
The Cable Model and the Internet Model - ghshephard
http://avc.com/2014/11/the-cable-model-and-the-internet-model/
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zackmorris
A better analogy (to me) is that the internet infrastructure is part of the
commons (like roads, bridges, canals etc) and the internet data is the free
exchange of ideas (like phone calls and ham radio broadcasts). Internet
technology may be so ubiquitous now that I don't think we can trust control of
it to private interests. Arguing in terms of corporations frames it in the
wrong light and reminds me of Ma Bell.

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guiomie
I recommend also reading the comment/discussion from Mark Cuban at the bottom
of the article. Here is the initial comment:

"Come on fred. Cable companies started as analog. They were held back from
going digital more quickly because people still watch TV and they had to
support old stb. It wasn't a binary go all in for digital or not

And as far as 1k channels are you saying more linear is better than the
thousands of hours of HD on demand content they offer to tv viewers ? Or for
the remote dvrs coming online ? Consumption of on demand and dvr viewing is
growing faster than internet viewing of long firm content. Or did you not
notice that side of the equation. People do watch far more digital tv than
they do internet video. By a long shot

And you seem to forget that the internet was designed for everything but
video. But that's a topic for another time.

If you want to discuss the openness of the net you have to take out netflix.
That's one company the discussion of the open internet can't be built around
one company (disclosure I own a lot oc nflx stock and do quite a bit of
business with )"

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jacquesm
> And you seem to forget that the internet was designed for everything but
> video.

I've had that one leveled at me on more than one occasion (including a very
irate backbone operator that was pissed off that my webcam software was about
to saturate the transatlantic link) but I really do not agree with that.

The internet was designed to transport bits, to do so connectionless (UDP/IP,
Multicast/IP) or using virtual circuits. What the content of those bits was
was no doubt important but it is not exactly as if the internet was designed
to the exclusion of one particular medium because it happens to produce a lot
of bits.

Talk about videoconferencing started in the 1930's, and in via the internet in
the 1970's (roughly around the time the internet was built). I highly doubt
that you could make a credible claim that streaming video across the world
digitally was the one application that the internet was not designed for.

The whole idea is that it transports _bits_ , and that it does so with maximum
speed and reliability routing around problems where those are encountered.
What those bits represent is an affair of the sender and the receiver.

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angersock
Yep. That was the line that annoyed me the most, other than the continued
dismissal of concerns about ISP behavior--it's pretty obvious at this point to
anybody in tech that they can't be assumed to be competent and unbiased
actors.

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mwsherman
Net neutrality _is_ the cable model. It locks in local monopolies, aka,
utilities.

I find Fred uncharacteristically confused on this. We have local monopolies
because cable (and phone) were built according to a utility model. Net
neutrality is the legal reification of the utility model.

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splitrocket
Providing last mile service, be it electrical, water, gas, sewage, or TCP/IP
is a natural monopoly. No one is going to build more than one sewage pipe to a
customer. It only makes sense that we don't allow these natural monopolies
extract monopoly rents. Right now, we do allow the cable companies to do just
that, and worse.

If you find that your netflix or youtube is slow, just VPN into a server with
a real internet connection and be amazed at how fast the video loads, even
with the encryption overhead, all because the VPN bypasses the ISP's domain
based throttling. (Unless you're a youtube or netflix employee who can spin up
a VM for your own personal VPN or somesuch)

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icebraining
Lots of us outside the US have multiple ISPs in competition, usually with
their own cables. I'd really like to know what's so impossible about this, or
what makes monopolization inevitable. Sure running cable is expensive, but
it's hardly outside of the range of typical VC investment. It's not like you
need to wire a whole country at once, you can start by serving small & cheaper
areas.

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mschuster91
> Sure running cable is expensive

It's not just expensive, it's fucking hard. Speaking as a guy who occasionally
does this for a living.

The revenue you can make on a single phone wire these days just doesn't pay
off in five years. Not in ten. Maybe in twenty years, but this break-even
delay is too much for any investor who is not at government level!

And this is why speedy stuff like FTTH is deployed in cities and not in rural
areas: digging costs approximately the same in rural as in city areas... and
if it costs me as provider 50 k€ to wire up 100m of city street with 500
customers, that's paying off in a year. Wiring up a rural area with (if you're
lucky, and I'm already leaving out _real_ rural areas!) 50 customers takes 10
years to break even...

And this difference is why it is imperative that last-mile infrastructure
building is done by a government entity charging the same amount of money for
providing a bitstream Internet uplink to the customer - at a price point where
the city customers subsidize the rural customers and the utility provider
breaks even.

The added value by telecom providers renting the wires from utility can be
e.g. faster peering to Netflix, Facebook caching servers in the next major
city, etc.

~~~
icebraining
_And this difference is why it is imperative that last-mile infrastructure
building is done by a government entity_

Why? I'm really missing that logic step. OK, so rural is too costly to
connect. But that doesn't follow that a specific solution is imperative,
especially since the vast majority of the population lives in cities.

Why can't the government entity only build in rural/unprofitable areas, by
imposing a tax on city connections? More: why can't the government entity
simply subsidize the bills of rural users, adjusted to the extra cost of
wiring their areas?

Thinking even wider, must we wire? What's keeping wireless point-to-point
connections from working here?

Rarely a problem only has one solution, why is this one an exception?

~~~
mschuster91
> Why can't the government entity only build in rural/unprofitable areas, by
> imposing a tax on city connections? More: why can't the government entity
> simply subsidize the bills of rural users, adjusted to the extra cost of
> wiring their areas?

Because charging every customer the same price regardless where he lives is
widely accepted - but just imagine you had a "city tax" appear on your telco
bill. You'd be outraged by it...

> Thinking even wider, must we wire? What's keeping wireless point-to-point
> connections from working here?

That one is easy to answer: people these days are afraid of radiation and
high-voltage lines (NIMBY phenomenon). Also, you would not gain much from
point-to-point-connecting a rural village as you'd still have to dig fiber
into the village center which you then distribute to the individual houses.
But as you are already in the village center, you could also just put a FTTC
DSLAM box there and be done (this is what Deutsche Telekom is doing right now
in a load of rural areas!).

edit: (microwave) point-to-point communication also usually requires expensive
communication gear as well as individual (!) licenses from regulators. In
addition during heavy rain, fog or snowfall communication quality decreases
drastically, and heavy wind may displace the dishes.

~~~
icebraining
_Because charging every customer same price regardless where he lives is
widely accepted - but just imagine you had a "city tax" appear on your telco
bill. You'd be outraged by it..._

Sure. Which is why you wouldn't charge a "city tax", you'd just charge a tax
on everyone, but the subsidy to rural users would simply cover it (and part of
the ISP price).

 _Also, you would not gain much from point-to-point-connecting a rural village
as you 'd still have to dig fiber into the village center._

I was actually thinking about connecting to the village using microwave, not
(just?) to individual homes.

~~~
mschuster91
> I was actually thinking about connecting to the village using microwave, not
> (just?) to individual homes.

The "connect individual homes" part is the expensive part.

Just digging fibers across plain land is easy - just plough them in, bury
pipework during road construction (actually mandatory in Germany!) or use
existing sewer pipes. Or, even better, use existing overhead poles for HV or
MV electricity.

