to what FireBeyond said. One provider. As I replied to you earlier in another thread, cellular internet isn't equivalent, nor is it priced comparably. http://www.broadbandmap.gov/internet-service-providers/olymp... re: EDIT: I didn't DV you but you shouldn't be surprised. There probably isn't a single HN'er without direct experience shopping for an ISP, and thus few without the knowledg…

But the argument here is "broadband monopoly" not "wired broadband monopoly", which municipalities have direct control over on who gets to lay cables. The "broadband monopoly" argument should stop since American consumers aren't limited to one broadband provider. Anyway, one of the wired ones that's listed (CenturyLink) does residential internet from what I can tell[1]. Another wired one that's also listed for reside…

Are you going to claim that AT&T offering (typically) a 10GB cap / month (without huge overages) is a realistic broadband offering?

Also - yes, I'm aware CenturyLink does home internet. Not at any of four addresses, including mine and major streets in 98501 where it says they are available according to the original site.

Megapath (the one I found) does residential - in theory. After inputting my service address (and I'm in the heart of the residential area, in a division less than ten years old), here are my options:

1. "Symmetric Ethernet: 6.0M to 45.0M (* Requires Business Account)"

2. "SDSL: 192k" (fairly sure that doesn't meet any current definition of "broadband")

3. "T1: 384k to 3.0M (* Requires Business Account)"

I wouldn't call that a realistic residential broadband offering.

Apropos of anything else, it's as much as you can't just blindly point at broadband.gov and say "look, healthy marketplace!".

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#273

Post by smallerize »

bduerst wrote: post #111
smallerize wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use a tracker, anyone on that tracker can get your IP address. Not to mention querying the DHT and busting everyone with a matching hash. I once downloaded a file with all the encryption buttons checked (Deluge interface) and some enforcement agency still sent a warning notice to my ISP with my IP address.

Couldn't that be because they seeded the file to directly?

I hadn't thought of that. I'd forgotten to install the "Blocklist" plugin for Deluge and configure a list.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#274

Post by mhurron »

gfdgh54yhgf wrote: post #253
mhurron wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And of course, if one person in a zip code can get it, everyone can. I could give you my old Zip code, it would include a small city that had DSL providers and Cable. Where I lived there was one provider, 3mb DSL. That finally showed up about 4 years ago.

Even with 3Mbps, that's still sufficient for vast majority of Americans. Netflix, like the guy said, recommends only 3Mbs. Heck it requires only 0.5MBps[1] [1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306

That wasn't the point. The user is saying everywhere has multiple providers to choose from, and it is just not true.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#275

Post by wernercd »

TTPrograms wrote: post #189
redi90000 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ISPs have monopolies exactly and in what city? Go to broadbandmap.gov and find me one.

1) Click "Explore the Maps". 2) Click "number of broadband providers" on bottom. 3) Set sliders to color places with 1 provider. 4) The huge areas of green across the US are monopolies.

http://www.broadbandmap.gov/number-of-providers/wireline/bot...

Then click "unserved" to show those areas...

Interesting stuff...

* Unserved = red * served ~ 2-6 providers = green * white = one provider aka monopoly

Lots of white... I wonder how much is due to lack of interest vs "interference" of any sort.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#276

Post by exelius »

yourapostasy wrote: post #269
exelius wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, it is a pretty big if. Here's what I foresee actually happening: these networks will work great for 10 years or so. But eventually the maintenance costs will catch up, and you'll have service outages that take days to fix because it's run by lazy government workers with a guaranteed pension. Customers will complain, but nothing will happen until the city goes broke (as happens to nearly every city every…

The useful life of fiber installs can be even shorter than 10 years in specific cases [1]. What if the municipality owned, laid, and maintained the physical conduit/poles/enclosures but not the actual network physical plant itself, which is then deliberately designed to be replaceable so commercial providers fish through the cabling they want to municipally-owned physical hubs that are equipped and operated by the pr…

Except you almost never want to pull fiber when you can help it (fiber is far more fragile than copper). In the scenario you describe, instead of burying a conduit, you would just bury a jacketed fiber bundle containing hundreds of fiber threads, even if you only need a couple dozen right now. This is where the term "dark fiber" comes from. Also, in this scenario, if a fiber cable "goes bad", you can just swap out another, unused cable.

Regardless, the architecture you propose would be incredibly expensive for ISPs to implement on any large scale - so much so that it would create significant barriers to entry for any new entrant, and a big incentive for horizontal consolidation. Ideally, the utility ISP would provide route tunneling from a specific port on their demarc switch representing a home to a specific provider at a NOC at the edge of their network. This does create some bottlenecks, but it's better than having 5 ISPs have to put 1,000 switches all over a city just to cover all the homes. Coverage is the entire problem that causes a monopolistic situation - so let the shared service provider worry about coverage.

Even still, I'm not sure of the value that ISPs provide in such a scenario. It seems like a commoditized service with very little in the way of competitive advantage - which means that advertising dollars will be the biggest differentiator (similar to how it is today).

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#277

Post by ticviking »

jewel wrote: post #191
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…

This is how UTOPIA in Utah is run. There are a myriad of ISPs to choose from, and the pricing is excellent ($70/mo for gigabit from Xmission, for example). http://www.utopianet.org/pricelist/

Ohh how I wish we had that further north. Or that we could get logan city council to see the benefit of UTOPIA

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#278

Post by ticviking »

jewel wrote: post #191
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…

This is how UTOPIA in Utah is run. There are a myriad of ISPs to choose from, and the pricing is excellent ($70/mo for gigabit from Xmission, for example). http://www.utopianet.org/pricelist/

Ohh how I wish we had that further north. Or that we could get logan city council to see the benefit of UTOPIA

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#279

Post by ticviking »

jewel wrote: post #191
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…

This is how UTOPIA in Utah is run. There are a myriad of ISPs to choose from, and the pricing is excellent ($70/mo for gigabit from Xmission, for example). http://www.utopianet.org/pricelist/

Ohh how I wish we had that further north. Or that we could get logan city council to see the benefit of UTOPIA

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#280

Post by yourapostasy »

exelius wrote: post #276
yourapostasy wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The useful life of fiber installs can be even shorter than 10 years in specific cases [1]. What if the municipality owned, laid, and maintained the physical conduit/poles/enclosures but not the actual network physical plant itself, which is then deliberately designed to be replaceable so commercial providers fish through the cabling they want to municipally-owned physical hubs that are equipped and operated by the pr…

Except you almost never want to pull fiber when you can help it (fiber is far more fragile than copper). In the scenario you describe, instead of burying a conduit, you would just bury a jacketed fiber bundle containing hundreds of fiber threads, even if you only need a couple dozen right now. This is where the term "dark fiber" comes from. Also, in this scenario, if a fiber cable "goes bad", you can just swap out an…

Good points, thanks for contributing your domain knowledge. So the issue seems to remain: fiber can be made in different ways to accommodate different signaling technologies, and what we lay down into the ground and run through buildings today might not be what we want to use 5/10/15 years from now. Is there a potential way to economically mitigate that, and at the same time turn Internet access into a public utility so the bulk of the initial capital costs are somehow only paid once by the utility?
Post reply on HN