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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

#71

Post by [deleted] »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #57
gwright wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure small ISPs are a viable business model like it was in 10-20 years ago, but if you want to build a small regional ISP, I don't think peering relationships are going to be the problem, you can simply purchase transit bandwidth from the big guys. To do that cost effectively you do need to be renting rack space at a carrier hotel though. The really hard part is the layer-2 last-mile infrastructure to end use…

I visited a location this week where there were 2-4 houses per mile along country roads. The residents had a choice of ISPs. The house I visited had dialtone from a VOIP service. Yes, it costs money to build out last-mile infrastructure. But even in very low density areas, it can pay off. Recurring revenues of $50-100/month per customer can in fact pay for the initial investment. Especially if the investment was a wi…

[deleted]

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

#72

Post by stephen_g »

justicezyx wrote: post #53
stephen_g wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at Google's BBR congestion control algorithm [1]. This is perhaps a solved problem now (although it's still not supported on all platforms, but only the side sending the bulk of the data needs to have it). 1. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3022184

Bbr is about high bandwidth latency product network with low error rate. Any window based retransmission protocol just breaks under high error rate, that what happens in wireless links.

No, BBR does deliver significant performance improvements in high packet loss links. It is designed as a general purpose algorithm (not just for high bandwidth links) - they are using it on the YouTube (and other) content servers as well as between their datacenters. I believe trying to optimise delivery of content to high loss, high latency mobile users was one of the use cases they designed for.

See slide 33 here for a comparison to CUBIC under packet loss - https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/98/slides/slides-98-iccrg-a...

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

#73

Post by strictnein »

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%…

From the link:

> a 2015 proposal from Samsung has outlined a 4600-satellite constellation orbiting at 1,400 kilometers (900 mi) that could provide a zettabyte per month capacity worldwide, an equivalent of 200 gigabytes per month for 5 billion users of internet data

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

#74

Post by gwright »

Spooky23 wrote: post #67
amorphid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A relative of mine lives in a rural area of Washington State, USA. He has fiber internet through ToledoTel... http://www.toledotel.com/our-services/internet/ ...it's expensive, but he has it. Every time I hear someone say we can't have blazing fast Internet in San Francisco, it's never phrased as a question like "would you be willing to pay $MONTHLY_PRICE for 1gps fiber?" So far, I've only heard "Building fiber in Sa…

That stuff was all part of the Obama era stimulus bills. Many folks with the ability to lay fiber did so with substantial capitalization from the Feds. Many municipal governments and counties built fiber rings as well. The result was mostly institutional connectivity. Rural prisons, hospitals, government, factories, and schools got connected. But local franchise agreements make the last mile pretty much impossible.

Huh. ToledoTel is the telco it its service area. It isn't competing with the local telco. I don't think this is an example of municipal networking.

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

#75

Post by gwright »

gwright wrote: post #60
amorphid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A relative of mine lives in a rural area of Washington State, USA. He has fiber internet through ToledoTel... http://www.toledotel.com/our-services/internet/ ...it's expensive, but he has it. Every time I hear someone say we can't have blazing fast Internet in San Francisco, it's never phrased as a question like "would you be willing to pay $MONTHLY_PRICE for 1gps fiber?" So far, I've only heard "Building fiber in Sa…

It looks like ToledoTel is a "Local Exchange Carrier" (LEC). These entities have existed for a long time and are effectively the local incumbent telco and are quite common in more rural areas. Purchasing IP connectivity from ToledoTel is the same thing as purchasing IP connectivity from Verizon -- they are both the incumbent telco in their respective geographic areas.

Perhaps I should have said "analogous to" and not "the same thing as". I'm not trying to put forth an opinion here, just trying to point out that ToledoTel is the phone company in its service area.

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

#76

Post by Can_Not »

rayiner wrote: post #48
Can_Not wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The difficulty in an ISP is going to be about initial funding and being sued by regional monopolies. An ISP, specifically one that does not require additional hardware/software to organize and power tiered net neutrality violations logic, has orders of magnitudes less moving parts and disruptive needs for real estate/infrastructure. Maintainence labor could be simplified by training existing city electrical teams to work on both wire sets. We're talking about something with a lot less toes to step on. The failure scenarios for an ISP are so miniscule they make public transportation look like Chernobyl. Does a public ISP need to be ran better than those other things? There's just so much less to mess up and the consequences are just so much smaller and less permanent. Even if the mayor explicitly sells you out to the NSA or acquires someone's browsing history abusively or somehow the internet is out for a day, that's pretty much nothing compared to lead water, out of service rail line, environmental disaster, etc..

