This wouldn't be a problem if ISP's weren't de facto monopolies. If there was competition in this space, then there would be incentive to improve the infrastructure and Internet speeds. However, ISP's kill competition by making legal arrangements with local governments to only do business with them, and by cutting competitors' cables. Since we have no way to guarantee reasonable speeds to small time websites now, we should pursue antitrust legal and foster competition in this space. Comcast didn't realize it, but net neutrality was their own safety net.
I've been thinking this over for the past couple months, because I was pretty sure this would be the outcome - that we would lose our net neutrality protection.
So let's play out the worse case - Comcast, AT&T etc wait out the shitstorm and then start throttling traffic and packaging the internet, releasing cable-esque "plans."
Is it feasible to just start running our own fiber to hubs? I want to learn more about the internet and what it would take to bypass the ISPs. Can I do this? Do I need to be incorporated to do it? What would it take to start a new ISP with the premise "unthrottled, unmonitored traffic, charged by the gigabyte - an internet utility service"?
As a private citizen, can I purchase a bunch of land between me and, I dunno, a DNS node or whatever and just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it? Who do I have to pay at the node to get to "plug into" it or whatever?
Hmm. I should see if there's some "How the Internet Works: for Dummies" book.
> As a private citizen, can I (snip) just lay a super long fiber cable straight to (the internet).
Yes. I worked on a startup ISP for a few years, which attempted to do this. It's actually really easy to do :
1) Pick a point where you can get connection to the internet. (Backhaul). This is usually a phone companies central office, but it can also be at a data centre or other point of presence.
2) Run fiber cable from there to your customers. (You can also use wireless gear instead for a WISP. I don't like this approach, it's very 1990s despite all the newer better gear, but it's much cheaper than fiber and if your careful it can work out OK)
3) Setup some light network management.
Some cities / municipalities have signed agreements for monopoly rights to a telephone or cable provider. Many (but not all) of them can be worked around by simply not selling telephone or TV service.
The land between you and your customers is owned. You'll need space in public property (or 'right of way') to connect to them. This also varies based on city/county/state/local laws, but in Michigan there are somewhat decent rules around this. (Set rates for underground conduit access or utility pole access, rules about what can/can't be blocked, etc).
The only real roadblock is money. Fiber ISPs are super cheap at scale, but are effectively impossible to bootstrap unless you are already a millionaire. In Michigan, I could easily offer everyone residential 500mbps to the home via fiber for $50/month and cover all costs, no problem. But only after we already had a few thousand customers. The cost for your very first customer is somewhere north of $50k/each, and prices don't become reasonable until your in the thousands.
In most areas, the only thing you really need to start an ISP is (1) Lots of money, and (2) perseverance. There's not really any rules that prevent it, and the regulations aren't unreasonable. But the upfront cost is so high, it rules out basically any honest person from having the chance to do it.
"Some cities / municipalities have signed agreements for monopoly rights to a telephone or cable provider. Many (but not all) of them can be worked around by simply not selling telephone or TV service."
Isn't it ironic that the only way for a startup ISP to get around the local monopoly agreement is to not provide services which are regulated by the FCC?
Yet somehow, Google, Amazon, and Facebook have convinced most young people that FCC regulation of ISPs is a good idea.
The sad part is, the only thing between a mass of young voters and 1984-style internet is just 3 more years of Trump/Pai, who most of them hate. Hopefully the FTC's renewed authority over "information service" can be demonstrated for the virtue it is before it's too late.
What not offering telephone or television service gets you is avoiding the need to negotiate with the city for a television franchise. These agreements are usually stuffed with grab-bags for the municipal government (e.g. per-user fee, 5% of revenue off the top, offer XYZ public-access channels, build out to XYZ neighborhoods). All of this is imposed by the local government, not the FCC.
If you just want to run an ISP, build out where you think you can make a profit, and don't want the city to skim off the top, you can avoid that by not offering television or phone service. On the other hand, not offering television makes it hard to compete. People really do care about television service. I lived in an apartment building in Baltimore that had both cable and FiOS. FiOS was internet-only, because Verizon couldn't get a television franchise in the city. I found out I was the first one on my floor (of dozens of apartments) that had subscribed to fiber since the building was built 4-5 years before. All because people really love their television bundles. (There is a reason Google Fiber offered television service.)
Probably not. Franchising authority extends only to television. Municipalities aren't permitted (under federal law) to leverage their authority over the television side to regulate the broadband side.
I suspect the best thing municipalities can do is to make it easy to build competing systems. Take the list of concessions that Google Fiber cities made in return for getting service and commit to doing that for any potential entrant. Adopt one-touch make ready rules, maintain city-owned ducts in good shape and make it easy to get permits. Lay dark fiber every time the city digs things up to put in sewers or roads. Even a little bit of competition can have significant effects. E.g. in the D.C. metro area Comcast has no data caps because it's in competition with Verizon, RCN, and Cox. At the state level, municipal networks can provide a backstop for places (e.g. rural Maryland) that can't support sufficient private competition.
I would really like to see a business case study of building out and operating an HFC network in a single average suburb, and how that varies with how cooperative the suburb is.
Could any of the economies of scale enjoyed by the huge/evil ISPs be recaptured by using some kind of franchise-model where the locals can own an ISP like they would a McDonalds?
I think towns might be more willing to make those concessions if at least some of the competitors were local small businesses rather than giant corporations like Google.
Google Fiber failed because being a telecom network operator means tying up billions in capital assets in your infrastructure and then only making 10% margins.
Google’s business model is built around low capex and 35% margins. It’s simply a terrible fit for the other side of the company. Exponential growth becomes logarithmic growth and drags down their financials if they scale out too far.
The opposite is true: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-kansas-city-.... Google got tons of concessions from Fiber cities that other providers don't get, such as free power and free use of public property. There was nothing special about Kansas City--cities were falling over themselves to offer Google concessions in return for getting Fiber.
That's laughable. If Google was to take a VZ, there would be no VZ. Same goes for Comcast, AT&T etc.
The reality is that Google has no interest in taking on carriers. There's nothing sexy is digging treches and hiring Fat Joe, who belches, farts in a workplace, drinks a litter of coke, votes Trump and goes to work at -4C to splice fiber. You won't get accolades. You would only get shit if fiber is out and Paris Hilton can't watch her Netflix.
Here in Seattle our condo building is in the middle of something insane - Comcast is actively installing their network in our building; previously we were only served by Wave Broadband. The local government has finally pushed back on what used to be de facto "gentlemen's agreements" to not allow competition in buildings. Excited to see what this brings!
Do you think the "monopoly" concept may still apply when looked at through the Net Neutrality argument that ISPs may throttle/block services which compete with their own (possibly franchised) services?
I too live in the DMV area and am on the lookout for an apartment with decent internet.
Sure. You can have market power in the antitrust sense without being a legal monopoly.
I don't know where you work, but I'm personally loving the Annapolis area. (As I like to say, VA won't let you have weed, DC won't let you have guns, but MD will let you have both.) I also have two fiber providers to my house, and the state is building municipal fiber in the more rural counties that don't have FiOS.
Ahhhh Annapolis... Home to a big naval academy & supporting infrastructure/economy. That sounds great. My hope is to find a sweet/similar deal somewhere between Laurel & Crystal City.
If your view of the Second Amendment runs more towards militias than self defense, MD isn't bad. For long guns, there is no permit required, and either concealed or open carry is allowed without a permit. The ban on "assault style" weapons just means the state police runs a website listing all the semi-auto rifles you can legally buy (which is a lot). You can get your 30-round magazines in Virginia and bring them in with no trouble.
For long guns (which is kind of pointless, I suppose). The point is that there is nothing preventing you from stocking up on arms for when MD/DE/PA have to become their own country.
You’ll need to shoot for constitutional carry. Here in KS (least gun laws in the nation) there is statewide open & concealed carry, no license required, at schools, bars, university. Though there would be a trespassing charge if you refuse to leave if asked. Still need a CCH license to get around federal Gun Free School Zones. No NICS if you have CCW.
The recent Firearms Protection Act says firearms and accessories (suppressors) made in KS are exempt from federal regulation. Though a couple of guys lost their federal case when they built a suppressor and sold it; at least no prison sentence.
I wonder how much this has changed recently. We have PS Vue, sling, Youtube XYZ. Could you partner with one them to provide a discount to their services? Do the same with Vonage/etc?
Municipal Monopoly agreements are not illegal. No monopoly is illegal. _Abuse_ of monopoly power is illegal. Cable TV is a government granted m.onopoly
> Isn't it ironic that the only way for a startup ISP to get around the local monopoly agreement is to not provide services which are regulated by the FCC?
Isn't it telling that the FCC is repealing the consumer-protecting regulations, and not the monopoly-protecting ones?
What the heck are you getting at? You don't seem to be making a clear point. Federal regulation of most common monopolies is a good idea, and the internet has thrived under the net neutrality regulations.
The “everyone who disagrees with me is a paid shill because I surround myself in an echo chamber and can’t fathom of a legitimately dissenting opinion” mindset on the internet is more toxic and disturbing than actual astroturfing (insofar as it is far more prevalent at this time). It adds nothing to the discussion, stifles the sharing of unpopular opinions, and only reinforces the echo chamber. Please consider the ramifications of such accusations and in cases where you have proof, present it in lieu of the substance-less attack.
Crowdsourceable? If you need a couple thousand users, would it be possible to run a marketing campaign, get pre-purchase commitments of $100-200, and give some rewards to early adopters? If you raise enough funding, you're good, if not, just cancel the campaign.
> Google Fiber works better when communities are connected together. So we’ve divided Kansas City into small communities we call “fiberhoods.” We’ll install only where there’s enough interest, and we’ll install sooner in fiberhoods where there’s more interest.
I have a gigabit connection, and regularly verify my bandwidth. It's usually not actually in four digits, but I see 800+ megabit on a pretty regular basis.
It amuses* me that the rural Northwest and Yorkshire Dales can get orders of magnitude faster yet cheaper broadband than my parents in suburban Manchester.
I wonder if this would be feasible at the neighborhood level via Home owners association. The neighborhood gets a tower and microwave link to a backhaul station, and provides internet via wifi or wires to the neighborhood.
I think our neighboorhood is about 130 houses. probably not enough to make it cost effective.
