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Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

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Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#201

Post by rayiner »

nxcho wrote: post #151
reaperducer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a non-American, I find to hard to grasp how a country that places super high priority on access to choices and options can get stuck with just two major parties and just ONE ISP (in most places, that is). Distance. America has states and even counties larger than many countries. And even where there are lots of people, population density is typically less than most other nations. Distance is a killer in last-mile…

Sweden is about the same size as California but with about one third of its population (and about 2/3 of the population density of US), still it is in the top 10 internet access list in about every metric you can think of (together with for example Norway and Iceland, neither especially densely populated) so I don't think the density argument holds.

Stockholm and LA are excellent examples. In Stockholm, there is a municipally owned company that builds fiber. It received no government funding, and built the fiber over more than 15 years in a demand driven way (building first to businesses, then to places with highst demand). It leases access to ISPs, and there are no mechanisms to force it to subsidize lower income or disadvantaged people.

Contrast Los Angeles. There, Stokab’s business model would be illegal. Builiding out based on demand might mean that wealthier neighborhoods would get fiber a decade before poorer neighborhoods. Disproportionately, white residents would get fiber before hispanic residents. That would be politically untenable (and would be completely impossible to put the government’s imprimpteur behind such an effoet as with Stokab). For that reason, most US cities make Stokab’s business model illegal.

Los Angeles had a fiber proposal: https://www.wired.com/2013/11/la-fiber. It tried to get companies to build a fiber network. By contrast with Stockholm’s approach, neighborhood income and population density could not be a “factor” in the rollout. That means that any ISP would have to build to new neighborhoods that were not economically justifiable. The ISP moreover would have to provide a minimum level of free access to all residents. It would thus have to recover the cost of that from other residents, driving the price higher and decreasing the competitiveness of the product. Unsurprisingly, nobody took up Los Angeles on that proposal. Nobody would build it, it made no business sense.

In Stockholm, fiber was a simple business proposition, built with private capital. In California, it was a social justice initiative, unattractive to private capital. Which is not necessarily itself a problem, but if you want to do that you need to be willing to build it with public money.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#202

Post by wahern »

TheCrownedFox wrote: post #162
mattnewton wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gp is being sarcastic (hence the “socialism uga buga”)

I meant that it's disingenuous to portray small-government proponents like he did by using a strawman of someone upset at a clear government power. It adds nothing to the conversation.

For many decades (certainly at least through the 1990s, I think) there was a popular narrative that made poor postal service synonymous with inept government. Almost every citizen regularly visited a post office, and everybody had at least one poor experience. Standing in line at the post office was the equivalent of standing in bread lines in communist countries. This shared experience made the postal service a key talking point by politicians when selling small government, pro-capitalist policies.

For various reasons this narrative has subsided. It probably wouldn't even occur to younger people to perceive in the post office reflections of a wider debate about government. Indeed, for some the post office is seen as a pragmatic answer to providing banking services to poor communities, only distantly related to or even entirely divorced from the big government vs small government debate. Actually, I think in general the debate on both the right and left has shifted away from bickering over the size of government, per se, and instead emphasizes individual rights and injuries.[1]

It's why you'll hear the echos of demands on the right to completely privatize the USPS, almost entirely from the older generation because newer conservative generations couldn't care less unless you're talking about Jeff Bezos.

[1] IMO I think that conservatives won the small government debate in the 1990s, for better or worse. There was a confluence of events in both America and Europe that effectively resolved the debate. Rather, policy proposals these days either rely on some public-private model, or simply attempt to exact concessions from private industry. The government directly doing something themselves is completely off the table. See, e.g., rayiner's comparison of Stockholm's and LA's fiber initiatives.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#203

Post by paranoidrobot »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #199
RickSullivan wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing the exact thing net neutrality seeks to prevent--pricing based on the type of data being sent. I think it's dangerous to let those with deep pockets prioritize their traffic over mine.

