An opposing viewpoint on net neutrality • Hacker News Board

Re: An opposing viewpoint on net neutrality

#31

Post by tc » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 1:49 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #29

niels_olson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those networks were far more heavily subsidized than our own. BTW, didn't the US give the telecoms several billion to build infrastructure? Where did that go? And how far did it go? How much does it cost? Let's say some bankers and lawyers and doctors buy out a 10,000 acre farm in coastal Virginia, 5 miles from the nearest stoplight of a medium-sized city, and they want gigabit ethernet to their McMansions and 3G c…

High tens of millions of dollars is my guess, between right-of-ways and spectrum licensing. The routers themselves might not even break a million, though.

Yes. Building out fiber to a single point would be the easy part (as low as hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps). The continuous 3G coverage would be expensive though.

Re: An opposing viewpoint on net neutrality

#32

Post by niels_olson » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 7:33 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #27

niels_olson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No knock on you in particular, but the comment is typical of a sort of insider Stockholm syndrome where members of one industry, or one sector of an industry are presently at the mercy of another sector, and the "prisoner" tells outsider "Well, from the outside, idea B might appear attractive, but if you have my inside information, you'll see Plan A is Plan A for good reason." Your comment does not address why the eq…

Cisco gear is expensive because it is expensive to design and expensive to manufacture equipment that can shuttle frames between multiple OC-192 circuits at sub-millisecond speeds across a purpose-built backplane that won't lock up under the load, and because it is even more expensive to design the software that will manage the forwarding databases on that equipment under the strain of multiple global routing table u…

> It's a weird argument about the scarcity of bandwidth that suggests that it's all a price fixing scam by Cisco

I heartily agree, but that is the thesis tc postulated in his comment, to which I responded.

Re: An opposing viewpoint on net neutrality

#33

Post by niels_olson » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 7:40 PM UTC

tc wrote: post #25

niels_olson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No knock on you in particular, but the comment is typical of a sort of insider Stockholm syndrome where members of one industry, or one sector of an industry are presently at the mercy of another sector, and the "prisoner" tells outsider "Well, from the outside, idea B might appear attractive, but if you have my inside information, you'll see Plan A is Plan A for good reason." Your comment does not address why the eq…

I think using the Stockholm syndrome is an absurd metaphor in this case. In the Stockholm syndrome, the victim defends the attacker. In this case, the 'attacker' is the regulation, and I'm opposing it. Seriously though, I think I've addressed some of those questions elsewhere in the thread. Many other countries you would compare against have heavily subsidized consumer internet via government spending. Many countries…

> I think using the Stockholm syndrome is an absurd metaphor in this case. In the Stockholm syndrome, the victim defends the attacker.

fair enough. It was a convoluted enough metaphor that I've since forgotten how I stitched it together. Anyway, I appreciate all your information in this thread.