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We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

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Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#41

Post by dboreham »

Can_Not wrote: post #37

One thing I've wondered, if the big regional monopoly ISPs actually violate our net neutrality on a large enough scale, can enough new ISPs pop-up who have net neutrality in their company charter (or otherwise are non-profits) to keep the old internet alive? Can municipalities drop existing exclusive contacts citing "loss of net neutrality" as a material change? How will regressive districts take it when other states…

No. Because people love cheap and free stuff. Non NN ISPs will be cheaper and consumers couldn’t care less as long as they get their Netflix, which the will.

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#42

Post by greglindahl »

vorotato wrote: post #17
vandweller wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on this? Do you think latency is the limiting factor for a LEO network?

A geosynchronous orbit is ~36000km 36000 km / speed of light = .12 seconds So thats a ping of 240, minimum. That's assuming everything else in the system happened instantaneously. If you can however manage to solve the whole aiming at a moving target 360 kilometers away then maybe you could do a LEO network, and yeah the ping would be closer to 1.2 assuming again literally everything was instantaneous.

There are several companies building (and a few shipping) flat-panel phased array antennae that can "point" at a moving target 360 km away. They also can switch to a new satellite instantly.

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#43

Post by colinyoung »

rayiner wrote: post #36

> internet infrastructure that is locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people who connect to it In theory our public transit is “locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people” rather than shareholders. Yet public transit is almost uniformly awful in the US. If you live in San Francisco, do you really want your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?

Your premise forgets that the Muni and all other public transit is not funded directly by its citizenry or riders. It's funded thru a mix of fare income, city and state taxes, federal appropriations. This is obviously different from something that is "locally owned and operated" since it is owned, operated, and funded by an organ of the city and/or state government.

Meshnet type stuff is comparable (in terms of the economic system it might "ideally" thrive within) to leftist ones like anarchism. (Any connotations a reader might be applying, like black masks or throwing shit, are simply connotations - I'm not advocating for anything political, either - I'm referring mostly to the anarchist concept of "just building things you want without asking anyone"). But you are missing the point if you are asking "do you really want your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?" without acknowledging the fact that publicly-owned transit authorities in the US are 'extra-ordinary' structures within the free-market capitalism they inhabit, and are therefore limited by it. In other words, there's no reason one couldn't have a great Muni, but you're pretending Muni exists in a vacuum when it doesn't.

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#44

Post by rayiner »

betterunix2 wrote: post #21
bitsnbytes wrote: post #2

I like their fire to get this done. however , the ISP market is a market hated by its cutomer base for decades. So you got to ask why hasnt this been done before at a reasonable scale or more often? Didnt even google fiber run into epic hurdles due to monopolistic regulations setup by the telcom oligarch? if Google fiber struggled how is a small startup going to be able to play? I'm skeptical in the success of this ,…

It's not just monopolistic regulations. Outside of dense urban areas there is not much room for competition among ISPs. At some point it is never going to be profitable to compete; and in some places it will never be profitable to even build the infrastructure in the first place. The only reason DSL is widely available is that phone companies were forced to build the copper network even in unprofitable places, so add…

> Infrastructure sharing requirements have worked very well in France, where fiber optic service is more widely available and costs consumers less.

According to OECD, fiber penetration is 7.9% in France versus 11.2% in the US: http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/1.10-PctFibreToTotalBroadb....

Average broadband speeds in the US are also almost twice as fast as in France: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t....

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#45

Post by justicezyx »

dboreham wrote: post #41
Can_Not wrote: post #37

One thing I've wondered, if the big regional monopoly ISPs actually violate our net neutrality on a large enough scale, can enough new ISPs pop-up who have net neutrality in their company charter (or otherwise are non-profits) to keep the old internet alive? Can municipalities drop existing exclusive contacts citing "loss of net neutrality" as a material change? How will regressive districts take it when other states…

No. Because people love cheap and free stuff. Non NN ISPs will be cheaper and consumers couldn’t care less as long as they get their Netflix, which the will.

A global internet does not need to be consumer oriented.