On the flip side, maybe starting a local company to provide LOS microwave hookups to the various neighborhoods in the area could make it work.
If you can somehow convince your HOA to let you put up a tower, then yes, it's feasible. And if you are doing microwave link only, it's pretty cheap.
You can rent space on a nearby cell tower for a pricy-but-not-insane monthly fee, and they'll usually have decent backhaul already present. (American Tower had a WISP sales program specifically for this at one point, I'm not sure if they still do). Run point-to-point from there to your neighborhood via some microwave WISP gear.
If you had a volunteer from the HOA willing to setup and manage it (a bigger ask than it sounds like), and if all 130 houses would agree to pay $50/month, then the math would work out OK (at least, using pricing I got in suburban Michigan about 4 years ago).
> If you can somehow convince your HOA to let you put up a tower.
You don't have to convince them, let the FCC do that. I lived in an area with a heavy handed HOA. The only decent broadband was a WISP. They had a few go rounds with the HOA, but they can't regulate antennas. In the end the WISP put a tower on my roof - I never heard a word. They may try, but they don't have authority to regulate it.
> They had a few go rounds with the HOA, but they can't regulate antennas.
That's a little bit of an overstatement. HOAs can regulate antennas unless the FCC (or Congress) makes an exception.
In the case of WISP, there is an exception that applies: 47 CFR 1.4000 [1]. WISPs would fall under the exception for antennas for "fixed wireless signals". A "fixed wireless signal" is "any commercial non-broadcast communications signals transmitted via wireless technology to and/or from a fixed customer location".
I think you have a flawed assumption that the big telcos that own the tower and backhaul aren't going to charge content providers for access to that tower.
> you have a flawed assumption that the big telcos that own the tower and backhaul
Most cell towers are owned by a third party (not a big telco), and they'll lease to anyone if you have the cash, and the site has the capacity (physical space, weight/wind requirements, etc). You can lease from American Tower, Crown Castle, SBA, etc.
The existing backhaul is often owned by existing monopoly telecom providers. But not always. And competitive non-big-telco commercial operators will often install service to a site for you, if you are willing to pay for it. For example, I'm looking at a cell site in Michigan right now, that's deep in AT&T territory, but Sprint fiber is actually the installed backhaul provider, and four other commercial providers will install service there for a price.
You can know all of this upfront, before you sign anything, so there's very little risk in terms of tower space or backhaul availability. People have been doing this for decades now, it's not as ill-defined as it might seem.
Speaking from today's perspective, you're correct. But it won't be long until all the third parties et. al figure out they too can get into the paid access game. Contracts will be revised. Rents will be extracted. Because there are no regulations to put a check on greed.
Contrary to the claims made if one is to remove municipal blocks fiber is very easy and very cheap to install. What makes fiber installation expensive is municipal regulations
Clearly I’m not the guy to talk to about tor/onion. I’m wondering if a network could be set up across thousands of homes somehow and that network could purchase priority of its traffic. Basically there’s always a way to add another layer of abstraction to circumvent a lower layers restrictions.
Yes, a mesh network would work for that, then you just need a method to measure how much traffic each node serves then pay the node operators for that.
I know there were mesh networks with wireless microwave transmitters deployed in some rural areas, but I can't find the articles. It's probably going to get more and more attention though, along with distributed electricity and similar things as technology progresses.
About the wireless approach, Monkeybrains (https://www.monkeybrains.net/residential.php) in SF seems to do this. I believe I read somewhere that they're planning on replacing the wireless stuff with fiber for areas where they have high customer density. They're awesome, the service is good (except when it rains. Thanks california), it's cheap ($35) and I've been pretty happy with it.
I wonder if that could work to bootstap an isp. Obviously the wireless thing won't work in less dense areas and is subject to weather but maybe a successful business in the city could provide enough capital to expand to the suburbs.
Thank you maxsilver, this is one of the most informative posts I've seen on HackerNews.
Question, you said: This is usually a phone companies central office
Are there risks involved with that? Like for example, they could start playing games with you by saying 'sorry we're doing construction for a week, you can't access your office' ? Maybe a bad example, but I mean, would it make more sense to do it outside of their office?
> Are there risks involved with that? Like for example, they could start playing games with you by saying 'sorry we're doing construction for a week, you can't access your office' ?
Probably? I've never written up a plan using an actual monopoly telco's CO, exactly for this reason. It's easier to find anywhere else to start from, and usually cheaper too.
I only mention it because my experience is mostly suburban / small city related, and I know the majority of small ISP / WISP guys are hyper-rural. They may not have any other options available to them.
I'm having trouble finding it now, but didn't the FCC overturn the rule that says ISP's have to sell bandwidth to other ISP's? If they do not, or they are able to make it to where they do not have to, they could pretty easily prevent people from doing this or charge some huge amount for a contract to connect directly to a backbone.
Yes absolutely, but it's not really a problem on the commercial market because there's enough competition there.
In my small city in Michigan, for example, there's exactly one phone company and one cable company for residential uses. But there are 4 different local companies selling commercial bandwidth backhaul, in addition to nationwide major providers like Level3 and AT&T.
If you're somewhere truly rural, this can be an issue, the local monopoly might not let you buy commercial (re-sellable) bandwidth. But in most cities -- even small ones, it's probably not a major issue.
At the moment, commercial ISP services are still somewhat competitive. It's the residential ones that are completely monopolized.
This is cool, thank you for explaining. It never occurred to me that it would be so different for commercial offerings. The main question I have with ideas like this is where the shitty pricing scams are going to be happening—if it's the residential companies, then yeah, this is perfect. But if it's Level3 that's shaking down Netflix for more money, for example, then the "fork" isn't happening high enough up the chain. Do you have any insight into this part of the equation?
Please don't be offended, I am only pointing this out because you are obvious very intelligent and expert in the field.
>If your somewhere
*you're
I only point it out because I know some people discount comments that have grammar and spelling errors.
Thanks for the super informative posts!
Edit: I guess I offended, based on the downvotes. I only pointed it out since it was used incorrectly in the posts. I was trying to be helpful, apologies if I was being a dick.
I didn't downvote you, but you might have gotten downvotes because the beginning of your post built up anticipation by making it sound like you had some amazing point/rebuttal to drop, and then seeing only an `s/your/you're` was a huge disappointment ;-)
Based only on this description it sounds like a Kickstarter-esque model might work. E.g. get tens to hundreds of dollars from thousands of would-be customers, then start building once the funding goal is reached. Contributors would get X GBs or Y months of service once the utility is operational.
People in Michigan are getting fed up with this situation. Lyndon Township passed a 20 year millage to fund a municipal fiber network. The vote passed 2-1 with almost 50% turnout in a non-general election year. The tax will cost every $200K household about $300/year; $6000 total. That's on top of the monthly fees they intend to pay for the service.
People want good fixed broadband Internet. They are willing to pay for it. The telcos and cable operators don't care; they're happy with the customer base they have and their horizon is measured in quarters, not decades, so they're entirely uninterested in the effort and investment needed to build out such systems. They want the low hanging low effort fruit.
This NN outcome won't change any of that; whatever ambition these companies have is now focused on the windfalls they'll make from the peering agreements they're going to negotiate with Netflix et al. and none of that money will find its way to build outs.
You've covered the "last mile", but there is the upstream world to take into consideration.
1) Connecting into a CO is one thing, but your fiber is going to need to connect into something. Who is paying for your optics, is there a port or line card that can accept those optics? Does the CO actually have enough bandwidth upstream? This is a real issue.
Back in the 90s, I helped set up an ISP in Boston proper and our main competition had well over a 1000 customers attached to a single T1 (1.5mb/s) link. Everyone wanted 28.8k speeds (lol), but would normally get ~300 to 2400bps. The competition had a bunch of modems with a single upstream link. No one wanted what we were selling - guaranteed bandwidth / true 28.8 bandwidth all the time. People wanted $19.99/unlimited all you can eat. People still want that today.
Back to the CO, maybe you are lucky and they have some open ports. Worst case scenario, they want you to plop down a router and you'll do 10gb/e between. You can go with a homemade box and hope that it is stable, or you can buy expensive network gear.
2) To your customers, that "CO" is the "internet", but to that vendor/telco, it is just a single point of presence (POP). That CO has to connect to other POPs that are owned by them, and that costs real money. Eventually through a unknown number of hops, your traffic will hit an exchange point or carrier hotel. This is where your traffic exits their network and is taken up by another provider and/or company (google has their own fiber plan, for example). The amount of bandwidth at these peering/access points is finite and providers choose to peer with each other, usually at no charge, if there is an equitable distribution of traffic. The last thing that you want is for one company to take up all of the (finite) bandwidth at a peering point.
An ISP connects to multiple carriers (l3, cogent, comcast, att,verizon, etc) so that your customers have quick access to the websites/services that they want to visit - which most likely have to traverse one of those other providers. Similarly, their customers will want to access services that you are hosting, so you will take in a similar amount of ingress traffic.
With the fiber network that you are connecting your customers to, they'll most likely want to access bandwidth intensive services. You better hope that your CO has upstream capacity and a fast path to netflix/hulu/facebook/google/akamai/etc.
Or you, as a internet service provider, try and peer directly with the content providers if they allow it. If there are only 2-3 hops between you and Netflix, your users will love you. If they have to bounce around the country a couple of times, your customers will go back to Comcast (because they have a well connected backbone).
3) This doesn't even cover where you are going to get your IP addresses, if your upstream provider will announce them in BGP for you, etc. Or maybe you connect in to two carriers, get an ASN and announce your networks yourself. You are still at the mercy of your upstream providers.
I think a lot of these details are often overlooked when someone talks about network neutrality. I think network neutrality is a glib term for a number of issues:
- filtering of traffic and/or inability to access a service
- loss of freedom to host stuff "for free" on the internet
- lack of competition in "the last mile".
The FCC/TitleII stuff, from what I've heard, negatively impacted small WISPs that were trying to start up, by assuming that they were the same size as major wireless providers. A $20k fine because your lawyer failed to properly submit paperwork can wipe you out if you are a simple provider that is trying to provide access to a small community. You aren't AT&T, but title II will assume that you are - and penalize you accordingly.