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

#77

Post by sliverstorm »

pmoriarty wrote: post #6

An Internet that is completely decentralized and independent of gatekeepers is the only long-term hope that I can see, and it's a very remote hope at that. There are too many powerful, vested interests in controlling people and their communication to let that happen. The only reason the Internet was ever as free as it was that it slipped under the radar of those very interests and wasn't taken seriously enough at fir…

Trouble is nobody's yet figured out how to build a completely decentralized internet that is anywhere near as good as the regular internet.

Mostly because wireless technologies still don't scale that far, which means wires in the ground, which means gatekeepers on the other end.

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

#78

Post by emerged »

I've noticed that when Trump detaches a thing from government control (Paris agreement, net neutrality), the populace and media go full on chicken little sky is falling.

Then as the dust settles, people start having conversations like this one. Private and corporate entities, wealthy individuals, organizations, step up and attempt to fill the gap.

So. Isn't that the whole point? That society as a whole is better suited to solve these problems than the largest centralized node on the network?

Edit: K I'll just absorb downvotes for having an opinion which doesn't actively oppose trump in one particular case.

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

#79

Post by gwright »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #57
gwright wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure small ISPs are a viable business model like it was in 10-20 years ago, but if you want to build a small regional ISP, I don't think peering relationships are going to be the problem, you can simply purchase transit bandwidth from the big guys. To do that cost effectively you do need to be renting rack space at a carrier hotel though. The really hard part is the layer-2 last-mile infrastructure to end use…

I visited a location this week where there were 2-4 houses per mile along country roads. The residents had a choice of ISPs. The house I visited had dialtone from a VOIP service. Yes, it costs money to build out last-mile infrastructure. But even in very low density areas, it can pay off. Recurring revenues of $50-100/month per customer can in fact pay for the initial investment. Especially if the investment was a wi…

I'd be interested in knowing who was really providing the layer-2 connectivity. In most places your options are the local telco and the local cable company. What were the other options here?

It is possible in some places to get IP transit from someone other than the telco or cable company but almost always that is happening using the layer-2 infrastructure from the telco. I've never heard of that happening via cable but I suppose it is possible.

I've been out of this for a while, but in Connecticut it used to be possible to lease layer-2 connectivity from the telco and then provide the IP services on top of that. This was done via DSL to the end-user with the layer-2 traffic aggregated and backhauled via ATM virtual circuits to the ISPs router in some data center. It was still difficult to compete with the local telco -- who also was selling IP transit of course via the same methodology. Mainly the problem was the economies of scale. The pricing favored high-volume which is hard for a small company competing against the market visibility of the local telco.

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

#80

Post by karlshea »

gwright wrote: post #52
iamnotlarry wrote: post #47

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 tha…

I'm not sure small ISPs are a viable business model like it was in 10-20 years ago, but if you want to build a small regional ISP, I don't think peering relationships are going to be the problem, you can simply purchase transit bandwidth from the big guys. To do that cost effectively you do need to be renting rack space at a carrier hotel though. The really hard part is the layer-2 last-mile infrastructure to end use…

I'm don't think that's true. US Internet[0] here in Minneapolis is privately-funded and they've been slowly building out an in-ground FTTP network. It's cheap (50Mb/$35, 100Mb/$45, 1Gb/$70, no contract), reliable, and fast.

They buy transit from a couple of different providers[1] and are co-located in an exchange downtown (MICE/Cologix) that's got the usual suspects like Google and Netflix.

I think the key is that they are growing responsibly and not trying to be everything to everyone but are just offering a pipe. Granted, this is a dense area so it's a lot different than trying to get fiber to a rural area, but so far that's what all the other fiber providers have been concentrating on.

They're certainly doing better than CenturyLink's pathetic rollout, and CenturyLink can just use poles instead of burying fiber.

[0] http://fiber.usinternet.com/coverage-areas

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/7ju5ew/now_tha..., https://www.peeringdb.com/net/3996

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