20 ms·

Fiber Optic Bliss

132 points by uptown 11y ago

zatkin 11y ago
>They do very much want to serve residences too, but state law forbids them from retailing directly to consumers Why does the law forbid selling directly to consumers?
- oh_sigh 11y ago
  Presumably to protect the interests of the groups that are allowed to market to consumers.
- dsr_ 11y ago
  Specifically because cable companies don't want competition, so they lobbied for this. http://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/ http://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblock...
  - slxh 11y ago
    If they don't want competition, they should at least provide the latest technology at a reasonable price...
    - singlow 11y ago
      That is exactly why they don't want competition. They don't want to spend more and charge less.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      There can't be any meaningful competition between a private company and a government entity that can tax people to pay off its infrastructure bonds and take land by eminent domain.
      - amazon_not 11y ago
        I see this statement bandied about quite frequently. Would you like to substantiate the claim and/or provide examples of actual public harm where such faux competition exists?
        nickpsecurity 11y ago
        It's actually self-evident in the claim. Tell any venture capitalist they'll be doing the same thing as the competition in a regulated market except the competition can get exempted from regulations or pull in tons of extra money in form of tax revenue. Who wants to take that risk in the U.S. system? I think you could say it's played out in the areas where utilities introduced cheap broadband. Articles on those usually major players are suffering over there compared to where they're competing with private companies like their own. I do have a specific example, though. My background is high assurance security & systems. The government once used incentives + good criteria to get market to create quite a few products their pentesters couldn't break. Then, NSA started competing with private sector under a new initiative. Market went away with Boeing guy clear that was largely why. Only a few remain and stay stagnant because companies won't invest much further in them due to risk posed by both market demand and government decisions. http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Bell-Looking-Back-Addendum.pdf http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Bell-Looking-B...
        dsr_ 11y ago
        I see that you have proven the nonviability of FedEx, UPS and all other package carriers that compete with government postal services. I also note that you have proven the nonexistence of private security companies, since they compete with the police and are much more restricted, by law, in what they can do. And there can't be any private shuttle bus services, because there are municipal bus services. I think you need to modify your claim. All of these companies do reasonably well by competing with government-run services by offering things that the government isn't providing and is unlikely to provide because it unreasonably benefits a single user: on-demand pickups and guaranteed delivery times; full-time guards in a particular location; a bus that runs directly to your campus.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Because KPUD is a public utility district with taxation and eminent domain powers.
scott_karana 11y ago
Wow. Kudos to this guy for working through a corporate/bureaucratic nightmare. Good on KPUD for putting in a solid effort here too: looks like everyone in the area might benefit from this one.
Havoc 11y ago
Fibre techies - even residential FTTH - are pretty clued up. I was pleasantly surprised by the guy that activated my fibre...got a distinct feel of "he is one of us". Hidden benefit of a cutting edge tech I guess...you get real techies instead of people following a fkn script.
- willyk 11y ago
  Y, based on my experience, the utilities generally have different teams that handle the fibre installs.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I thought it was specialization and cost-cutting. I know Comcast out here contracts their cabling to a company where the few managers make a decent amount of money while the technicians make little ranging from amateur to experienced in skill. Keeps them out of Comcast's HR approach and branding, too. Maybe some blame-shifting potential. Not sure all the reasons but plenty of possibilities come to mind. Cost is probably the main one, though. This company has way less overhead and more flexibility than Comcast.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
This one is doing a good job. For ideas, I posted on that site and am here this other project that got good results: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-building-its-own-gigabit-fibre-network http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-bui... Deploying to rural is quite an uphill battle. But their model seems to be doing the job. Might be worth copying aspects in deployments like original post's.