For more information, read some of these filings/papers:
Say you have a HOA with 100 houses and you got the last mile wired with fiber. There is probably some place ( such as community center ) that is owned by HOA itself. You get 100 pairs to that building. 10G LR SFP+ are $40 a pop all day. So you need $80 per link once. 48x 10G port switches are $3k all day. So it is 24x edges with a reasonable fabric oversubscription - so you need 5 of those because you want to oversubscribe core rather than the edge as edge requires interaction with a customer while core requires simple internal upgrades. In reality we are goig to do 1Gbit/sec to every drop delivered over 10G so we only need 100Gbit/sec to the edge. Lets spend another $10K on the "core switches" - which in reality are going to be the same as the edges but we will provision them in a way where should this take off we could replace core with 40 and 100G. All of this is going to cost us very little money. Hell, lets pretend it costs us $50K just for the sake of the argument because we like buying really expensive stuff
We can ride a single fiber pair ( remember, this is a residential service, so screw redundancy ) to one of the major interconnect centers because we can drop DWDM gear on our side ( prisms are cheap as hell ) and rent a rack in that interconnect location.
Monthlies:
$10K/mo ( worst case scenario ) DF to interconnect point
$2.5K/mo ( rack at the interconnect point )
This gives us the L2 access. But that's not a problem. The problem is that 100Gbit/sec of non-congested IP transit is abou 55c per mbit/sec so that is $55K/mo.
So your cost is $67K/mo to provide 100 houses in a HOA with 1Gbit/sec of IP.
Lets say that you are in a magic place called say... NYC and it just happened that this wonderful thing is a building located right next to one of the big interconnect points and the developer who developed this highrise owns both buildings. You nuke dark fiber monthly cost. Hell, lets even pretend that the developer who owns both buildings lives in a building that we are wiring and he wants high speed internet connectivity to be able to watch NetFlix and PornTube. So there's not only no cost for dark fiber but there's no rack cost.
You are still at $55K/mo of non-congested IP to provide 1Gbit/sec access to every one of those 100 apartments.
Kind of insane to not oversubscribe residential or small/medium business connections, it's extremely rare that 100 houses would saturate a 10Gb line or even half that.
When you pay $50/mo for an internet connection you aren't paying for guaranteed bandwidth, you're just hoping the ISP has enough capacity to meet peak demand - not much different from your local electric provider.
It'd cost me roughly ~$3000/mo for a 10Gb point-to-point link from Boise to Equinix in Seattle from Zayo, and about another $2500/mo for a 10Gb transit connections from Hurricane Electric. You could serve quite a lot of households from that, 50-100:1 oversubscription is pretty common for residential/small business service - so that 10Gb connection could pretty safely serve 500 households reducing your fixed costs to $11/customer/mo.
What we need a boatload of small regional networks ( like the one with 100 houses of HOA ) that have an open peering policy. If you can peer out 50% of your traffic at $0.01 per mbit ($100/mo PNIs to CloudFlare, JoeSchmoeNet, FLIX etc) then you have the same non-congested non-oversubscribed exit for 50% less.
And this is where you are getting into some really interesting stuff:
what you want to do is be an ISP and content originator. In that case you effectively are double-selling your bandwidth since eyeball networks are bringing content in while web farms are pushing content out.
Oversubscription is a reality but it transparently works only on a very large scale - which is why Verizon and Comcast should be able to provide extremely high speed connections ( they don't due to their peering and interconnect policies but that's a separate thing ).
> Who is paying for your optics, is there a port or line card that can accept those optics? Does the CO actually have enough bandwidth upstream? This is a real issue. (snip) You better hope that your CO has upstream capacity and a fast path to netflix/hulu/facebook/google/akamai/etc.
Yes and yes. I don't want to dismiss this, it's a real need, but this is what you pay your upstream for. I've never seen a provider not take care of it.
I suppose if you cheap out on your upstream, this can be an issue. I can't imagine someone doing all the work to build a Fiber ISP, and then cheap out on the actual internet service, but I suppose anything is possible.
> This doesn't even cover where you are going to get your IP addresses, if your upstream provider will announce them in BGP for you, etc. Or maybe you connect in to two carriers, get an ASN and announce your networks yourself. You are still at the mercy of your upstream providers.
I don't know how common this is, but my upstream providers would just sell me the IP addresses and were flexible enough to handle either scenario.
> You are still at the mercy of your upstream providers.
Absolutely. This is always true, until you get large enough to be the upstream provider yourself and peer with others directly. But since upstream is competitive, and carries heavy contracts with teeth, you are mostly shielded from the worst atrocities.
It's kind of like forming a union. Sure, you're still "at the mercy of the employer", but you have way better bargaining power to prevent major problems, when you represent 10,000 internet users instead of just one. It's not perfect by any means. But it's worlds better than anything folks are used to on the residential side.
> The FCC/TitleII stuff, from what I've heard, negatively impacted small WISPs that were trying to start up,
Yes, fines should be lower for small business. But these guys could also just not break the law.
The complaints I've seen from some small WISPs are from people who are cheap and lazy, and want to do some pretty sketchy things. (Intentionally throttle Netflix to save upstream bandwidth, for example, because they want to sell 20mbps but can only provide 2mbps). These are blatant violations of Net Neutrality that would cause a shitstorm when AT&T/Comcast does it. But because they are 'small businesses', they want a bunch of sympathy despite doing the same slimy stuff.
I'm guessing there's probably an honest reason for some of the complaints, but the ones I've heard myself were all pretty shady. These providers give honest ISPs a bad name, and play into the false "everyone's just as evil as Comcast anyway" narrative.
> Pick a point where you can get connection to the internet. (Backhaul). This is usually a phone companies central office, but it can also be at a data centre or other point of presence.
Me too :) I think it was easier for Longmont as it's part of "Longmont Power and Communications" - they were able to run a lot of fiber in existing infrastructure, and right of way was essentially a non-issue.
power companies seem to be in the best position to offer awesome internet. a local provider here has 1000/1000 for $99/mo. but unfortunately they haven't laid fiber in all of the neighborhoods, especially the older ones. so it's only the newer subdivisions that are getting it. :/
i'd be all over it. one less bill to worry about too. (just bundle internet + power)
Acenteck has been doing this in Michigan for the past few years in the Grand Rapids area. They keep pulling lines to new rural neighborhoods coming in. Basically get everyone on the block in one shot because Comcast/Charter have such a bad name.
> In Michigan, I could easily offer everyone residential 500mbps to the home via fiber for $50/month and cover all costs, no problem. But only after we already had a few thousand customers. The cost for your very first customer is somewhere north of $50k/each, and prices don't become reasonable until your in the thousands.
Sounds like you could benefit from and ICO to gauge interest and raise the capital necessary for infrastructure development ;)
No, it isn't. I live in NYC. I have access to exactly one broadband provider. So, if Spectrum starts blocking Vonage because they want you to pay for their VoIP instead (ISPs in the US have done this in the past), I'll have to drop Vonage and use Spectrum's VoIP. Repeat for blocking P2P, Google Wallet, Facetime, Netflix, etc (all of which have previous incidents in the US).
As someone from a country without net neutrality, I have to say this hasn't happened. Generally you get very cheap or free plans that are sponsored by Facebook or others that give priority to Facebook, but ISPs are always happy to take a little bit more money for an unlimited plan that gives you full access. And at least in my country, they're not unreasonably priced.
Even without net neutrality, your single monopoly ISP could triple their prices and there would be nothing you could do about it. The fact that they haven't seems to show that net neutrality probably isn't going to affect you all that badly. No sane company is going to block Google Wallet or Netflix.
Feels like net neutrality isn't the problem - it's Spectrum that is the problem. If repealing net neutrality gets your country to fix your real problem, then I'd say it's going to be a massively good thing in the long run as top parent on this comment chain implied.
It's not entirely clear whether they blocked it from being installed on their carrier locked phones, or if they blocked it from communicating with Google servers at the network level. Back in 2011 it was relatively uncommon to buy unlocked phones, particularly for use on CDMA networks. It sounds to me like they just blocked the phone from installing the application, rather than anything that net neutrality would prevent.
There's no legal reason that a carrier has to allow you to use an unlocked phone on their networks. My cable ISP doesn't allow me to bring my own modem, for example. From what I can tell, the net neutrality rules wouldn't have changed this situation at all.
edit: This article[1] is extremely informative; Verizon was not blocking anything at a network level, they were disabling the OS from accessing the necessary "secure element" (TrustZone) in some of their carrier locked phones, which made the Android APIs that Google Wallet relied on cease to function. Due to this, Google chose to not show the app on the Play Store to customers on Verizon because they didn't want people to try the app and have it fail.
So in conclusion, this "blocking" (if you can even call it that) is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand about net neutrality.
How long did it stay blocked? I bet they unblocked it as soon as customers complained.
Definitely an interesting example though. Nothing like that has ever happened in my country without net neutrality, but then we have a fairly competitive market where a single carrier trying that would lose their customers very quickly.
> That's crazy! I'd have cancelled and swapped ISPs after a week. Guess people didn't really care?
The vast majority of people in the US only have access to a single broadband ISP. I live in NYC and only have access to one. My other options are slow DSL (under 15Mbps download and under 1Mbps upload), dialup, or using a hotspot that is generally limited to 15GB download (3 Netflix movies) for $90 a month.
That's crazy! I'd have cancelled and swapped ISPs after a week. Guess people didn't really care?
EDIT: After reading more replies, it seems like you guys actually have no choice. Serious red flag that it sounds like net neutrality was covering up. I think you will be better in the long run with it removed, but you all need to get active and fix your ISP problem and create a free market.
In many regions in the U.S. you don't have any other ISPs. Cable & telecom companies have de-facto monopolies in most places; your only competition is often a reseller that uses the exact same pipes as the local telecom and so is subject to the same throttling.
Internet speeds are also ridiculously slow. In the heart of Silicon Valley, I'm on 5 MBPs/sec, even though the equipment can easily do gigabit. (How do I know this? Because if you pay several hundred bucks a month, they will upgrade your speed to gigabit without anyone coming out.)
Yeah you definitely have bigger problems than net neutrality. I'm in the middle of Africa, 30km from the CBD of a small city, and I have 1gb local / 100mb international fiber with no caps or throttling for the equivalent of ~$85/month. Plus I can WhatsApp the tech support if something goes wrong and they'll drive over and fix it within 30 mins or so.
I also have a choice of about 8 different ISPs offering me fiber lines to my door who seem to be in a price war with each other at the moment.
