7 ms·

This quote from Marc Andreesen sums up why treating it as a utility may not make sense: "Because sewers and electricity are far more static markets than broadb

This quote from Marc Andreesen sums up why treating it as a utility may not make sense: "Because sewers and electricity are far more static markets than broadband. You don't shit 10x as much every 3 yrs." I don't understand the resistance to nationalizing the physical Infrastructure. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes sense for consumers. Because somebody famous once said Govt. is part of the problem, we don't even want to entertain this idea anymore.

whoopdedo 10y ago
> You don't shit 10x as much every 3 yrs. I buy a new house when I'm single. Three years later I'm married and have two kids. More new houses have been built in my neighborhood, and they all have families moving into them. I sure hope whoever laid the sewer pipes at year zero anticipated at least 10x capacity in three years.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  On the other hand, 3 years from now, the typical house will have approximately the same sewer needs that it has now. What perseusprime11 is pointing out is that the typical house will consume much more broadband in a few years than it does now, not just the houses with carefully chosen stories.
  - pharrlax 10y ago
    I don't understand how this relates to whether broadband is a natural monopoly. Certainly it's one that demands more frequent upgrades, but that seems to be missing the point.
- stordoff 10y ago
  I think the key part is _every_ 3 years. With the sewerage pipes, you can plan around the maximum capacity of the house, and the required capacity of the pipes will remain pretty much constant. You don't have the same upper limit on Internet capacity.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  A physical fiber strand is mostly agnostic to the technology used (yes I know there are differences). The government should lay fiber to every home and business, then sell access to that fiber at cost. Let ISPs setup equipment racks at a local POP and do the termination & CPE. Now you can innovate by replacing the equipment at either end without digging a single trench.
ChefDenominator 10y ago
Some people perceive that their lives are not a toy thing for some far away central planners.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Then those people should really hate the broadband companies.
- rhizome 10y ago
  Your libertarian slip is showing.
dangjc 10y ago
The last mile wires going into your home aren't changed every 3 years. Those should be shared through a regulated utility. The telcos can compete building connectivity between neighborhoods and cities.
ScottBurson 10y ago
So you think the broadband infrastructure should be nationalized, but not treated as a utility? That seems inconsistent. Anyway, I think Andreessen's argument is greatly exaggerated. 20 years ago I had ISDN at 128kb, if memory serves; now I have a cable modem that bursts to something like 90Mb. That's a CAGR of 39%, or a factor of 2.7 every 3 years. Give me gigabit fiber and I'll be happy as a clam for years to come. (I don't expect my cable speed to increase significantly from this point either; that 39% CAGR is not going to be maintained.)
- kalleboo 10y ago
  I got 100 Mbps in 2005, 1 Gbps in 2016. The same fiber ought to scale fine another order of magnitude to 10 Gbps in 10 years. Fierce competition made sense in the 90's and 00's when all the last mile technologies were duking it out. Now we know that DSL and Coax cable don't have a future. It'll be either wireless or fiber, and you just can't go wrong with fiber.
  - RugnirViking 10y ago
    'I got 100 Mbps in 2005, 1 Gbps in 2016.' Where the heck do you live? 100mbps is like science fiction where I live, and we are all on fiber at like 10mbps
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      Sweden before, Japan now
    - dpark 10y ago
      > we are all on fiber at like 10mbps Where the heck do you live that runs fiber to the home but can't deliver better than 10mbps?
      - RugnirViking 10y ago
        Here in the UK the max I have ever heard of is 200mbps in inner cities and everywhere else its basically 10mbps or nothing
creeble 10y ago
I don't use 10x as much bandwidth every 3yrs either. I don't use 3x. I don't come anywhere near my "unlimited cap", nor do I use anywhere near my 80mbps limit, except the occasional download (from a very well-connected source). Consumers at home use bandwidth for exactly one thing: video. I can only watch so much video (just as I can only shit so much). And the cable that comes into my home - like the sewer line - is 30 years old, and has never been upgraded.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>I don't use 10x as much bandwidth every 3yrs either. 10 years ago, how many static web pages had several megabytes of JavaScript just to render three paragraphs of text? :)
- nightski 10y ago