- willyk 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing the Vice article, it was great ... good to see some of these projects succeeding now that the capex has come down (a decade or so ago there was a long list of similar ventures that failed).
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Yeah I enjoyed it too and it's quite hopeful. I like how the communities are essentially coming together to get themselves on the Internet's, Fast Lane.
techsupporter 11y ago
I'm glad it worked for him but he asks the right question: How can we get this to work for other people in Washington State? I live in Seattle and have fiber optic service from CenturyLink. The gigabit is nice, but CenturyLink is running my fiber drop over a "route of convenience that, if the next door property owner ever gets snippy, will turn into a battle of lawyers. Why? Because CL won't use the utility poles in front of my house because they don't want to coordinate with the transit agency. The whole infrastructure argument is getting absurd. KPUD can't sell to end users because Washington law prohibits it. I have service but might not someday "just because." A city in Washington that owns its own utility agency could serve but has to do it by selling bonds that require 60% voter approval. Meanwhile, everybody is left wondering what next.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Who exactly wants those laws in your state? If the answer is "nobody", then get your neighbors together and fix the problem. And if there is somebody who wants those laws, at least you'll know who the problem is, and can start raising public awareness of who is needlessly keeping them from having better Internet.
  - techsupporter 11y ago
    It's a mix. Both of the incumbent providers push heavily to keep the restrictions on the books. In addition, there is a large contingent of voters who do not want the restrictions repealed because they are opposed to public operation and/or financing of a telecommunications system that can serve the general public. Much like a lot of things, folks here are generally opposed unless or until it directly impacts them. There is a group in Seattle that is pushing for a ballot initiative with accompanying property tax levy to get the city to build an open-access last mile system. The areas of the city that already have good service, whether Comcast or CenturyLink fiber, poll at slightly under 50% support. Areas that are stuck with Wave Broadband or only CenturyLink DSL poll at well above 70%.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
steeples 11y ago
Just curious, but what does she need that bandwidth for? I am expecting the usual replies of running a server, having better upstream capabilities, and the very typical 'techies gonna have bandwidth', but I would love to hear some weird unexpected ways to use bandwidth like that.
- bane 11y ago
  I honestly have no idea. I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it. FiOS keeps upgrading it every year or so (it started as a 15/5 I couldn't saturate), so that's nice. At least I'm basically in "first world" territory even if I live in the U.S. I suppose when 4k video becomes more common I'll feel it, but I don't even have anything that can display 4k right now and Verizon will probably just upgrade it to 75/75 or 100/100 by that point. One nice benefit, I have a plex server I can access remotely and it works well outside of my network. But I'd live with just my netflix account if I had to "rough it".
  - icelancer 11y ago
    I have 50/20 with a family. Two laptops and Netflix going on the Media Center PC plus my work easily causes degraded service on certain appliances in peak times.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it. Unless you've throttled your torrents, or you're connected to a really slow swarm, you have almost certainly saturated your download. I have -er- 100/10 or 100/15 service from Comcast. If I'm downloading anything >= 100MB, and a member of the household is going to start a new Netflix stream, I need to pause the download, or else the stream will be degraded for a long time. Also, unless you're using a decent router, it's very possible that your router can't route and/or NAT at 50mbit or faster. I know that Apple Airports can and Ubiquiti EdgeRouters[0] can. I would also expect that an ISP-provided router would route fast enough. [0] If you're in the market for a new router and are somewhat network savvy, or are comfortable with running OpenWRT on your router, I strongly recommend the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It routes and firewalls at ~1Gbit/sec (when offloading is enabled) and costs right around $100. Check out the Newegg reviews that aren't "It's slower than I expected" or "It's totally broken" for an idea of what you'll be getting in to. I've had mine for nearly a year and -other than the eventually dodgy external power supply[1] it shipped with- it has been rock solid. [1] The unit I got had been sitting in a box in a warehouse in Florida for ~two years before it arrived on my doorstep. The failing power supply presented as infrequent spontaneous reboots with nothing unusual in syslog, which became more and more frequent until the power supply just stopped providing power entirely. Replaced it with a wall wart that I had on hand and have had no trouble since.