I don't have net neutrality though. But surely the problem you're facing is ISP/government monopoly related, not the net neutrality bit? Or do you think it's something else causing the ISP issues there?
It's totally ISP/monopoly related, but convincing the government to keep net neutrality regulations is generally viewed as easier than convincing them to break up monopoly telecoms. It was hard enough getting them to block the AT&T/T-mobile merger. The last time a company's been threatened with being broken up was Microsoft in the late 1990s, and they got off with a slap on the wrist (albeit one that made them reluctant to enter new markets, which opened the door for Google & Facebook, and Apple's resurgence, in the early 2000s).
Is that 100 up as well as down? How's the roundtrip latency to get a packet to a US server and back? In any case you have better internet than me for cheaper, and I'm two miles from downtown Bellevue, WA USA not out in the sticks of a flyover state. :(
Generally speaking though I'm also not particularly sad that this NN regulation has been repealed, I agree with the assessment that our problems are not from NN, lack of NN is merely one of many unpleasant possibilities with the current system so even if it was fully fixed there's still all the other problems, most of which have no workarounds. Lack of NN has a workaround. The fact that many employees at many businesses require using a VPN to work from home means that most ISPs will have no choice but to accept extra money to give those people unthrottled / uncensored lines that they take for granted right now as part of the base fee.
Speaking of flyover states, I'm in Kansas and have symmetrical gigabit from Google Fiber. They've recently moved in and I think that if net neutrality is really an issue, competitors like Google will be able to handily out compete the existing companies that already exist here. I tried to get AT&T Fiber for almost a month before finally giving up and getting Google Fiber.
Have you considered that maybe your internet is bad in the heart of silicon valley for the same reason your public transit, housing, etc., is bad? Symmetric gigabit is ~$80/month where I live, and I'm having 2-gig installed in a couple of weeks for $150/month. We've got all our utilities on poles, zoning variances are a breeze to get, and nobody cares that my house never got its final inspection. But we've got lots of Trump lawn signs around so people in Silicon Valley would never stoop to moving here.
Just as a counterpoint, I'm also in the heart of silicon valley. I have 125Mbps internet, with a few other options available, at a not-unreasonable cost.
I recently redid our garage to create a laundry area, and the inspector collaborated with me to identify the most efficient (and safe and legal) way to implement the plumbing, drainage, and electrical. It was neither confrontational nor onerous; I truly got value from a helpful, knowledgeable person that wanted the project to succeed.
We have more jobs than houses, our local schools are some of the best in the state, I have 3 parks in walking distance and a network of bike paths that run through the city. Miles of protected open space, with trails, farms, and facilities are all nearby.
I'm more than happy to pay the taxes to live here and to support the regulatory regimes that protect all of the above.
Certainly considered it - I'm a political moderate, my political views are generally a mishmash from both parties (really all parties, I've been known to vote Libertarian and Green as well, sometimes on the same ballot).
But I'll say that my sister lives in Houston, TX, which has a basically diametrically opposite political philosophy. And it's fucked up in entirely different ways. Traffic and public transportation both suck here, but public transportation is basically nonexistent in Houston, and at least we don't have people shooting at each other because of road rage (which actually happened in my sister's neighborhood - some woman with a small child in the back seat cut off a guy in a pickup truck, so he pulled out a handgun and opened fire). Our house prices are ridiculous, but at least we can drive ten minutes and be in well-preserved, well-maintained open space preserves, while Houston's public parkland exists but is nowhere near as easy to get to or enjoy. Our Internet sucks, but PG&E is pretty reasonable and actually fixes outages fairly rapidly (even if it does have a tendency to burn down Santa Rosa), while my sister's electric bill goes through half a dozen companies, each of which tries to extract as much money from the customer while providing as little service as possible.
On balance I prefer the Californian system, though I'm open to compromise systems that combine the best of both worlds. (We're both initially from Boston, BTW, which is kinda in the middle of those two politically but fucked up in its own special charming way. At least the streets in both Silicon Valley and Houston are laid out in a grid, with more than one lane apiece and traffic lights in the appropriate places, and they can build a new public works project without the ceiling caving in.)
> and at least we don't have people shooting at each other because of road rage
Sorry, but yeah, you do. no major city is immune from crime, sadly.
> but at least we can drive ten minutes and be in well-preserved, well-maintained open space preserves
We can do that here too. I'm not in Houston, though, but Houston isn't representative of Texas. Neither is Dallas, though.
I found that I had more internet options when I moved away from San Jose and landed here. I had FIOS, Cox, Charter, wireless ISPs, even had that Clear service for a while. Now I live out in the cow fields and have Suddenlink for cable. My other internet options would be DSL or wireless. 200/20 down for $140/mo, business package with a static IP.
Most cities don't have poles, especially up here in the Northeast (snowstorms and such), so it's not like another cable company can come along and just string another wire to an existing pole.
> The thing is, these rules don't even apply in the case of Google Wallet, because Verizon isn't blocking anything. Why'd I bother explaining them, then? So you can see exactly how they don't apply.
> Unlike the tethering app that requires root access, Verizon isn't actively preventing the Wallet app from being installed on phones. That's all Google. If Google wanted to make the Wallet app compatible for every Verizon phone in the Play Store such that you could download and install it, it could. There is absolutely nothing to stop that happening - but the app wouldn't actually work.
All of the services you mention were founded in the US on NN principles. We wouldn't have services like Netflix or Facebook or Google if NN had not been in place.
What web services & startups have come out of your country recently that are house hold brand names? Can you name any?
Sorry, I may be incorrect here, but from what I understand net neutrality only came into effect two years ago in 2015. All three of the companies you mentioned were up and running prior to that. So net neutrality enabling them doesn't seem to be correct to me.
EDIT: As for my country.. c'mon, low blow. Most of the people in my country are having some difficult problems with simpler issues than video streaming. We're getting there though, hopefully!
> Sorry, I may be incorrect here, but from what I understand net neutrality only came into effect two years ago in 2015.
You are off by 10 or more years, depending on how you count. Some modes of internet service were under regulations which promoted something like neutrality before they were regulated specifically as internet service rather than ancillary to telephone service, but the FCC adopted a formal net neutrality policy (the Open Internet Policy Statement) in 2005 which was enforced through case-by-case action without general regulations from then until 2010 when that approachbwas struck down by the courts; at the time, the FCC was already developing net neutrality regulations under Title I, which it adopted also in 2010. Those rules were struck down in 2014, with the court saying that rules of that style could only be adopted under Title II authority. The FCC then initially drafted slightly weaker rules under Title I (on the theory that they could avoid crossing the line requiring Title II reclassification), but after the robust public comment period on that draft adopted, in 2015, regulations under Title II.
Net neutrality has been FCC policy since 2005, and every enforcement avenue except Title II regulation has been foreclosed by the courts.
> Sorry, I may be incorrect here, but from what I understand net neutrality only came into effect two years ago in 2015.
The 2015 regulations were a replacement for 2010 regulations. The 2010 regulations were struck down in court on the grounds that they exceeded the FCC's powers under Title 1 of the Communications Act; the court told the FCC they would have to classify ISPs as Title 2 Common Carriers in order to enforce net neutrality.
2015 was when official rules were put into place to protect Net Neutrality. But before that, ISPs had generally worked in a way favorable towards Net Neutrality. But then they started to act against Net Neutrality and then the rules were put into place.
So, you could argue that we've have net neutrality in principle since the internet existed (or at least up until 10 or so years ago when ISPs started to push back) but we have only had Net Neutrality enshrined in regulation for a couple years.
It appears that going forward we will have neither.
No. The entire history of the internet has been built and developed under NN principles. It was merely codified by the FCC in 2015. Companies regularly violated these principles in the past, and the FCC has previously intervened on behalf of customers. Now, there are no protections, with the FCC stating that it will no longer intervene for these violations.
My point was that the innovation from NN was a HUGE deal for the US economically and all the innovation came out of that, i.e. Netflix, Google, Amazon. If a country like yours has no NN protections then you probably won't see innovation like this in your country.
That misses the point. NN protections were enforced even if they were not codified by the FCC, through the courts. Once they were hard coded it made it a lot harder for ISPs to cheat. That's all 2015 was about, making it harder for ISPs to throttle so we didn't have to sue every time. It wasn't about putting practices into place that weren't there before, it was about hard coding practices that were enforced for years so that it was simpler to enforce. That's all.
The new ruling by the FCC does the opposite. It encourages the ISPs to cheat in a blatantly obvious way.
The current regulations around Net Neutrality have only officially existed for that long. Previous attempts at regulation happened before that, and the principles around net neutrality were how the Internet worked for a long time until ISPs began to go a different direction.
So, we've had lowercase net neutrality for basically the entire existence of the Internet. But the uppercase Net Neutrality has only been around for a couple years, but came into existence because we were losing the lowercase version.
exactly. before 2015, you had to pay Comcast extra if you wanted a package that included access to Google, and even more if you wanted reasonable speeds to get to your Facebook feeds
those were the golden days that created the internet. remember when Microsoft payed out to isps to close down access to altavista so they could get more users to use Bing?
Every example I gave in my comment you are replying to are things that a US ISP did prior to the implementation of net neutrality. Even during net neutrality multiple ISPs were caught artificially throttling Netflix to attempt to get payouts.
Ho! Amazing, thanks for clarifying. Your ISPs are pretty messed up. Are they government monopolies? I think your problems are far, far deeper than net neutrality, and just re-affirms my belief that net neutrality was a band-aid that needed to come off for you guys to wake up and fix your problems directly at the source. I wish you well in the fight ahead!
Well yes, most of the US's problem stem from the fact that Corporations Are People (when it suits them to be), and can thus give unlimited amounts of money to politicians because Money Is Free Speech.
It’s been getting worse and worse over the past few decades because of this, and we may be near the point of violent revolution. Except probably not because hey, who has time for that when they gotta put in forty hours a week plus overtime, or three part time jobs, just to barely fail to make ends meet?
What type of competition do you have among your ISPs? I think this is a fear in the US because many people are locked into a single ISP because of geography.
Tons of competition. I have a choice of multiple different fiber line providers, government copper phone line provider, a bunch of different wireless options, and then multiple different ISPs who run over those different fiber or copper lines or 4G towers.