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#46

Post by jedmeyers »

amelius wrote: post #16
basicplus2 wrote: post #4

All major infrastructure such as roads, power, communications etc needs to be owned and run by government upon which is then a level playing field on which free enterprise can then compete. When you have any major infrastructure essential to running a business in private hands you no longer have a democracy or free enterprise.

On a related note, can't a digital platform such as iOS or Android be viewed as major infrastructure? How about Google's search?

Main difference between digital platforms and government owned utilities it that utilities require access to land. No one is stopping you from rolling out your own digital platform, while there is no practical way to get any land to lay your own gas pipeline. Therefore the answer to your question is "no, Google search cannot be considered public infrastructure, and one for the reasons is that it does not require any public land to operate".

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#47

Post by iamnotlarry »

The real snag in net neutrality, and "saving the internet" in general is not in getting a bunch of pop-up isps. The real crux of the problem has always been in peering relationships. It's not that hard to start a wISP. It's not that hard to even lease telco copper or fiber and run a local wired ISP.

Right up until your local customer wants to access Google, or Netflix, or something in Japan or Europe, or anything that isn't one of your local customers. Then you have to find peers who respect NN. And you have to build some connection to those peers.

Peering is expensive. A little ISP running out of a local data center has to find some other little ISP nearby and they have to build a connection between their data centers.

Building a worldwide network of such ISPs is very expensive. Sooner or later, the two little guys combine with each other, then with two others. And then you get exactly what we had in the '90s, which leads to what we had in the '00s. Unless you get very luck and get some superpower that builds out the infrastructure without losing sight of all that is good and right in the world, you end up where we are today.

Oh, and you have to get the masses to understand the issues and penalize cheaters. Good luck with that.

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#48

Post by rayiner »

Can_Not wrote: post #40
rayiner wrote: post #36

> internet infrastructure that is locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people who connect to it In theory our public transit is “locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people” rather than shareholders. Yet public transit is almost uniformly awful in the US. If you live in San Francisco, do you really want your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?

You can show them Chattanooga as a case study where the results were optimal. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpk77/chattanoog... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17... https://www.thedailybeast.com/chattanooga-has-its-own-broadb...

But are the odds in your favor? I live in the DC area. What are the odds that the public ISP is going to be run better than WMATA, where trains are catching fire on a regular basis? Or the roads, which are chock full of potholes. Or the water system, where the system is full of lead pipe? Or the sewer system that dumps untreated sewage into the local rivers after heavy rains?

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#49

Post by ehnto »

stephen_g wrote: post #34
joeyspn wrote: post #3

In 2019 SpaceX should start deploying their satellite constellation... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_satellite_constellation

Capacity would be a huge problem though, even with 5000 satellites, if you wanted to rival fixed-line or cellular wireless networks for a significant part of the world's population... To put that in perspective, in Australia we have 13,400 cellular towers [1], with an extra 9,000 proposed to be built, to cover just 26.3 million subscribers [2]. This is to deliver 2.8% of the data downloaded over the last year (97.2%…

That is actually surprisingly low. How many of those towers are due to georgraphic constraints rather than capacity constraints? Each town tends to have its own tower, and then a tower often exists between towns to fill dead spots. I can get 3g or 4g from almost the entire length of my state, and I can imagine in a few of those spots it's just me and a handful of others that are connected.

Re: We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

#50

Post by AnthonyMouse »

rayiner wrote: post #36

> internet infrastructure that is locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people who connect to it In theory our public transit is “locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people” rather than shareholders. Yet public transit is almost uniformly awful in the US. If you live in San Francisco, do you really want your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?

> In theory our public transit is “locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people” rather than shareholders. Yet public transit is almost uniformly awful in the US. If you live in San Francisco, do you really want your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?

Public transit is terrible for a specific reason. The majority of people don't use it which means the majority of people don't care that it's terrible and don't want to spend a lot of tax money on it.

But the majority of people do use the internet, and the funds would come from subscribers rather than taxes so you don't have to convince non-users to pay for it.

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