icelancer 11y ago
This person should have been awarded mid five figures from Comcast. I wonder if any legal team looked into the possibility of suing them and/or the the municipality?
- BillyParadise 11y ago
  Why do you Americans always think about suing someone?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - oh_sigh 11y ago
    Presumably Canada or wherever you are from has some sort of formal system in place for situations where, for example, contractual terms are breached http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/24/america-litigious-society-myth http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/24/america...
- grecy 11y ago
  It's a crazy world when you can sue someone for not selling you something. Why should they have to sell it to you?
  - icelancer 11y ago
    Because they promised carriage. Twice.
SethKinast 11y ago
I'm curious what the monthly cost is for the line (not considering the upfront cost).
transfire 11y ago
We really know how to paint ourselves into corners don't we. Here we have a slew of people who want broadband and companies willing and able to provide it. So what prey tell is the problem? Laws.
- caryhartline 11y ago
  Of course companies want you to buy their 5 Mb/s down Internet for $100/month and there isn't a law to keep them from doing that.
- rayiner 11y ago
  > So what prey tell is the problem? Laws. KPUD isn't a "company." It's a public utility district.[1] It wouldn't exist without "laws." [1] With special powers of condemnation and taxation. See 54.16.005 RCW et seq.
reedlaw 11y ago
I have fiber optic in China rated at 20mbs but it's really spotty. Downloads can be really fast but latency can be terrible. I realize that browsing foreign sites is sharing bandwidth with a pool the size of China but sometimes even domestic sites time out. I think it's either being oversold or badly misconfigured by the ISP.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  Why was this downvoted so deeply into the gray?
  - wmf 11y ago
    Every story about broadband attracts random, totally unrepresentative anecdotes that aren't interesting or informative. Such comments may even be harmful if they trigger various cognitive biases.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      And there are a dozen similar comments elsewhere in the threads, that contribute equally much (or little), that are not downvoted. I want to know what the difference is. Is it the mention of China?
    - reedlaw 11y ago
      I'm sorry if my comment wasn't interesting or informative. I posted in the hopes that someone else with similar experience could offer advice. I know anecdotes are not of general interest but there's usually a long tail of comments that are useful to _someone_ and can be found by search engines.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
hamza001 11y ago
http://googler700.blogspot.com/ http://googler700.blogspot.com/
gcb0 11y ago
<quote>but state law forbids them from retailing directly to consumers, so as of yet they have no way to do this directly and no residential pricing model. So we had to be creative.</quote> isn't having in writing the intent to go against the law (even if creatively) a very dumb thing to do?
- __david__ 11y ago
  No. They aren't going against the law, they're finding creative ways to obey it. I hereby announce my intent to pay as little taxes as legally possible.
  - gcb0 11y ago
    but if you say how you plan to do something to evade the spirit of the law, that is pretty much a crime. people got their assets taken by the IRS by moving to another country and giving up citizenship when it was proved they did that with the intent to not pay taxes.
    - jotm 11y ago
      But if you don't say it and just do it, you get away with billions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - georgerobinson 11y ago
      Wait wait wait.. what!? How can it be illegal to say "I don't like paying your tax rate, so I'm leaving your country and move to another country with lower tax rates. Here is my citizenship."
      - gcb0 11y ago
        well, IANAL, but it is. there is the famous story of the founder of one of the big french game studios. forgot which now now. but i'm confident you can search. the gist is that he got his series A or B, on a french bank, frozen because the US IRS told them to, because he gave up his green card (not even a full citizenship yet!) to go back to his home france and start a company there.
sergiotapia 11y ago
These days buying a house without internet is like buying one that has no running water or not functioning electricity. How can an area in the US not have any sort of internet coverage? When does the FCC step in and provide this basic utility to the tax payer?