Generally small towns would only have access to 1 fiber or copper line provider (generally Telkom our useless government supplier), but multiple ISPs running on that line so it's not that bad, but I live in the suburbs near a city so I have a lot more choice.
I wanted to add that I think everyone's case is different. I had a tenure in Chicago and all of the apartment buildings I lived in were locked to a single ISP. This is very much so a YMMV.
I'm definitely not going to be that guy who says his ISP is the exception, but Spectrum, basically the evolution of Time Warner Cable, hasn't even dabbled in paid prioritization. Time Warner Cable didn't start fiddling with fast and slow lanes when Comcast tried it and never put out any such policy. That's why I liked living in a TWC city and not a Comcast city (ever noticed there are barely any cities that have both TWC and Comcast? That's intentional)
However, I will say that the management of TWC left once Charter completed the purchase, and as such they might start new prioritization policies and anti-net neutrality stuff. But from what I've seen, Spectrum doesn't seem to be publicly expressing interest in that stuff.
Unless I see it in a policy change on their website I won't be concerned.
(Okay now time for the part where I tell you that I am completely for net neutrality and think that Ajit Pai is a piece of excrement for gutting net neutrality laws because judging from how I worded my message it probably seemed like I supported the repeal. In short, screw Ajit Pai.)
If the thrown-together design of TWC's official app is any indication, I find it more likely that the previous leadership knew that software wasn't their specialty and (rightfully) shied away from building software businesses before they became worth prioritizing in the first place. Now that they can amortize the costs of such development over the entire Charter-TWC group, it may very well become worthwhile... not to mention that they'll be looking for new profit centers given the demise of cable [0]. So our insulation from this may be short-lived.
To your parenthetical point, I actually find it fascinating from a psychological perspective that someone like Ajit Pai can present himself as, and very possibly believe himself to be, a "man of the people" while simultaneously literally making a mockery of their interests [1]. Someone with a mind so ungrounded that it can function under that level of cognitive dissonance is as deserving of pity as they are of ire. (Or perhaps that's what I tell myself about most politicians so that my veins don't burst.)
I think TWC didn't implement any of the anti-consumer technical measures not due to altruism, but due to a lack of technical acumen. They implemented anti-consumer human measures because they had that ability.
> As a private citizen, can I purchase a bunch of land between me and, I dunno, a DNS node or whatever and just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it? Who do I have to pay at the node to get to "plug into" it or whatever?
You'll have to buy transit from someone, which will most likely be terminated at a neutral internet exchange / data center. You'll pay the transit provider (e.g. Hurricane Electric) for the bandwidth, and monthly fees to the data center for colocation and the cross-connect.
To get that transit back to a point of presence from where you'll branch out service to end users, you'll either have to bury your own fiber (very expensive - tens of thousands of $ per mile even in rural areas not to mention maintenance costs), lease fiber through someone else (e.g. Zayo) (also very expensive), or use wireless backhauls (cheaper but wireless comes with its own set of headaches).
Also you'll have to get a CCNA yourself or pay someone to manage your network since a carrier network is nothing like a home network.
Now by the time you get service back to your point of presence, you'll have to figure out how to get it to people. Burying fiber is extremely expensive, no way around it. Fixed wireless is a simpler option but getting a line of sight to the customer isn't always feasible, and you'll never have the bandwidth of fiber.
That's assuming people even want it. Out in a semi-rural area there may not be much competition, but the population density is so low putting up a tower or burying fiber may not be viable. In any city you're likely to have cable or DSL companies already there, with a price point that may be difficult to convince people to switch. Most people won't care about philosophical arguments about net neutrality, or be willing to pay a lot more for higher speeds.
In my opinion your best bet is to rally a coalition of people in your area to petition the municipality to bury the fiber and provide it as a utility. If you're uncomfortable with the gov't being an ISP, there is a very interesting model where the city provides an open access network which lets private ISPs plug in as virtual network layers, letting customers easily switch providers: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-...
> As a private citizen, can I purchase a bunch of land between me and, I dunno, a DNS node or whatever and just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it?
I'm sure you can, the issue is do you have a couple million $ in your bank account to do this?
This is the route I'm thinking - crowdfunded. Problem is how do you crowdfund "unfettered, utility-style access to the internet" when your funders are spread across the country? It would have to be municipality by municipality. Much harder to get a concentrated volume of funding.
Could go the VC route, are there other companies doing this right now? Is the profit model not sellable to a VC yet?
It might not be feasible until the actions of other ISPs drive demand high enough for new ones.
This is essentially how cable worked in the beginning[0]. In lots of rural areas, it is still the case that communities band together into co-operatives to provide power, cable, and broadband[1].
Co-Ops (at least mine) are awesome. I have fiber to my home and I live in the "middle of nowhere". The other two are the power company and the propane company. They act like a company - except they only try to provide a service and provide jobs, not reap huge profits.
> I want to learn more about the internet and what it would take to bypass the ISPs. Can I do this?
Fwiw, a group called Toronto Meshnet [1] was investigating the opportunity for a community mesh project (which lacks incorporation and know-how of how to run an ISP) to partner with a non-profit ISP [2] (that lacks capacity, constantly gets shut out of the last-mile to new condo developments, but understands the ISP side) to have mesh accommodate the last-mile into homes.[3]
I think they're in a slow-down phase right now as they didn't get funding, but I imagine there's legs in this approach, and they'll ramp up again :)
In San Francisco there's local ISP called MonkeyBrains that uses microwave tech to create a wireless network in the city. They put a receiver on top of your apartment/building and then run cat5 or use existing cable. It's pretty awesome and fast. So it can be done. I'm hopeful that people will be inspired to create their own local ISP in light of the new rules.
Mostly what you need is a lot of money and a legal team. There are some government granted monopolies in certain municipalities, but by and large I understand it's just a money problem. The incumbents have tons of established infrastructure; you're starting from scratch.
Along the same lines, curious, what if it was a WiFi mesh network connected to a gateway node. You could bridge cities/regions by gateway. Inspiration stemming from Havana’s 50mi mesh intranet.
There are currently small operations that offer wireless broadband by putting the receiving equipment on your roof (sometimes they give you a discount if you serve as a repeater) and they purchase wireless data from larger companies' cell towers.
Building a mesh network* is a much cheaper, more realistic alternative.
Also, with regard to your point about "starting an ISP", I don't know the legalities and IANAL, but NYC Mesh goes out of their way to state that they _are not_ an ISP - there's probably a reason for that.
Fundamentally, mesh network is a shared medium. Think of it as ethernet over hubs. As long as there are not lots of talkers it works just fine. The more talkers you get the worse it becomes.
If those "talkers" all had hubs which were participants in the mesh, would that help the network "scale"?
Also, _what is_ the "scale" issue? Network congestion? Latency introduced by the need to relay a message from node A1 to node Zn? Something else entirely?
I sent a message to our mayor, to which he responded, regarding muni fiber... It seems the best way to approach it is via a public-private partnership - meaning, we (the residents of our 50,000+ city in SoCal) pay for the buildout, own the fiber infrastructure that should be good for at least 3-5 decades, while someone like Cox, GFiber or whomever provides billing/maintenance/operations.... that way it's a win win and the city doesn't have to get involved in becoming a full blown ISP.
In his response he said the topic's been brought up before. If I get his and the council's blessing, the next thing is to hit the ground and get probably 3000-5000 signatures and put this up on a ballot in 2018 November to see how the city feels. I'm optimistic however cause I've been hearing multiple complaints, on-goingly about bad service from ISPs (and we have Cox here, and I don't think they're that bad as opposed to Comcast) and probably a pet peeve is data caps... Sure, we've 1TB caps which is plenty, but w/advent of 4k TV and IPTV ... that may be very low.
Here's to hope that in a few years we all have FTTH where I live (crossing my fingers!)
> Is it feasible to just start running our own fiber to hubs?
It is, on the city level. Some created municipal broadband, and showed crooked monopolists and their paid shills to the door. To be clear - Comcast and their ilk fear municipal broadband way more than net neutrality rules. So expect fierce opposition, especially attempts to bribe local legislature to write laws forbidding or obstructing municipal networks.
> As a private citizen, can I ... just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it?
The other responses offer far more technical details than I can, and probably also a better long-term strategy, but here's a small thing you can do right now: knock on your neighbor's door, and offer a six-pack of good beer and half his internet bill in exchange for his WiFi password. If he says yes, cancel your service. Say you are moving to Bhutan and becoming a monk to make their "customer retention specialists" go away.
From my apartment in a fairly spread-out "city," I can see about ten wireless networks, half with a pretty good signal. I can only imagine what things are like in SF/NY, where techies are stacked on top of each other like dogs in a no-kill shelter.
It's quite expensive to start a fiber network. You might want to consider using wireless with a mesh network. In Detroit there's an organization that has become the leader:
In Detroit it's not real high speed because they're using foundation money to provide basic access, but there's no reason I know of that it couldn't be.
Here's more information on the mesh network in Detroit:
Back when the last mile was a real problem, people got pretty inventive with using directional antennas to establish links over vast distances using unlicensed spectrum, which as far as I know is totally legal still.
I did this for a few years in the late 90's, before anything better than POTS was available in my area. Used a 2.4 GHz 24 dBi antenna on my roof to reach an access point on a mountain about 7 miles away. This worked well; the network operators were competent and the service was more reliable than some of the systems I've had since.
Depends on where you live. Every city has different laws about how to run cable underneath the ground. The first cost you pay is figuring out where everyone's cables are. The second cost you pay is convincing the city to let you do it. The third cost you pay is doing the digging.
If you spin it off as a service to your block, then it might be possible...?
IMO the way to go if the ISP monopolies start getting unreasonable is to start single-issue voting for free municipal broadband. Possibly also run a campaign or grassroots organization for it as well. Comcast can't screw with you if nobody is using Comcast.
Besides the costs, getting all those easements takes a lot of time, and often legal work. This is why crowdsourcing fiber hasn't taken off, it's a nice idea but you'll go through a ton of money on permits and legal filings before you buy a single spool of cable.
The more likely next step is not cable-esque plans. It is ISPs shaking down Internet companies to try to get huge sums of money at the source.
As such, what you'll see as a consumer is just higher prices from _other_ companies, as they're forced to pay for access to bandwidth which you paid for.
This also means that most people won't understand the problem, and won't get upset with the correct people.