> "it's dangerous to let those with deep pockets prioritize their traffic over mine" If only a finite amount of bandwidth is available to the world, then yes, the rich will be able to spend more to take bandwidth from us. However more cable can always be added, so what would actually happen is that the pie would grow.

> However more cable can always be added, so what would actually happen is that the pie would grow.

This assumption is the same one behind energy grids, and assumes an ideal world with no bad actors.

Instead, what happens is that incumbent players with the deepest pockets buy up all the (relevant) competition and then corner the market on capacity.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#204

Post by wahern »

nolliebs180 wrote: post #71
tomcam wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snail mail is handled by one designated quasi-private firm, the USPS. Roads are often handled by contractors on a per-job basis. How would handling it like roads and USPS help?

The USPS (at least in my neighborhood) does a far better job than Amazon+OnTrac?

I thought OnTrac was bad, but then Amazon somehow figured out how to provide even worse service.

It was easy to pick on the USPS when people could only compare them to UPS or FedEx. But these days complaints about the USPS fall flat as its more obvious how much value they provide. I'll happily keep shoveling junkmail into the recycle bin if that's the cost of Priority Mail.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#205

Post by patrickg_zill »

dunham wrote: post #165
GistNoesis wrote: post #158

I'm picturing plenty of bundled optical fiber cut in two. How big are these bundles ? How can they repair the optical fiber (i.e. how to reconnect each single fiber to its previous half ?) Do they have to reinstall a section of cable ?

My dad used to do this for AT&T (mainly for train derailments if I remember right). As I understood it, he would cut/polish the ends of the glass and glue together. The process may have changed since then, it’s been about a decade.

That is no longer done.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#206

Post by briandear »

ryandrake wrote: post #170
nxcho wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden is about the same size as California but with about one third of its population (and about 2/3 of the population density of US), still it is in the top 10 internet access list in about every metric you can think of (together with for example Norway and Iceland, neither especially densely populated) so I don't think the density argument holds.

Also, New Jersey is about as dense as many European countries that have great broadband and competition--yet New Jersey has crappy broadband. So, it's not due to USA's low population density.

6 years ago in Jersey City I had Fios, while across the river in Manhattan, it was very difficult to get. In my part of New Jersey in 2012, I had far better internet than I did in 2018 France — and much cheaper.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#207

Post by briandear »

nxcho wrote: post #197
reaperducer wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think per-unit density, not per-geographic division. On average, houses in Sweden and closer together. Apartments are smaller than the U.S. Perhaps instead of "last mile," the term should be "last meter."

Sure, Swedish cities are a little less sprawly than American cities of the same size (I have no data on this but my general experience is that both apartments and houses a slightly larger in Sweden but a bigger part of the housing stock is in apartments), but I still don't think the geographical explanation holds especially in densely populated regions like the Bay Area. I think it has more to do a lack of interest f…

The Bay Area isn’t densely populated. San Jose to San Francisco is mostly single family homes in suburban neighborhoods. Even the “dense” parts don’t hold a candle to East Coast cities.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#209

Post by casefields »

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #187

Allegedly the outage due to a utility truck in North Carolina knocking down a few power lines. When I heard this, I realized it could've been what happened in my hometown! There was a video going around Facebook of a truck taking down several utility lines in Wilmington, NC. https://www.facebook.com/110795228128/posts/1015572616317812...

Streamable mirror: https://streamable.com/8qb3i

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#210

Post by rayiner »

makecheck wrote: post #16

Well, we all know they’ll learn to do better because of this: they’ll take all that money from monthly fees and make sure to improve quality of service! Right? Nope. They’ll probably raise prices if anything, and receive no ill effects as a company for basically failing to provide what they happily accept money for. (Buried somewhere in an “update” to Terms of Service, they probably pardon themselves from exactly thi…

I don’t understand this trope that ISPs don’t invest in network upgrades. A decade ago you 25 mbps was the fastest Comcast offered. Today, Comcast is rolling out gigabit around the country. What else has gotten 40x faster/better over the last decade? Even your iPhone CPU has gotten maybe 10x faster in that time. Maybe the GPU has improved that much.
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