- mbreese 11y ago
  There are plenty of parts of the US that doesn't have any sort of wired internet access. It's a big country with lots of people living in rural areas. The best my dad can get is a satellite connection that is metered. He can get a phone line, electricity, and water - but not internet. 10GB per month doesn't go very far...
- rosser 11y ago
  More than a quarter of the US states — most of them very large — have population densities below 50 people per square mile. Even providing wireless internet to all those people is a staggeringly expensive undertaking. I'm not saying people shouldn't have internet access. They absolutely should. But it's not something you can just should into existence, either.
  - revelation 11y ago
    I wonder how they did that with telephone service back then. Must have been the superior technology and productivity.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      I like how you put it into perspective nicely. :)
  - amazon_not 11y ago
    I call BS. Finland has less than 48 people per square mile and universal cell and broadband service. By law the locally dominant service provider has to deliver a minimim of 1 Mbps to all inhabitants. In practise the delivered speed is a lot more and the minimim will be raisdd to 10 Mbps shortly. 3G is almost 100% and 4G covers most areas. The population density excuse is just that, an excuse not to do cell and broadband service properly. As such broadband definitrly falls into the should category.
mikehc 11y ago
I had a similar situation in Mexico where no provider gave me the bandwith I need it. The biggest provider (Telmex( refused to sign me up for a better plan because their infraestructure near my home wouldn't support it, at least they were honest. I called my local cable company and contracted their 50 mbps plan. Had a lot of issues with the installation and never really received the complete service. They didn't had enough bandwith in the zone so very few times I received my contracted bandwith. At the end I contacted a Telcom (EnlaceTPE) which specialize in providing fiber internet to companies. They did the entire fiber instalation to my home. I only had to commit to 3 years paying around 70 usd with a 200 mbps service. From the first call to installation took around 3 months, best decision made so far.
- willyk 11y ago
  That's a great outcome, props on making it happen.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Curious, what's wages (low and medium) in USD for someone in your area? As an American reading anecdotes, I like to look at it in terms of cost relative to income instead of cost in isolation. Helps me get an idea of where the cost would start here and how much value that company delivers.
  - mikehc 11y ago
    I really have no idea. I get paid very well but that is not representative of the common wages around here. The service by itself is expensive, considering it's just Internet. The most common package for internet + phone, on the most popular provider, costs around 24 USD monthly. If you want cable add another 20 bucks. According to some websites the median wages in Mexico per home at 2013 was around 740 USD monthly.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      Interesting. I decided to do a comparison using the percentage of monthly income for the Internet. I decided to use $30,000 a year per household to represent middle end of working class. I figure it's a fair class to use and pretty large. I used price of good Internet (50Mbps) in my area. So, here's the costs: USA: 2.8% of household income; Mexico: 3.2% with your number So, they're quite similar. For that, I get 50Mbps down and a fraction up for $70. You get 200Mbps down and how much up? Either way, you're getting a good deal as a percentage of income. If you're better than $740/mo, you're getting a really good deal. I'm envious. :)
chrissnell 11y ago
I'm curious if the author ever looked into HamWan. [1] They provide non-commercial internet access for hobbyists who have their amateur radio licenses (very easy to get) and buy some basic equipment. They cover a number of places in the Puget Sound region. The author would have to build a tower to get above the trees but I can't imagine that this would run more than $4-5k (on the high end). I am not actually a user of HamWAN--I'm down in Tacoma and my line-of-sight is impeded by terrain and building a tower in my dense urban neighborhood isn't an option. Also, I have biz-class Comcast. [1] https://www.hamwan.org/t/Wiki+Home+Page https://www.hamwan.org/t/Wiki+Home+Page
- amazon_not 11y ago
  "Since many traditional uses for internet at home are not compatible with part 97 rules, this can't replace your home internet connection." Does not seem suitable.
- rosser 11y ago
  Can you meaningfully do things like ecommerce over HamWAN, given the restriction against using encryption on amateur radio bands? Losing that capability would severely limit the internet for most folks...

