The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007) • Hacker News Board

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#191

Post by afuchs » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 2:17 PM UTC

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #124

Anyone who comes up with a reasonable way of bypassing the natural local monopolies of cable companies is going to make a fortune. I would think dense wireless networks in urban areas could work. I'm not an expert, and would be interested in hearing from one, but I imagine that wireless networks could benefit from algorithmic advances in a way that might be more difficult in traditional copper/fiber networks. If you…

A few unlicensed wireless systems exist, namely, Ubiquti's AirMax (http://www.ubnt.com/) and Cambium's ePMP (http://http://www.cambiumnetworks.com/). The problem is that these systems are often set up by people with no knowledge of how radio or the Internet works. Imagine a residential DSL connection being resold to fifty people while being made even worse by radio interference and propagation issues. It is possible to build an ISP while bypassing a local monopoly, but few have the requisite knowledge.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#192

Post by fulafel » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 2:21 PM UTC

dubcanada wrote: post #135

zurn wrote: post #133

This is not really an American problem. In nearly all developed countries the delivered broadband "moore's law" has been abysmal compared to what technology allows. In an apartment building the cost of per apartment gigabit ethernet with a couple of trunked 10 gig ports for last mile would be very very low. (And we'd have much faster tech for same money, but development stalled due to lack of deployment - 10 gig ethe…

It's mostly a North American and maybe Australia thing tbh. Europe and Northern Europe and most of Asia/Africa is significantly better then NA.

It's bad in Europe too, you get just ADSL2 or bad cable in cities for the most part. I'd say ADSL2 worse for >90% of the population and improvement is very slow.

ref: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/07/average-global-...

(also shows that US bandwidths are better than Europe on average)

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#193

Post by will_work4tears » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 2:24 PM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #173

anon4 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is that I currently get my internet via a LAN cable that goes into my router box. I have a tower PC hooked via a cable to it and a laptop that connects via WiFi. The tower can achieve the full 5 megabytes/sec I pay for, while WiFi maxes out at about 1½ mbytes/sec. It's slow.

It sounds as if either your laptop's wifi card is old or your router is. 5mb is nothing, 802.11n can easily handle that (its about 20) and dual band connections can push it a bit higher. Where WiFi at home is breaking down is some cable companies are offering 30, 50, or more down. Then there is Fiber which just blows past what most people will get out of home WiFi networks.

"802.11n can easily handle that (its about 20)"

Is that all? I haven't benchmarked mine, but it claims 300Mbps, and I've never noticed any speedup on my video streaming by switching to ethernet (my internet speed is ~28Mbps). It's possible I just wouldn't notice an ~8Mbps speed up though.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#194

Post by eseehausen » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 2:51 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #166

cbhl wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Decision-making power in the US is too spread out to make that feasible!" If you wanted to run a fiber-optic line between SFO and SJC, you'd probably have to ask at least three or four different county governments, never mind the state, federal, or municipal governments. Take a look, for example, at the mess that is keeping Caltrain funded every year.

That problem is mere politics and provides no fundamental technological barriers.

You're right, but that makes it sound more, not less, difficult to accomplish.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#195

Post by hbags » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 3:01 PM UTC

ihsw wrote: post #26

hbags wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Corporations do nothing but good. They bear no responsibility for their purposeful misuse of the funds. And government does nothing but bad. Swear on your stack of Ayn Rand books that the world would be better if we had more corporations, because they are perfectly ethical and never screw anybody over. Yes, that's right. Never blame the con artists^W^Wcorporations who didn't do what they promised. Instead…

You're taking what he said and swinging it so fully in the opposite direction it makes you look as crazy as him. Can't we both agree that corporations and governments abuse their power as a matter of fact?

Can't we both agree that corporations and governments abuse their power as a matter of fact?

All people and institutions that have power sometimes abuse the power. Sometimes the abuse is knowing, sometimes it's accidental.

This is not terribly interesting.

You're taking what he said and swinging it so fully in the opposite direction it makes you look as crazy as him.

In my defense, I wasn't commanding the HN audience to place 100% of the blame on one party or another. I was just illustrating how insanely idiotic it was for OP to command us to absolve the corporations of their sins, and instead place 100% of the blame on the government.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#196

Post by hbags » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 3:09 PM UTC

hoilogoi wrote: post #48

hbags wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Corporations do nothing but good. They bear no responsibility for their purposeful misuse of the funds. And government does nothing but bad. Swear on your stack of Ayn Rand books that the world would be better if we had more corporations, because they are perfectly ethical and never screw anybody over. Yes, that's right. Never blame the con artists^W^Wcorporations who didn't do what they promised. Instead…

I enjoy HN comments for their tempered, rational thought. I don't think diminutive hyperbole benefits your position here.

For future reference: there is a small downward facing arrow that can succinctly express your opinion.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#197

Post by mikeash » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 3:13 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #110

mikeash wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously saying that life in the US is terrible if you're a woman? Do I understand that correctly? Has HN really reached that level of boneheadedness?