This is a travesty, akin to if every appliance manufacturer had to pay a recurring tribute to the electric company.
But hey... at least the Libertarians are all quite excited.
I so desperately wanted to use either of those, but MonkeyBrains would require me to mount something outside my building which wasn't going to be possible at either place I've lived in the city... and Sonic... well I got Sonic.
Sonic runs on AT&Ts lines. It was slow and had lag spikes. After about a year it got to be where the modem (and Internet) would cycle for a couple minutes about once every 2 hours. The (Sonic!) tech came out, found a fault on the line, and his advice was to get Comcast.
I also tried getting Wave, but couldn't.
I went through a similar runaround with my previous building (also in SF), where I tried to avoid Comcast. Eventually I caved.
Comcast was terrible and shady from the very beginning. They sold me an internet package they later claimed didn't exist(!) even though I had the offer in writing from the sales guy. So they just adjusted my bill to what they thought I should pay.
They eventually backed down after I kicked up a huge fuss (and took it to social media), but they also threw a bunch of free stuff I didn't want in to my package as "compensation", and guess who was paying for that when my promotional rate expired before they promised it would? My rate was constantly going up if I didn't fight them tooth and nail. I had to check every bill and almost every one had a new surprise. I have never worked with such a perfidious organization.
So after all that I wanted Anything But Comcast, which I already disliked before that experience. I've seriously considered tethering to Verizon Wireless as better...
But I like to do online gaming and Comcast is the only vaguely reasonable option at this point. They're a little less shady if you avoid ALL television service.
10 friends sharing a t1 falls apart if more than 1 friend wants to stream a movie at the same time. Or if just one friend wants to stream a HD movie. A t1 is 1.54mbit.
Ah, the good old days - when I had DSL with 1.1 Mbps up AND down, guaranteed. My ISP didn't even have a policy against resale so I shared with 15 units in 6 different buildings - all wired. I was always amazed how much better my dedicated 1.1 felt compared other plans boasting up to 5.
The "last mile" is a utility, and by its very nature will always result in monopolistic control.
It is impractical and irrational to wire up a home to multiple ISPs with their own fiber channels. Each channel could cost tens of thousands to install.
Instead the "last mile" should be a non-profit funded by ISPs who lease the channels. The non-profit is responsible for installing the "last mile," upgrading it, and repairing defects in it. The ISP is responsible for everything that happens from the exchange upon up (inc. pricing, support, peerage agreements, interconnects, etc).
This way you can still choose Comcast if you wish but may also have several local ISPs competing for your business. When you choose to change no engineer needs to come to your house, they just plug and unplug you at the exchange.
This is done quite successfully in other countries around the world, like New Zealand where we mainly have one infrastructure provider (selected and monitored by the Government), who must offer fair and standard pricing to any ISP who wants to add value to the network.
As a result, we have many ISP options throughout the country and competition between providers is high.
What value do the ISPs actually add to the market?
It seems like a government granted middleman position to me, where I'd rather just purchase service from the government or the government's selected infrastructure manager.
Presumably there's already some base price for service that this infrastructure provider is charging everyone (a controller monopolist), what are you gaining on top of that by having a second middleman that is presumably also making a profit?
> What value do the ISPs actually add to the market?
They're the main point of contact for the end customers; as a typical customer, you only interact with Chorus (the public company that provides the fibre/copper in most of NZ) when they send technicians out to work on the connection upstream from your house.
So, the ISP handles billing, tech support, DNS, email, liaising with Chorus, etc. Different ISPs offer different service tiers, billing arrangements, options for buying/leasing the modem, etc.
Our residential electricity works similarly, which leads to retail companies offering both - for example I get one bill each month to pay for both fibre and electricity.
Given the government's track record with some big projects like healthcare.gov which is still a nightmare to use, I would not trust them to be an ISP. In fact, in the past, some states did (or still do) have their own ISP that they use at a lot of schools and public facilities. Ours was always slow with frequent outages.
I think a hybrid approach with the government managing and maintaining the physical lines and allowing isps to plug in and pay rent is the way to go. The ISP rent should be enough to cover the cost of physical line maintenance.
What are your specific complaints about healthcare.gov? I was out of the country when it initially rolled out, but have had no problems with it the past 2 years since I've moved back and needed to get it.
Washington State exchange is notoriously terrible in terms of downtime, availability, and customer service. I won't go into what I dealt with for six months using their service vs. my previous low-cost insurer that left the market due to regulations, but it was an absolute nightmare for me and my family. Small business owners got absolutely screwed in our state.
packet transit, installation, maintenance, customer service. Also most less technical ISP customers get a lot of value out of ISP managed equipment rental and don't want to buy and maintain a router-AP themselves.
Local loop unbundling for phone and DSL service was extremely successful in the US, there's not a lot of reason to think a government bid process would have done better than CLECs did.
> The non-profit is responsible for installing the "last mile," upgrading it, and repairing defects in it.
What incentive does a non-profit have to invest the billions of dollars required to do these things? If you use public dollars to do it: what do you think happens when investment into upgrading from GPON to NGPON2 is competing for taxpayer dollars with roads and schools? I can't imagine that anyone in say San Francisco would rather have SFMTA running their internet than Comcast.
1) You get the government you deserve. If you're worried it would be mismanaged, become active.
2) I would absolutely rather have an unbiased and fair agency installing utilities than a rent seeking public company that is beholden to shareholder value.
You get the government your neighbors want. I'd vote in a heartbeat to raise water and sewer rates to upgrade our water systems so we could stop dumping untreated sewage into the Chesapeake Bay: https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2017/08/01/baltimore-released-.... But my neighbors won't do that. Do you think they'll be more forward looking when it comes to broadband? Or will all the retirees who dominate the voting decide that 50 mbps ought to be good enough for everybody?
Since my parents first got fiber 10 years ago, Verizon has spent a ton of money upgrading from BPON to GPON, and now is working on NGPON2. If a public utility were in charge, even if they were willing to raise the money to install fiber in the first place, there is no way in hell they'd have made those upgrades.
You can see this in practice. Here in Maryland, the only upgrade in transit service I can think of in my lifetime is running the Penn line from Baltimore on weekends. More typically, the public authorities run the transit systems on the edge of collapse. Simply maintaining existing service levels in the face of under-maintained infrastructure is considered a victory.
That has been tried in a few places, and I'm not sure that it has succeeded anywhere. Municipal fiber was laid where I used to live in Provo, UT and it had huge funding problems. ISPs could compete, but all the value is in the last mile not in the gateway.
Eventually Google bought it out, but the city had to increase taxes to help pay for the current bond, and was looking at more bonds to pay for it before Google stepped in.
It has definitely succeeded. For example, New Zealand uses this model, and we're actually in the middle of rolling out fiber to almost every house in the country.
Okay, so technically in New Zealand the last-mile infrastructure is owned by a utility company, not a non-profit. However, the utility companies are selected by the government and tightly regulated, so they act more like non-profits than typical companies. Also note that they aren't allowed to actually sell internet access to consumers; they only maintain the infrastructure.
When I lived there, I had 200mbps up and 200 down for $70 a month and it was great. This was before Google came to town. But since I didn't own property, I guess I was out of the loop on property taxes.
I had it as well at 100Mbs before Google fiber. The service itself worked great, but it had to be subsidized by taxpayers throughout its lifetime - it never broke even after the subscribers fees.
> The "last mile" is a utility, and by its very nature will always result in monopolistic control.
This is THE central point. Everyone saying that they would be OK with the latest FCC regs if there were only more competition need to consider this. In what bizarro world would anyone actually want ISPs competing for the last mile?
Coming in 2019, electric companies monitor your usage profile to tell when you turn on different appliances and charge you a higher rate for running your TV or charging your electric car. But don't worry, the free market will fix it.
In California you do get different rates if you get an electric car. You also get different rates (higher) if the State thinks you don't "need" air conditioning.
Is that because electric rates are heavily regulated as utilities, or because the free market let the only electric supplier do whatever they wanted to with your rate structure?
I think that would be a good value proposition for a city that does not already prefer one ISP over another. Interesting idea to spin something like this up.
> Instead the "last mile" should be a non-profit funded by ISPs who lease the channels.
That's an interesting idea, kinda like Interac for telecom. From what I hear, Interac has a bit of an issue with being fairly closed to new peering agreements, so I wonder how that could be solved for the telco space, maybe constitute the maintenance corporation to be open to bids from new ISPs.
Instead the "last mile" should be a non-profit funded by ISPs who lease the channels. The non-profit is responsible for installing the "last mile," upgrading it, and repairing defects in it.
Yes, that's called "government".
We do that with roads and mail, we can do the same with communications.
Even if you avoid the last mile cluster F*, you still need to rent physical space to ISPs for setting up their network equipment. With multiple ISPs, its not clear who should "own" the space. I doubt individual homeowners want to deal with that headache.
cars cost "tens of thousands" yet personal automobile ownership has been feasible and has a huge positive impact on the economy. If that 10-90K ballpark cost estimate is accurate then accessing the information superhighway could be a similar situation.
Right, but not being able to afford a car severely limits people's' access to jobs, care, entertainment, groceries, etc. And this would be worse; access to the Internet is starting to be assumed here in the US. If it's going to be it should be treated as a right.
I'm always surprised that folks on here don't think about the future of last mile connectivity being wireless, instead of wired. Next generation wireless networks (5G) are poised to have broadband like speeds, faster latency, and high bandwidth. Wireless operators have been pretty explicit in that their plan to get into the home broadband game. These networks are a few years away from a broad roll out, AT&T is starting next year. I predict there will soon be much more competition in the home broadband game and much of these net neutrality debates will seem pretty silly. Other cities like Boston already have a wireless broadband provider and are moving in this direction.
Wireless is inherent issues that fiber and copper does not.
1. Wireless is burst not pure data streams, latency issues.
2. High probability of interference.
3. High probability of collisions, wireless spectra bouncing off one another and objects, requiring multiple transmissions.
Big difference between Wireless and Wired / Fiber. Pokeman GO event in IL is a prime example of inherent issues.
So we shouldn't worry about the monopoly because it should "go away soon". How does that make any sense? You know, these same companies started out as multi-decade cable monopolies before they were providing monopolized internet service. You really think that will change? If it wasn't for the DoJ blocking mergers 90% of the country would already have a single internet provider.