132 points by uptown 11y ago

>They do very much want to serve residences too, but state law forbids them from retailing directly to consumers Why does the law forbid selling directly to consumers?

oh_sigh 11y ago
Presumably to protect the interests of the groups that are allowed to market to consumers.
dsr_ 11y ago
Specifically because cable companies don't want competition, so they lobbied for this. http://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/ http://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblock...
- slxh 11y ago
  If they don't want competition, they should at least provide the latest technology at a reasonable price...
  - singlow 11y ago
    That is exactly why they don't want competition. They don't want to spend more and charge less.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    There can't be any meaningful competition between a private company and a government entity that can tax people to pay off its infrastructure bonds and take land by eminent domain.
    - amazon_not 11y ago
      I see this statement bandied about quite frequently. Would you like to substantiate the claim and/or provide examples of actual public harm where such faux competition exists?
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        It's actually self-evident in the claim. Tell any venture capitalist they'll be doing the same thing as the competition in a regulated market except the competition can get exempted from regulations or pull in tons of extra money in form of tax revenue. Who wants to take that risk in the U.S. system? I think you could say it's played out in the areas where utilities introduced cheap broadband. Articles on those usually major players are suffering over there compared to where they're competing with private companies like their own. I do have a specific example, though. My background is high assurance security & systems. The government once used incentives + good criteria to get market to create quite a few products their pentesters couldn't break. Then, NSA started competing with private sector under a new initiative. Market went away with Boeing guy clear that was largely why. Only a few remain and stay stagnant because companies won't invest much further in them due to risk posed by both market demand and government decisions. http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Bell-Looking-Back-Addendum.pdf http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Bell-Looking-B...
        dsr_ 11y ago
        I see that you have proven the nonviability of FedEx, UPS and all other package carriers that compete with government postal services. I also note that you have proven the nonexistence of private security companies, since they compete with the police and are much more restricted, by law, in what they can do. And there can't be any private shuttle bus services, because there are municipal bus services. I think you need to modify your claim. All of these companies do reasonably well by competing with government-run services by offering things that the government isn't providing and is unlikely to provide because it unreasonably benefits a single user: on-demand pickups and guaranteed delivery times; full-time guards in a particular location; a bus that runs directly to your campus.
rayiner 11y ago
Because KPUD is a public utility district with taxation and eminent domain powers.

scott_karana 11y ago

Wow. Kudos to this guy for working through a corporate/bureaucratic nightmare. Good on KPUD for putting in a solid effort here too: looks like everyone in the area might benefit from this one.

Havoc 11y ago

Fibre techies - even residential FTTH - are pretty clued up. I was pleasantly surprised by the guy that activated my fibre...got a distinct feel of "he is one of us". Hidden benefit of a cutting edge tech I guess...you get real techies instead of people following a fkn script.

willyk 11y ago
Y, based on my experience, the utilities generally have different teams that handle the fibre installs.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I thought it was specialization and cost-cutting. I know Comcast out here contracts their cabling to a company where the few managers make a decent amount of money while the technicians make little ranging from amateur to experienced in skill. Keeps them out of Comcast's HR approach and branding, too. Maybe some blame-shifting potential. Not sure all the reasons but plenty of possibilities come to mind. Cost is probably the main one, though. This company has way less overhead and more flexibility than Comcast.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

This one is doing a good job. For ideas, I posted on that site and am here this other project that got good results: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-building-its-own-gigabit-fibre-network http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-bui... Deploying to rural is quite an uphill battle. But their model seems to be doing the job. Might be worth copying aspects in deployments like original post's.

willyk 11y ago
Thanks for sharing the Vice article, it was great ... good to see some of these projects succeeding now that the capex has come down (a decade or so ago there was a long list of similar ventures that failed).
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Yeah I enjoyed it too and it's quite hopeful. I like how the communities are essentially coming together to get themselves on the Internet's, Fast Lane.

