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Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

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Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#41

Post by wmeredith »

underdown wrote: post #37

I'd love to have fiber dropped to my home but this article glosses over the privacy implications of having a government entity have direct access to everything you do online.

RTFA. Direct quote from the linked page:

"There Are Good Reasons Not to Want the Government to be Your ISP

"Just because a local municipality might own the fiber infrastructure does not necessarily mean it is also best-suited to act as an ISP to residents. Residents might rightly wonder what sort of information sharing practices would become policy, particularly information sharing with law enforcement.

"This challenge can be addressed as well. Cities can help resolve privacy concerns by adopting the open access model described above. On this model the local municipality merely leases the fiber and never has to have access to the data on the fiber. Local ISPs that lease the fiber can be held accountable by users that encourage the ISPs to adopt privacy-protecting policies and terms of service."

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#42

Post by ceejayoz »

Millennium wrote: post #40
underdown wrote: post #37

I'd love to have fiber dropped to my home but this article glosses over the privacy implications of having a government entity have direct access to everything you do online.

Indeed. Taxpayer-funded broadband has its allure, but the risks of something going very wrong with private data are much higher, in terms of what is at stake if not in terms of odds of a breach.

The solution here is SSL everywhere, at all times. We should be just as concerned about Time Warner and Comcast having access to our private browsing.

It'd be nice to have an intermediate step between HTTP and CA-validated HTTPS. Yes, my ISP could theoretically MITM me, but it'd at least allow websites to prevent casual snooping.

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#44

Post by ensignavenger »

JunkDNA wrote: post #30

I wonder if there is a way to adopt something analogous to a franchise model here. It strikes me that only the communities that are really, really engaged are going to be able to pull this off (which is true of most public works projects). That being said, it would be great to not have every small town and borough have to figure everything out for themselves. A franchise operator for a fast food restaurant doesn't ha…

I am involved in a local community fiber project- DadeCountyFiber.org and I have been thinking along similar lines. I think an association or coop model may work best. I am actually considering a proposal to organize a Fraternal Society that would operate with local chapters controlling the local networks, and leveraging the resources of each other. The Fraternal Society would provide education and social activities to members, and encourage the open development and collaboration of the network.

Any thoughts or ideas are always welcome!

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#45

Post by bgentry »

lawrencegs wrote: post #14

Do we have something like this in SF Bay Area?

Actually the article includes a link to a study on Community Fiber which included San Francisco: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2439429

I haven't read it, but maybe this means there is an SF neighborhood that's rolled this out or at least was studied?

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#46

Post by lawrencegs »

bgentry wrote: post #45
lawrencegs wrote: post #14

Do we have something like this in SF Bay Area?

Actually the article includes a link to a study on Community Fiber which included San Francisco: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2439429 I haven't read it, but maybe this means there is an SF neighborhood that's rolled this out or at least was studied?

I just skim through it, pretty good reading to understand where we are now. Main key-points:

- fiber has been rolling out for library, public housing, schools and public Wi-FI. But not on community / businesses.

- SF has the infrastructure, it just needs to build "the last mile" to connect with the houses / buildings

- there has been effort for community-fiber since 2011, but as of 2014, the city is still not in favor of this kind of development.

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#48

Post by curun1r »

ensignavenger wrote: post #44
JunkDNA wrote: post #30

I wonder if there is a way to adopt something analogous to a franchise model here. It strikes me that only the communities that are really, really engaged are going to be able to pull this off (which is true of most public works projects). That being said, it would be great to not have every small town and borough have to figure everything out for themselves. A franchise operator for a fast food restaurant doesn't ha…

I am involved in a local community fiber project- DadeCountyFiber.org and I have been thinking along similar lines. I think an association or coop model may work best. I am actually considering a proposal to organize a Fraternal Society that would operate with local chapters controlling the local networks, and leveraging the resources of each other. The Fraternal Society would provide education and social activities…

The main need for community fiber is because we've proven that private companies cannot be trusted with a broadband monopoly/duopoly and yet to allow more companies to run lines would create chaos. For that reason, the community needs to control the last mile. But the community doesn't need to be the ISP. Without the barrier to entry that is running lines to residential customers, many smaller ISPs will be able to compete with each other and you'll see the market actually work the way that it's supposed to.

So run the fiber to people's houses and charge ISPs a fixed fee per customer that covers the cost to maintain the network and, potentially, recovers a bit of the initial expense of the network. But then let customers choose their ISP based on speed and features. The worst thing you can do is replace the crap fully-private system we have now with a slightly-less crappy government monopoly.

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#49

Post by djvv »

vicpara wrote: post #20

Community fiber optics is the way to go. In Bucharest, in 2000, when fiber was really expensive a small community, like a block of apartments, would get much better quality service by sharing a business type of connection than buying for each apartment a "home/personal" service. The initial cost is that someone needs to step up, build the infrastructure and start the sharing service. In Western countries this might b…

I ran a similar but smaller network back in high school. I was in Bulgaria but the setup was exactly the same. Me and several other kids wanted to play Starcraft and dial-up was bad. We bought a lot of cable and connected 3 apartment buildings.

Soon our neighbors learned about the network and started asking if they can join. At the peak we had wired about 20 families, this was all supported by me and a friend. The incentive for me was free internet and some side income.

In retrospect I find it amazing that such DIY approach brought us in the top of the internet speed rankings surrounded by the most developed countries in the world.

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#50

Post by tatterdemalion »

xhrpost wrote: post #35

> "People love to complain about the speed of their Internet access and with good reason." I'm sorry, but no, in my experience, they don't. I can't think off hand of any non-tech person in my area complain about their Internet speed. People pay $42/mo here for 9/2Meg and because it will play Netflix and get them on Facebook, it's good enough. I'm not arguing against a fiber upgrade, I'd love to see it, but in the end…

It has been my experience that "non-tech people" do complain about their internet speed because the major ISPs actually don't provide good enough service for them to play Netflix and get on Facebook as consistently as they want.

More importantly, what "non-tech people" don't realize is what they will want in the future. In 2008, they didn't know they would want to stream Netflix over the internet. I don't think there's a big chicken and egg problem with faster internet; people will want faster internet when they start using services that the current infrastructure doesn't support well. It has happened before and it will keep happening.

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