Wireless internet for everyone will never be realistic. There's a theoretical limit to how much data you can send wirelessly, the "Shannon limit". On many bands we're already close to it, 90% of "5G" is just about using the rest of our bands more effectively. Once we're using all the frequency bands that penetrate far enough to be useful theres nothing you can do in increase wireless bandwidth. Theres more hope with satellites and narrow beams but these technologies are a decade away. 5G isn't going to do anything noticeable to ISP competition and I think you need to do more research on how 5G works if you think otherwise
I don't think I said that. Emotions seem to be running really high today! I admit my comment was a bit rash. I'm not against all government regulation of the industry, your comment is a bit lost on me. DoJ anti trust enforcement isn't the same as net neutrality debate, so I really don't disagree with your point.
Yea I don't think it will be realistic for everyone, especially folks outside of the city. I understand the concept of the Shannon limit. But I still think there is still plenty of opportunity for it to be useful in real world applications. I think you need to do some more research on some of the wireless breakthroughs going on and start ups in this space if you think otherwise.
I just don't think you see the net neutrality debate from the stance of someone that had shit internet for 10 years and could nothing about it because there were zero local competitors. And this is the norm nowadays, more than 50% of Americans have a single option for high speed home internet. DoJ enforcement is directly related to to introduction of net neutrality law. They couldn't get ISP's to compete effectively anymore.
Considering 4g just muddies the waters because there's no way we'll ever be able to provide the data allocations needed to make a realistic competitor. There's a good reason wireless has data-caps, it's all about limited spectrum. 4G/5G/wireless is, at this point and for the near future, a classic straw-man argument.
I was a lifelong moderate small-government republican until we elected the orange clown, and I still see telecom monopolies as a defiance of antitrust. Internet service is just as important and power or water hookups these days. It's a government utility and natural monopoly. The fact that we don't treat it that way is disturbing.
As a Webpass customer in Boston, you really hit the nail on the head. More than twice the speeds of Comcast's best offering at less than half the price, better reliability and none of the bullshit - no outages, no slowdowns, no rate hikes, no forced modem upgrades, no shitty customer service, just 500Mbps up/down for $45 a month.
The amount of people who argue that this tech isn't possible is astonishing! I show them it's literally happening now and they don't believe me. I show them how wireless mobile and traditional companies have plans to create wireless home broadband networks and they don't believe me. We are at the early stages of this and it's pretty clear to me that this industry is about to be massively disrupted.
Why would wireless lead to more competition? Wireless spectrum is monopolized in much the same way that the right to lay fiber/wiring is. FCC auctions sell exclusive use of the spectrum to these companies for billions of dollars. The switch to wireless would be nothing more than a chance for these companies to save on the expense of physical infrastructure, not a way to increase competition. Unless you're suggesting that high speed internet could be delivered on unlicensed bands, we'd just be trading one monopoly/duopoly situation for another, and likely with the same obstinate companies that we currently lament having to depend on for internet service.
The best hope for competition in the home broadband market is municipal ownership of last-mile infrastructure. We need to lay last-mile fiber and it needs to be owned by the public, though network maintenance can be contracted out.
Because wireless spectrum is finite. Anyone who's been on LTE since it started rolling out can tell you how degraded the network has become since more people came on to it.
Snow can be effectively invisible to a beam when wavelengths are larger than snowflakes (i.e. microwave range: broadly defined as lengths between 1mm and 1m.)
What confounds line-of-sight isn't "until it snows" but "until something/someone has to move around". :)
I agree, to some extent, but I'm not sure if wireless will ever be able to give me gigabit speed with sub 10ms latency. If that's possible, then I'm ready to sign up right now!
Wireless can give you gigabit speed with sub 10ms latency, for sure! With a few assumptions and caveats. You have to work out a compromise involving spectrum width, power usage, transceiver positions, etc. etc. etc. to get optimal performance, for all the various definitions of optimal.
And there are lots of games you can play with QAM, channel-hopping, frequency division, and I am sure that future DSP experts will invent still more ways of getting more data to more people faster with less power. But the basic compromises still need to be dealt with. Using a wired link, you can blast data as fast as you want to yourself without messing with other people, on wireless things are more complicated.
But enough of that, to answer your question: here's a product that can get you 20 Gbps and 0.2 ms latency over hundreds of kilometers:
Easy as that! ...but you're not about to mount one of those on your cell phone.
In an ideal world, all wireless access points could adjust their configurations as required. They'd share information on their physical locations, transceiver capabilities, power status, and bandwidth usage, with the data flowing across the landscape like electrical current in a sheet of metal or water in the shallow riffle of a stream. And of course all these devices would contain unimaginably brilliant and complex software that would manage all this with high efficiency, and they'd all interoperate seamlessly. And since this is the ideal world, no one would ever use the transceiver information from the network for nefarious purposes, and we'd all share the burden of keeping adequate transceiver power available, and the power would be generated from renewable energy sources.
But that ideal wireless world would still have far less capacity than the ideal wired world. The question is whether you think a user-driven wireless setup can be superior to the crappy wired situation we have now.
http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6880152186 - That's last mile wireless. Throughput is hampered by my crappy usb NIC because all of my thunderbolt ports are in use. With thunderbolt ethernet I'm getting the full 500Mpbs that I pay $45/mo for.
I totally agree. Who cares if the worst case scenario is tiered pricing, as long as their is REAL competition, a competitor can come along and say "we offer it all for one flat fee because our infrastructure is better." Boom, done. These municipal exclusion deals are the real problem.
I also think this is going to backfire and bite the telco's in the ass if they try to roll out tiers. The legislative outcry when joe schmo is affected could become so deafening that congress will be likely be forced to get up off their ass and intervene which is exactly what they don't want. If they were smart they would only go after the Netflix and Face-books of the world and leave the consumer out of it.
Can you imagine the 2020 campaign slogan of "Donald Trump ruined the internet." Ignoring this issue was stupid but I don't think they thought this through.
I predict the first package is going to be a gamer package. Image a low latency / high bandwidth connection tuned for gaming. Lots of people would pay $10 or $15 per month for that if it would give them an advantage in gaming.
I am concerned they'd go farther and use such demands to subsidize consumer rates. Then people would get complacent while losing the freedom of choice.
But going after Netflix, for instance, will result in a price increase for the consumer, no? When Netflix's costs for bandwidth go up, they are going to pass that cost on to you.
I worry the average consumer's reaction to that is going to be as follows: "All the tech nerds were worried about this net neutrality thing, but since it got revoked my Comcast bill is cheaper than ever. In completely unrelated news, those bastards at Netflix have hiked their prices again!"
Isn't this really the point? Netflix consumes a lot of resources and are the sole reason for a lot of ISP infrastructure upgrades. Why shouldn't Netflix and by proxy their subscribers be on the hook?
There's a microwave based ISP in SF called Monkeybrains. From their about us page:
"Monkeybrains is primarily a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider). What this means is Monkeybrains uses microwave technology to create a wireless network covering much of San Francisco. We deliver internet service to individual locations by placing an antenna on the roof. This antenna picks up an encrypted wireless signal from one of our network access points which can be found on over 1000 buildings city-wide.
From the roof, we run a Cat5 Ethernet wire either to the unit, telecom closet, or the property's Ethernet patch panel. We are happy to comply with any building wiring guidelines or work with the building's riser company if required."
Los Angeles is too big for that over the entire area but parts of LA like North Hollywood could become an opportunity to setup a microwave wireless ISP that covers an entire neighborhood in LA like North Hollywood or Santa Monica.
I live in SF and I used to use Monkeybrains, but I switched to Comcast about 12 months ago. It felt like using MB was taking the moral high road, but there are some things that a wired connection just does better. MB would have very spotty signal during rainy days. A few of us play competitive games (eg Overwatch) and MB had too many latency spikes.
> This wouldn't be a problem if ISP's weren't de facto monopolies.
It would still be a problem for startup companies. If TimeWarner gives exclusive preferential pricing to Vimeo and Verizon gives exclusive preference to YouTube, your video-streaming startup still has an extra uphill battle even if there is competition among the established players.
I thought he meant TimeWarner -- the content company that owns TBS and Warner Bros-- not Time Warner Cable which was bought by Charter?
(For the sake of correctness, the two companies are written as Time Warner Cable and TimeWarner, Inc)
Agreed. And corporations like AT&T that not only provide ISP services but actually serve original content, they are uniquely positioned to push their services over their competitor's. Perhaps we'll be seeing streaming services like Netflix become slower, while, say, DirecTV Now runs at full speed.
Hopefully when sanity takes office, we don't repeal the changes in net neutrality, but rather repeal the laws that created these insane corporate monopolies in the first place!
Google, Facebook, and Amazon are de facto monopolies and we don't do anything to improve competition in that space either. Ironically they were the leading advocates of net neutrality. We should also pursue antitrust legal and foster competition in their space as well. In the meantime, we are back to the status quo that was present in 2015.
This is incorrect on several points. Most importantly, the idea that this move returns to some "deregulated" 2015 is a myth and has been refuted so many times throughout the net neutrality discussion. The short version is that NN has always been roughly in place and has been enforced with legal action by regulators for many years prior to 2015.
ISPs, like power network companies, and road and rail network operators, are natural monopolies. There is no theoretical or practical reason to believe that free markets are the appropriate tool to organize them.
It would still be a problem. Maybe if one of those providers is benevolent enough to have a sanely priced "package" that promises to treat all data neutrally there'd be a shot, but I think greed would prevent that from lasting if things start moving away from neutrality.
When I emailed my Senator this was essentially his response. Whether genuine or not he said he wants to see a permanent solution that creates more competition. Who knows if he's being truthful but it is an argument I've seen for a long term solution.
If a Senator says he wants to see something as an alternative to a concrete option that exists (either as status quo policy under threat or a concrete proposal under debate) he's making excuses for not supporting the thing you care about.
If a Senator says he's actively working on something and points you to specific legislation he sponsors or supports, well, that might also be political theater, but it's at least possible that there is real substance behind it.
5G networks could very well change that. Right now people rely on LAN, however it's very possible that with the growth of 5G people will just use over the air internet rather than having their own setups everywhere they go.
Not being sarcastic, but is this honestly better? There are only a few major cell providers that can roll out 5G, so it seems to me that instead of Comcast-TW-Cox we would have ATT-Verizon-Tmo.
