The beginning of the end for copper wire • Hacker News Board

Re: The beginning of the end for copper wire

#191

Post by twothamendment » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 2:05 AM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #164

Invictus0 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a completely random section of Texas that I found on Google Maps. Have fun making a mesh network out of the houses there. You might have more fun playing "I Spy", with the aim to find the houses. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Texas/@32.4826637,-98.4527...

Ok, fair point, but you know, some wifi chips have range far larger than advertised. Especially in flat non crowded area where you can have line-of-sight and less noise. Some youtube video show packets traveling a few miles on a stupid esp8266 chip. I don't know how sparse texas is, but I'm sure you can find a nice % of houses whose distance to each others is lower than 1mile.

> Especially in flat non crowded area where you can have line-of-sight and less noise.

I had about a decade of wireless ISP in a neighborhood. It was ok, but speeds suffered as the number of users increased. BTW, this city of 30,000 doesn't have cable and it didn't really get started until 1999. Cable companies didn't want to build it out.

Now I'm in the middle of nowhere and there isn't a WISP to be found. Houses are to far apart and there are too many trees. Noise? I don't have any of that, but line of sight doesn't exist.

I think getting a workable mesh going anywhere would be tough, there is always something.

Re: The beginning of the end for copper wire

#192

Post by jessaustin » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 2:14 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #189

jessaustin wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise of deregulation was that it would lead to increased infrastructure spending. And it has: the late 1990's and the 2000's saw massive investment into cable and wireless. People assumed at the time the money would go into fiber, but demand exploded in wireless so investment went there instead. The RBOCs promised they would roll out fiber, FCC and PUCs promised they would enforce that, and we assumed any of t…

> The RBOCs promised they would roll out fiber, FCC and PUCs promised they would enforce There was never a quid pro quo: deregulation in return for fiber. We deregulated for the same reason everyone else in the western world did: to attract private investment. And we got that in spades—about $1.5 trillion since the 1996 Act. The Internet—the wires and fiber and switches—as we know it was built almost entirely with pr…

Who is "we"? Why does the rest of "the western world" (does that include Korea?) have competitive markets of higher speeds and lower prices than we do? Perhaps because they wisely use structural remedies rather than simply trusting incumbent monopolies to keep their promises?

You have read Kushnick. He has whole chapters that are little more than quotes from PUC testimony, RBOC press releases, annual shareholder reports, etc. The quid was most definitely pro the quo. Now who is "disingenuous"?

The stated objective of the 1996 Act was to foster competition. We had about five years during which the first hints of actual competition started to appear, which have steadily disappeared since then. Much of the investment you laud was misinvestment: witness the perennially low returns to building out long-distance fiber throughout the 2000s. Witness the steady consumption of investor-financed firms by the Daughters Bell. In what other industry would it be judged a success that lots of people spent lots of money, but they were eventually driven out of business by the monopoly anyway?

Re: The beginning of the end for copper wire

#193

Post by rayiner » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 3:33 AM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #192

rayiner wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The RBOCs promised they would roll out fiber, FCC and PUCs promised they would enforce There was never a quid pro quo: deregulation in return for fiber. We deregulated for the same reason everyone else in the western world did: to attract private investment. And we got that in spades—about $1.5 trillion since the 1996 Act. The Internet—the wires and fiber and switches—as we know it was built almost entirely with pr…

Who is "we"? Why does the rest of "the western world" (does that include Korea?) have competitive markets of higher speeds and lower prices than we do? Perhaps because they wisely use structural remedies rather than simply trusting incumbent monopolies to keep their promises? You have read Kushnick. He has whole chapters that are little more than quotes from PUC testimony, RBOC press releases, annual shareholder repo…

We—the American government. The rest of the world doesn’t have higher speeds and lower prices than we do. We’re in the top 10 in Akamai’s ranking of highest average connection speed, beating all the big economically diverse European countries (Germany, France, UK, Spain, Italy). We’re very close to Sweden in terms of % of connections above 15 Mbps in the same Akamai ranking. Our broadband—which is deregulated—compares a hell of a lot better to those countries’ than say our government-run transit.

We’re also pretty comparable in price, at least in many places. In the nation’s capital, gigabit fiber is about $80/month, roughly what it costs in London and cheaper than what it costs in Stockholm. Apparently Amsterdam doesn’t have FTTH except in small pockets: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amsterdam/comments/6pv96m/gigabit_i.... The recommended ISP there, for people who can get it, is about the same for 500/500 as gigabit in DC. Where European countries tend to do better is price points for lower service tiers. In London Virgin offers 50/3 for $43/month. If I couldn’t get 50/50 for $40 via fiber, my closest option would be $75 for 75/10 with TV and HBO. These are not categorical differences.

Broadband deployment is largely managed at the local level, so it varies from city to city. Cities that make it cheap and easy to build (Austin, DC, Houston, Atlanta), have options pretty comparable to London, Munich, Paris, etc. Cities that put up roadblocks to development suffer for it.