No, he's apologising for using 'he' all over his comment.

No, that last paragraph is clearly a list of circumstances which would cause life in the US to be bad. Depending on how you apply "red states", he may only mean that being a woman in a "red state" is bad. Either way, it's idiotic.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#198

Post by hbags » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 3:17 PM UTC

josu wrote: post #187

lotyrin wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just anyone can dig wherever they want whenever they want, laying redundant fiber and tearing up the streets?

Somehow I doubt that that would be the most efficient way to do it. But maybe a couple or three companies could lay redundant fiber, while another two used existing infrastructures with new implementations, and maybe a couple more could offer satellite connections. I don't know, this is just pure speculation. What I know for sure is that the reason to protect companies that exploit "natural monopolies" is to protect…

I strongly suggest that if you're going to espouse these opinions, you do some math first.

In this case, I suggest you model rural America's density, and the cost to lay down a wire, or fiber, or whatever in a town, along with all the needed infrastructure.

Then I suggest you model the financial returns of that investment under conditions where there are multiple players.

If you do this well, you'll find that as you add competition, you add marketing cost, and you're also forced to amortize the fixed infrastructure costs over smaller and smaller numbers of consumers. And you'll also find that whoever was first to market in that area has a dominant position from a game theoretical perspective, and can make moves that would make it essentially impossible for any competitor to enter the marketplace profitably.

Natural monopolies aren't made-up things.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#199

Post by arbitrage » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 3:21 PM UTC

simoncion wrote: post #144

brownbat wrote: post #76

It took fierce competition to even get broadband companies to advertise what they are offering. I had to deal with a very small local monopoly in Western Maryland that just advertised "faster than dial up," had typical pings of over 200. It was thick on the local board, had a deal with local government as the sole authorized supplier in the county. Now I'm in a different part of the country, can get FiOS, but while V…

> Now I'm in a different part of the country, can get FiOS, but while Verizon's service always delivers over 50 Mbps on speedtest sites, it often chokes on Youtube or Netflix. When that happens, there's no simple way to determine if it's the provider or some random provisioner in the middle. If you have shell access to a Linux machine in a College of Engineering attached to some university somewhere [0], try this: 1)…

So ... where you ever able to get comcast to actually fix the problem?

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#200

Post by mikeash » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 3:31 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #100

mikeash wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The health care system is fine if you can afford it. The main problem with American health care is financial, and if you have good insurance (which should come with any good job) it's fine. Not great, but on par with the rest of the first world. Limited annual leave depends on the job. If you're in software engineering or similar, you're unlikely to have a problem. If you get offered a job that doesn't offer the annu…

I doubt your statement that a majority of the US has an extremely high murder rate. Some parts of the country certainly do, but much of the country is perfectly safe. The overall average rate is higher than other first-world countries, but that does not imply that most of the country has a higher rate. Crime is not spread out evenly. That sounds reasonable, but I thought I'd take a look. It turns out that the Austral…

I don't think states are sufficiently granular to prove your case. For me, at least, you'd need to go all the way down to individual neighborhoods to show that "a significant majority of the United States' suffers from an extremely high murder rate".

Let me illustrate. The murder rate in Washington, DC is pretty high, at 13.9 per 100,000 (which I'll abbreviate as just 13.9 from here).

I live in the DC area. Does that mean that I live in an area with an extremely high murder rate? Nope. I live in Fairfax County, about 15 miles from downtown, but still well within the urban area. At first glance, Fairfax County is a collection of suburbs. However, this is kind of misleading, as the county has almost double the population of DC proper, about 1.1 million people. In 2011 (the most recent year I could find a figure for), there were 11 murders in Fairfax County, putting the murder rate at just under 1.0. That makes Fairfax County on par with or safer, on average, than every Australian state besides Tasmania.

And this isn't cherry-picked, aside from the obvious bit where I started out with it because I live here. neighboring Arlington County, for example, with a population of about 220,000, had no murders in 2011. Montgomery County had 16 murders in 2011 out of a population of about one million, for a somewhat higher murder rate of 1.6.

There is substantial variation within each jurisdiction as well. Large parts of DC is perfectly safe, with murders concentrated in certain areas:

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/investigative/homicides/

If you live in the northwest part of the city, you're perfectly safe. If you live in southeast, life is even more dangerous than the 13.9 average rate suggests.

DC is a somewhat special case, as a large urban area carved up into many jurisdictions. Other major US cities tend to have fewer local jurisdictions, which makes it harder to see the individual regions. Chicago, for example, has a population of 2.7 million within the city limits and that encompasses a huge range in terms of crime, from places where you'd never want to get out of your car to places that haven't seen a murder in years.

Yes, the US has more violent crime than other first-world countries, but it doesn't much apply to the average person. Much of this crime is criminal-on-criminal violence, and much of the rest is concentrated in poor and minority areas. That's not to excuse it at all, or to somehow imply that it makes it OK, but it is relevant when addressing what most of the country sees.