techsupporter 11y ago

I'm glad it worked for him but he asks the right question: How can we get this to work for other people in Washington State? I live in Seattle and have fiber optic service from CenturyLink. The gigabit is nice, but CenturyLink is running my fiber drop over a "route of convenience that, if the next door property owner ever gets snippy, will turn into a battle of lawyers. Why? Because CL won't use the utility poles in front of my house because they don't want to coordinate with the transit agency. The whole infrastructure argument is getting absurd. KPUD can't sell to end users because Washington law prohibits it. I have service but might not someday "just because." A city in Washington that owns its own utility agency could serve but has to do it by selling bonds that require 60% voter approval. Meanwhile, everybody is left wondering what next.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
Who exactly wants those laws in your state? If the answer is "nobody", then get your neighbors together and fix the problem. And if there is somebody who wants those laws, at least you'll know who the problem is, and can start raising public awareness of who is needlessly keeping them from having better Internet.
- techsupporter 11y ago
  It's a mix. Both of the incumbent providers push heavily to keep the restrictions on the books. In addition, there is a large contingent of voters who do not want the restrictions repealed because they are opposed to public operation and/or financing of a telecommunications system that can serve the general public. Much like a lot of things, folks here are generally opposed unless or until it directly impacts them. There is a group in Seattle that is pushing for a ballot initiative with accompanying property tax levy to get the city to build an open-access last mile system. The areas of the city that already have good service, whether Comcast or CenturyLink fiber, poll at slightly under 50% support. Areas that are stuck with Wave Broadband or only CenturyLink DSL poll at well above 70%.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago

steeples 11y ago

Just curious, but what does she need that bandwidth for? I am expecting the usual replies of running a server, having better upstream capabilities, and the very typical 'techies gonna have bandwidth', but I would love to hear some weird unexpected ways to use bandwidth like that.

bane 11y ago
I honestly have no idea. I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it. FiOS keeps upgrading it every year or so (it started as a 15/5 I couldn't saturate), so that's nice. At least I'm basically in "first world" territory even if I live in the U.S. I suppose when 4k video becomes more common I'll feel it, but I don't even have anything that can display 4k right now and Verizon will probably just upgrade it to 75/75 or 100/100 by that point. One nice benefit, I have a plex server I can access remotely and it works well outside of my network. But I'd live with just my netflix account if I had to "rough it".
- icelancer 11y ago
  I have 50/20 with a family. Two laptops and Netflix going on the Media Center PC plus my work easily causes degraded service on certain appliances in peak times.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- simoncion 11y ago
  > I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it. Unless you've throttled your torrents, or you're connected to a really slow swarm, you have almost certainly saturated your download. I have -er- 100/10 or 100/15 service from Comcast. If I'm downloading anything >= 100MB, and a member of the household is going to start a new Netflix stream, I need to pause the download, or else the stream will be degraded for a long time. Also, unless you're using a decent router, it's very possible that your router can't route and/or NAT at 50mbit or faster. I know that Apple Airports can and Ubiquiti EdgeRouters[0] can. I would also expect that an ISP-provided router would route fast enough. [0] If you're in the market for a new router and are somewhat network savvy, or are comfortable with running OpenWRT on your router, I strongly recommend the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It routes and firewalls at ~1Gbit/sec (when offloading is enabled) and costs right around $100. Check out the Newegg reviews that aren't "It's slower than I expected" or "It's totally broken" for an idea of what you'll be getting in to. I've had mine for nearly a year and -other than the eventually dodgy external power supply[1] it shipped with- it has been rock solid. [1] The unit I got had been sitting in a box in a warehouse in Florida for ~two years before it arrived on my doorstep. The failing power supply presented as infrequent spontaneous reboots with nothing unusual in syslog, which became more and more frequent until the power supply just stopped providing power entirely. Replaced it with a wall wart that I had on hand and have had no trouble since.

icelancer 11y ago

This person should have been awarded mid five figures from Comcast. I wonder if any legal team looked into the possibility of suing them and/or the the municipality?

