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Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks

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Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks

#131

Post by toast0 »

jtbayly wrote: post #119
toast0 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running an LEO satellite constellation is very expensive. But installing and maintaining a wire to everyone's house is also very expensive. IMHO, it's a question of capacity and acceptable service levels. Starlink monthly pricing is higher than my DSL and nearby cable as well as my local muni fiber. But it's not so much higher as to rule it out. And the install fee is a lot lower than muni fiber. It's going to take a…

But wires aren’t the only terrestrial option. I can’t fathom how many satellites it would take to support all the internet users as a monopoly.

Fair enough; I didn't read your comment very closely, I guess. Terrestrial radio seems a lot less expensive in areas with population. When you get out beyond rural and more into wilderness, satellite is likely cost competitive, because having a LEO constellation cover the wilderness comes at no additional cost, and having radio coverage in the wilderness involves setting up base stations with low usage --- you can do some things with longer range / larger cells, but it depends on terrain and maybe protocol limits? GSM had a concept of 'timing advance' that effectively limited the maximum cell size, but I don't know if that's a limitation if you're not using TDMA.

Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks

#132

Post by pxeger1 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #58

A hundred years ago on irc someone from Russia was describing their internet connection, which was ethernet, while I had only ever heard of dial up outside of large companies. It was just people had set up their own hubs and switches in their appartment buildings and strung cables between buildings. This blew my mind. They just ran themselves ethernet and everyone got a drop from a switch in their building. It wasn't…

Highly relevant is this article about an unsanctioned internet network built by students at Moscow State University: https://scribe.rip/p/moscow-state-university-network-built-b...

Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks

#134

Post by worik »

pessimizer wrote: post #107
londons_explore wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically, they stuck to the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law. (made an 'equivalent' fireproof product, which legally didn't need retesting, but in fact performed far worse) Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world) The pattern is that complex regulations always have loopholes, when far better would be to wipe out all the regulations and simply pu…

> The pattern is that complex regulations always have loopholes I think the pattern is that regulations that prevent people who have money from making more money will always have loopholes lobbied into them, and thereby become complex. But the complexity is an effect, not a cause or really the problem. The problem is that they are going to make sure that a particular unsafe product or unsafe use of a product, that is…

> There's a reason why political jobs where you get to award contracts or write legislation cost more to get than they pay.

That is extraordinary. Not necessarily false. Surely we can do better?

Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks

#135

Post by larkost »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #22
alwayslikethis wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the total possible bandwidth available on these even comparable to optical fibers?

The bigger concern is the latency. Even if some technical progress increases the bandwidth, latency is bounded by speed of light and couldn't be as low as cable.

The low-earth orbit generally means that this is not as big of an issue as in older satellite technologies. Currently if you are in an area where the satellite does not need to bounce your data through one or more other satellites before hitting a ground station they are in the tens of milliseconds of latency (20-60).

Comcast is generally in the 20-30 neighborhood, unless you are using their gigabit service, then it is more like 10-15 milliseconds.

So it is higher, but not debilitatingly so (unless your application is very sensitive to latency). I would imagine there is a lot more jitter in Starlink, but that is more a feel than real numbers.

Mainly on a terrestrial system you wind up bouncing through more substations on the way to the general Internet, whereas with Starlink you are generally bouncing straight from your dish to the satellite to the base station. So less bounces, but farther to go. The physics favors the wire, but not as much as it used to.

Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks

#136

Post by Spivak »

swatcoder wrote: post #121
Brian_K_White wrote: post #58

A hundred years ago on irc someone from Russia was describing their internet connection, which was ethernet, while I had only ever heard of dial up outside of large companies. It was just people had set up their own hubs and switches in their appartment buildings and strung cables between buildings. This blew my mind. They just ran themselves ethernet and everyone got a drop from a switch in their building. It wasn't…

> Unimaginable in the US. Not at all. Even in the US, rural folk have been beaming directional wifi to each other for a couple decades now (at least), and sharing utilities by personally running electrical, coax, telephone, or ethernet throughout a shared building or across houses stretches back for as long as those services have been available. Sharing ("stealing") Cable TV by just running coax around was huge befor…

Yep, a coworker of mine even made a business out of it. He owns a lot of land, put up (essentially) a big cell tower with directional radios, signed some paperwork with AT&T for the upstream and sold to his neighbors who only had shitty CenturyLink on the cheap. I think he's still doing it.

Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks

#137

Post by jmyeet »

The legislation banning municipal broadband is a symptom. The problem is capitalism.

All capitalism does is try and create enclosures and then use that monopoly to jack up prices for people who absolutely do not have to see the negative externalities of those endeavours. It is the most parasitic form of intermediation.

National ISPs are terrible. They shouldn't exist. The best Internet in the US by a mile (and it's not even close) is municipal broadband (eg [1]).

[1]: https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/?#choose-your-plan

Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks

#138

Post by nickff »

eqvinox wrote: post #128
nickff wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a perfect alignment because it gives the government monopoly power, to raise the price, decrease the service level, and reduce consumer surplus. That said, you can also make the case that governments (in most places) already have that power because of their permitting powers, and ownership of many poles or conduits.

The term "monopoly" doesn't really make sense for a government, they don't operate in a commercial/economic space where 2 governments could compete with each other. Also luckily a lot of us live in democracies where you have at least some degree of control over what the government does. (Edit: eh, I'm too tired, I guess you're arguing there is a monopoly on last-mile infrastructure then, which theoretically doesn't n…

Your edit caught my meaning; I should have been more clear.

There's always less profit potential where there is more competition, which is one reason why people suggest that monopolies are capable of providing higher-quality products (and services).

Interestingly, some local governments are known (or at least have historically) to use their permitting powers to extract significant amounts of money from telecoms and others. I am not really sure what to do about this, but in the early days of power poles, few/no permits were required to use them, and there were many power providers sharing the same poles; it was messy, and contributed to unreliability, but it worked and allowed for competition.

Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks

#139

Post by jedberg »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #58

A hundred years ago on irc someone from Russia was describing their internet connection, which was ethernet, while I had only ever heard of dial up outside of large companies. It was just people had set up their own hubs and switches in their appartment buildings and strung cables between buildings. This blew my mind. They just ran themselves ethernet and everyone got a drop from a switch in their building. It wasn't…

I did that in college in 1997 (in the US). :)

I wired up 1/2 of our building by just throwing cables between rooms via the windows. We got our upstream via a commercial DSL connection, which when split 11 ways, was about the same price as dialup, but way faster.

Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks

#140

Post by nicoburns »

bob1029 wrote: post #69
dv_dt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works out great until some capital pool decides to start acquiring smaller isps to roll them up into a larger corporate behemoth. As has happened in multiple other industries from groceries, animal vets, rentals, software niches, to hospitals and these days nursing homes Then the "efficiency" becomes how much can be extracted from the business and customers

Privately held companies have the option to reject these offers. A business doesn't have to be a non-profit or community-owned in order to do something principled. One good leader/owner is all it takes.

> One good leader/owner is all it takes.

It takes continued good leadership to maintain this status. And once such a company is sold to a public company, it's gone forever.

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