I guess it would be easier to set up municipal ISPs, since minimal wiring would be needed. But the lack of real competition in the cell market seems to indicate that the problems are pretty similar for small startups.
What's special about 5GHz? What about 700MHz-2100MHz?
Even with its high latency, packet loss, data caps, etc, LTE internet fits the need of a huge segment of casual internet users and has been doing so for some time now.
Oh, whoops. I wasn't joking. I never realized that there's actually a definition of 3G/4G/5G that isn't just made up marketing lingo. Thanks for the link.
Comcast and TWC did that literally all the time.
I can't back this up with a specific website link, but I have anecdotal evidence. When they tried to merge a couple of years ago a Comcast exec said in one interview that the move wouldn't affect consumers and isn't something intended to incite "anticompetitive" behavior because TWC and Comcast already do not compete.
Ever noticed how a city is EITHER a Comcast or TWC city, and not both?
This. I wish something was done about the regulations that are de-facto monopolizing franchise agreements and such at a city level for telecom services. Not much better in Canada either.
If Comcast re-enable Sandvine and start tinkering with P2P and VPN traffic, will that be enough to start the conversations around anti-trust? Or is there already a precedent?
Local governments have been legally prohibited from making exclusive ISP franchise agreements for quite a while now. IMHO the only thing really preventing local competition is the economic aspects of laying multiple physical wires to residences giving the setup strong natural monopoly conditions.
Source? Every single city I've lived in has such an agreement. One cable provider, one phone(DSL) provider. There might be smaller, internet only companies.
Do they have an agreement with the local city, or is it a natural monopoly? It's unclear what causes that condition of a lack of choices in a given area.
>In streamlining the franchising process and preempting (Local Franchising Agency) LFAs from taking action inconsistent with its reforms, the FCC relied primarily on its statutory authority to carry out the Cable Act’s mandate that LFAs “may not grant an exclusive franchise and may not unreasonably refuse to award an additional competitive franchise.” The FCC interpreted that mandate to cover not only the unreasonable denial of a cable franchise, but also unreasonable delay in action on a franchise application and the conditioning of a franchise on unreasonable terms.
Now local cable/isps do mess with the process of permitting and right of ways as much as they can when competitors arise, and local governments are susceptible to both corruption and being overwhelmed by the large corporations deploying such tactics. Just maybe not in that specific way of signing monopoly franchise agreements. So I'm under no illusions that this prohibition of monopoly franchise grants goes very far...
For power users on websites like HN and reddit, this might seem true. But if you take a step back and realize that the large majority of Americans don't use the internet like you do, and maybe never will use the internet like you do, I think this argument holds far less water.
Consider that it's estimated that 13% of Americans don't use the internet-- at all, for anything, ever.[1] Think about how many people probably exclusively use their $60/mo cable internet to use Facebook, read news websites, and send emails. They don't use Netflix, they don't watch YouTube, they only do what they know and they're happy with it. Is it accurate to say that someone with these needs has no choice in their ISP?
Where I am right now, in the middle of central Wisconsin surrounded by acres of farm fields in every direction, I have fiber all the way to my house. In addition, there is reliable LTE coverage on multiple carriers. There's also satellite internet. For the average internet user as of 2017, I really think it's inaccurate to imply that consumers lack choice.
What you're really saying is that there's no competition in the very high end segment of consumer ISPs. And I'd agree with that, there is little choice when it comes to a provider that is willing to offer you a highspeed DOCSIS plan without a data cap, or fiber internet, etc. Most homes probably only have one provider that meets the needs of power users.
And to that I say, "tough shit!" If you're an outlier as a consumer, you're going to pay through the nose for it and you're not going to have a ton of choice. It's not some giant conspiracy to milk consumers dry, it's a matter of business. ISPs don't want to invest billions into infrastructure that some trivial portion of their consumer market really would utilize. It would be fiscally irresponsible to spend all that money for such little return. If posing it that way doesn't appeal you, let me put it another way: it would be bad for the long term growth of the internet to spend all that money to appease a small portion of internet users. That money is better saved and spent later.
You might say, "Consumers will certainly desire faster internet as years pass, so it's an investment they'll have to make eventually, and the taxpayer has subsidized this expansion, so they should be doing it now, anyway."
I believe you'd be wrong to say that. ISPs shouldn't be obligated to be spending money now if they're meeting the majority of needs of their customers. I know online it maybe doesn't seem that way with all the "Comcast-are-Nazis memes", but it's just a matter of overlap between poweruser segment with high bandwidth requirements also being active on the social media you frequent. Elsewhere on the internet, there's a majority of casual internet users who are not coming close to being meaningfully impacted by technical limitations of their connection.
If you're interested in stable growth of the internet as time goes on, you should root for them to save their money now so they can spend it later when demand from the average consumer catches up. Doing anything else would mean spending a lot of money on infrastructure that sits unused, that is antiquated by the time people want it. Think of China and their crumbling empty cities, let's not make the same sort of mistake with internet infrastructure.
These are just the top links in the search results, not cherry picked at all. You seem to be extrapolating from your experience with ISP choice. I've lived in supposedly very high-tech American cities with only one choice of ISP over 2Mbps. Compare US prices and service to places like Scandanavia. What's the difference? Over here ISPs can extract a much larger fraction of value while providing smaller total value (worse service). This is a natural result of lightly-regulated monopolies and oligopolies. It doesn't mean that their choices not to invest are somehow best for the long-term growth of the internet, in any way shape or form. Their monetary incentives are not aligned with long-term growth of the Internet.
> Netflix has 52 million subscribers in the United States.
Put another way, about five of every six Americans doesn't subscribe to Netflix.
> 55% of Americans watched Netflix in the last year.
That article is based on a "study" whose source is an online survey (surveymonkey) with 1046 respondents.
> 98% of Americans think internet speeds need to be improved.
Blogspam article which cites, though does not link, to an alleged study from Cambium Networks. Cambium Networks sells WISP equipment.
> Roughly 50% are 'satisfied' with their home internet speeds but this is according to the FCC, which has lied to me a lot recently.
Wow, that's a serious misrepresentation. It says that 50% are "very satisfied" with their internet speeds, but you conveniently left out the line that follows: an additional 41% are "somewhat satisfied" with their internet speeds. So it's really saying that 91% are 'satisfied' with their home internet speeds.
The broader point you can take from that document is that, between two different studies, only 20% of homes had respondents who were aware of their network speed... It's not a tremendous leap to assume that most people are not savvy enough to understand whether their network issues are caused by their ISP, or whether their network issues are caused by an old and flakey combo-WAP-router-modem that lacks modern developments in things like traffic shaping. A lot of hatred for ISPs probably comes from misinformed consumers cursing their ISP for network slowness that is actually due to wireless congestion or old/slow computers running a virus scan.
> This is a natural result of lightly-regulated monopolies and oligopolies. It doesn't mean that their choices not to invest are somehow best for the long-term growth of the internet, in any way shape or form. Their monetary incentives are not aligned with long-term growth of the Internet.
My argument is that there is no real monopoly, the average internet user has a lot of choices that meets the needs of their usage patterns-- usage patterns that seem completely alien to HN readers and reddit users.
I don't have time to dig deeply into sources for all these things because I'm not a lobbyist by profession, but I think your assessment is way off. Somewhat satisfied also means somewhat dissatisfied, so by your reasoning 50+% are "dissatisfied" with their internet speeds. There also have been tons of studies on the level of monopoly service, but you seem to not count those because you think 1Mbps is acceptable in 2017.
You seem to be saying that we should be thrilled with this wonderful world where lots of people are "somewhat" satisfied and pay much higher prices than other countries and get 1Mbps level service. That's the status quo you want to hang on to? Is that where you want America to still be in 20 years?
If we never serve people a better internet, there will be tons of opportunities they'll never get. As just one example, right now there is a huge crunch of millenials moving to big cities where the jobs are at, but that's also where housing prices are highest. If only we had the Internet service to allow large numbers of good paying jobs from home in rural areas, it would be huge for our country's economy. But I worry that the attitude you present, that most people don't need good internet anyway, will never get us there.
Google is useful to everyone no matter if you're just a casual internet user or very technical, but a google page is like 80kb so it's not relevant in the conversation about what usage patterns are pushing the need for improvement of internet infrastructure.
Things like streaming media, file sharing, big game downloads, etc. are what's contributing meaningfully to filling up pipes and making it necessary to improve the links. And my point is that HN readers are far more likely to take part in these usage patterns, and underestimate how many Americans have zero interest in using the internet that way. They think that because their usage patterns could not be met by a cellular or satellite internet plan that it means that it wouldn't fit the needs of most everyone else, either. It's just not true.
It is what google leads to that matters. Google is the main way that laypeople find alternatives to Netflix, etc.
> HN readers are far more likely to take part in these usage patterns
One group being "more likely" does not make the other group "less likely".
File sharing, game downloads, etc. are still areas that are not very centralized, and that is why average people do care about net neutrality, whether or not they understand that to be the case.
Don't overestimate how many Americans "have zero interest in using the internet that way".
> They think that because their usage patterns could be met by a cellular or satellite internet plan that it means that would fit the needs of most everyone else, too.
Sure, there are a lot of people in that situation, here on HN, and elsewhere.
When file sharing sites, youtube, steam, etc. were new, they showed the limitations most people had with bandwidth, etc. It wasn't until later that most people found themselves with more bandwidth than they needed.
I think it's important that we reverse that order. I believe that if most people have significantly more bandwidth, that new services that use it will appear that wouldn't be possible with the bandwidth currently available to most people.
It's difficult, with many people, to convince them that should be the case, and ISPs seem to be working hard to convince people that providing more bandwidth is unfeasible. I don't believe that.
The reason ISPs are monopolies is because if they were unregulated, you'd have a thousand phone lines outside of everyone's house, from every single private phone network provider. You'd have a bunch of phones in everyone's houses, one for each network.
An unregulated ISP market is a safety hazard and ugly. Because of these issues, government eventually decided that only one phone company can serve each house, forcing a monopoly situation because of that. But that monopoly has to allow every other network access to that line so that callers can call anywhere. This is the origin of net neutrality.
You're never going to go back to the situation where you have a thousand different lines to everyone's houses, so you're better off regulating them properly with net neutrality.