BillyParadise 11y ago
Why do you Americans always think about suing someone?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- oh_sigh 11y ago
  Presumably Canada or wherever you are from has some sort of formal system in place for situations where, for example, contractual terms are breached http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/24/america-litigious-society-myth http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/24/america...
grecy 11y ago
It's a crazy world when you can sue someone for not selling you something. Why should they have to sell it to you?
- icelancer 11y ago
  Because they promised carriage. Twice.

SethKinast 11y ago

I'm curious what the monthly cost is for the line (not considering the upfront cost).

transfire 11y ago

We really know how to paint ourselves into corners don't we. Here we have a slew of people who want broadband and companies willing and able to provide it. So what prey tell is the problem? Laws.

caryhartline 11y ago
Of course companies want you to buy their 5 Mb/s down Internet for $100/month and there isn't a law to keep them from doing that.
rayiner 11y ago
> So what prey tell is the problem? Laws. KPUD isn't a "company." It's a public utility district.[1] It wouldn't exist without "laws." [1] With special powers of condemnation and taxation. See 54.16.005 RCW et seq.

reedlaw 11y ago

I have fiber optic in China rated at 20mbs but it's really spotty. Downloads can be really fast but latency can be terrible. I realize that browsing foreign sites is sharing bandwidth with a pool the size of China but sometimes even domestic sites time out. I think it's either being oversold or badly misconfigured by the ISP.

nitrogen 11y ago
Why was this downvoted so deeply into the gray?
- wmf 11y ago
  Every story about broadband attracts random, totally unrepresentative anecdotes that aren't interesting or informative. Such comments may even be harmful if they trigger various cognitive biases.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    And there are a dozen similar comments elsewhere in the threads, that contribute equally much (or little), that are not downvoted. I want to know what the difference is. Is it the mention of China?
  - reedlaw 11y ago
    I'm sorry if my comment wasn't interesting or informative. I posted in the hopes that someone else with similar experience could offer advice. I know anecdotes are not of general interest but there's usually a long tail of comments that are useful to _someone_ and can be found by search engines.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

hamza001 11y ago

http://googler700.blogspot.com/ http://googler700.blogspot.com/

gcb0 11y ago

<quote>but state law forbids them from retailing directly to consumers, so as of yet they have no way to do this directly and no residential pricing model. So we had to be creative.</quote> isn't having in writing the intent to go against the law (even if creatively) a very dumb thing to do?

__david__ 11y ago
No. They aren't going against the law, they're finding creative ways to obey it. I hereby announce my intent to pay as little taxes as legally possible.
- gcb0 11y ago
  but if you say how you plan to do something to evade the spirit of the law, that is pretty much a crime. people got their assets taken by the IRS by moving to another country and giving up citizenship when it was proved they did that with the intent to not pay taxes.
  - jotm 11y ago
    But if you don't say it and just do it, you get away with billions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - georgerobinson 11y ago
    Wait wait wait.. what!? How can it be illegal to say "I don't like paying your tax rate, so I'm leaving your country and move to another country with lower tax rates. Here is my citizenship."
    - gcb0 11y ago
      well, IANAL, but it is. there is the famous story of the founder of one of the big french game studios. forgot which now now. but i'm confident you can search. the gist is that he got his series A or B, on a french bank, frozen because the US IRS told them to, because he gave up his green card (not even a full citizenship yet!) to go back to his home france and start a company there.

sergiotapia 11y ago

These days buying a house without internet is like buying one that has no running water or not functioning electricity. How can an area in the US not have any sort of internet coverage? When does the FCC step in and provide this basic utility to the tax payer?

mbreese 11y ago
There are plenty of parts of the US that doesn't have any sort of wired internet access. It's a big country with lots of people living in rural areas. The best my dad can get is a satellite connection that is metered. He can get a phone line, electricity, and water - but not internet. 10GB per month doesn't go very far...
rosser 11y ago
More than a quarter of the US states — most of them very large — have population densities below 50 people per square mile. Even providing wireless internet to all those people is a staggeringly expensive undertaking. I'm not saying people shouldn't have internet access. They absolutely should. But it's not something you can just should into existence, either.
- revelation 11y ago
  I wonder how they did that with telephone service back then. Must have been the superior technology and productivity.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I like how you put it into perspective nicely. :)
- amazon_not 11y ago
  I call BS. Finland has less than 48 people per square mile and universal cell and broadband service. By law the locally dominant service provider has to deliver a minimim of 1 Mbps to all inhabitants. In practise the delivered speed is a lot more and the minimim will be raisdd to 10 Mbps shortly. 3G is almost 100% and 4G covers most areas. The population density excuse is just that, an excuse not to do cell and broadband service properly. As such broadband definitrly falls into the should category.

mikehc 11y ago

I had a similar situation in Mexico where no provider gave me the bandwith I need it. The biggest provider (Telmex( refused to sign me up for a better plan because their infraestructure near my home wouldn't support it, at least they were honest. I called my local cable company and contracted their 50 mbps plan. Had a lot of issues with the installation and never really received the complete service. They didn't had enough bandwith in the zone so very few times I received my contracted bandwith. At the end I contacted a Telcom (EnlaceTPE) which specialize in providing fiber internet to companies. They did the entire fiber instalation to my home. I only had to commit to 3 years paying around 70 usd with a 200 mbps service. From the first call to installation took around 3 months, best decision made so far.

willyk 11y ago
That's a great outcome, props on making it happen.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
Curious, what's wages (low and medium) in USD for someone in your area? As an American reading anecdotes, I like to look at it in terms of cost relative to income instead of cost in isolation. Helps me get an idea of where the cost would start here and how much value that company delivers.
- mikehc 11y ago
  I really have no idea. I get paid very well but that is not representative of the common wages around here. The service by itself is expensive, considering it's just Internet. The most common package for internet + phone, on the most popular provider, costs around 24 USD monthly. If you want cable add another 20 bucks. According to some websites the median wages in Mexico per home at 2013 was around 740 USD monthly.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Interesting. I decided to do a comparison using the percentage of monthly income for the Internet. I decided to use $30,000 a year per household to represent middle end of working class. I figure it's a fair class to use and pretty large. I used price of good Internet (50Mbps) in my area. So, here's the costs: USA: 2.8% of household income; Mexico: 3.2% with your number So, they're quite similar. For that, I get 50Mbps down and a fraction up for $70. You get 200Mbps down and how much up? Either way, you're getting a good deal as a percentage of income. If you're better than $740/mo, you're getting a really good deal. I'm envious. :)

chrissnell 11y ago

I'm curious if the author ever looked into HamWan. [1] They provide non-commercial internet access for hobbyists who have their amateur radio licenses (very easy to get) and buy some basic equipment. They cover a number of places in the Puget Sound region. The author would have to build a tower to get above the trees but I can't imagine that this would run more than $4-5k (on the high end). I am not actually a user of HamWAN--I'm down in Tacoma and my line-of-sight is impeded by terrain and building a tower in my dense urban neighborhood isn't an option. Also, I have biz-class Comcast. [1] https://www.hamwan.org/t/Wiki+Home+Page https://www.hamwan.org/t/Wiki+Home+Page

amazon_not 11y ago
"Since many traditional uses for internet at home are not compatible with part 97 rules, this can't replace your home internet connection." Does not seem suitable.
rosser 11y ago
Can you meaningfully do things like ecommerce over HamWAN, given the restriction against using encryption on amateur radio bands? Losing that capability would severely limit the internet for most folks...