  Well you are not typical then. I just had a long conversation with our cable guy as he was installing internet in a new place. He said that more & more people are trying to stream 4k video and hitting their caps within hours/days. It's kind of a problem. It's really funny because they offer gigabit speed internet but it's cap is lower than the 100Mbit. So you get faster transfer speeds but less actual data. Also our city (which is relatively small in the 200k range) has two competing cable providers installing fiber for gigabit internet across the city. This doesn't seem uncommon and I'd call that a total replacement.
  - fattire 10y ago
    You live in a 200k-person "city" and everyone's buying 4k-capable TVs? This doesn't sound like a typical town to me.
    - omarchowdhury 10y ago
      There are 40 inch 4K TVs for $400 now.
  - creeble 10y ago
    That doesn't mean they need to upgrade the wire going into the house then.
codehusker 10y ago
Andreesen is right about the past, but we're near the inflection point where the curve smooths out. 8K video (near IMAX quality) can be compressed into a 500mbps stream[0], so gigabit should have decent lifespan. If we lay fiber to the premises then we can increase speeds in the future without digging everything up. [0] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130238-8k-uhdtv-how-do-you-send-a-48gbps-tv-signal-over-terrestrial-airwaves https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130238-8k-uhdtv-how-do-y...
- mncharity 10y ago
  So if VR next year is 2K per eye, and is hypothetically cloud rendered, then that means gigabit would support 16-ish people? Sounds good. 2K per eye was at CES last month, and is badly needed. But 4K per eye prototypes exist, and will almost certainly be at CES next year. And will ship, maybe next year, maybe the year after. That's 4-ish people on gigabit? Hmm. Doesn't that seems a little bit tight to be confident that "gigabit should have decent lifespan"?
  - momerath 10y ago
    Cloud rendering is a fantasy for games on flat screens, because the latency is too high. To maintain 'presence' and not get sick in VR, the motion-to-photons latency has to be _consistently_ <20ms. 360 video for VR is certainly a bandwidth-hog, but I think that could well be offset by most VR content being game-like, where, though the game might weigh in at 40G, you download it once, and spend 40 hours in it, vs a 4k movie at the same size, which lasts 2 (and which you'd likely re-stream if you watched it again). In other words, widespread VR use, even with next-gen hardware, could actually lead to a reduced demand for bandwidth.
    - mncharity 10y ago
      > Cloud rendering is a fantasy for games on flat screens, because the latency One approach I've seen mentioned is sending a larger-than-used field of view (and resolution), and then locally deciding, with more recent orientation data, which portion to use. Also depth segregation of the scene, and sending multiple copies of nearfield, selected by recent position. These approaches might result in sending more data than the displayed video. I don't necessarily disagree with your suggestion of gigabit adequacy. Though after hearing similar suggestions so many times over the decades, about everything on Moore's law curves, and then having them almost always be wrong, I'm... leary of this form of suggestion. But one way such estimates fail, is being hit by an "oh, we didn't expect that one". So I'm brainstorming (well, merely sort of musing) about potential surprises. Hmm, surprises... One advantage of a single video stream is the system always knows what's needed next. The user may turn it off, but not much else. The above are perhaps examples of needing to send speculative content, which acts a demand multiplier. The future equivalent of web page preloading. As people acquire automated assistants, one thing they may do is speculative exploration and data gathering. When a user's eye pauses on a github project, not just download everything about the project, to produce the desired pithy little briefing popup, but also other pages associated with the repo authors (still alive? any replacement project?), news articles, related work, and so on. Automation of the 'github project evaluation dance', which in the fine-grained node.js ecosystem, is frequent. So what is now a few bytes of web link, and a rare on-demand textual mouse popover, followed by slow manual surfing, might be become an immediate massive demand spike, and pervasively common? One potential of VR vs 2D screen UIs, is that while screen realestate must be severely managed, else clutter, VR may permit vastly greater inclusion of speculative "some related stuff", blended as low-cognitive-overhead ambiance. Once upon a time, a web page had the bandwidth demands of a few lines of ascii email from a dumb terminal - no longer.
nojvek 10y ago
That's not necessarily true. There is some limit to what we consider fast Internet. Suppose you build a pipe to provide 1gigabit/person that should he more than enough for the future. Multiple streaming HD videos /person in peak time. That capacity should last quite a while
simonh 10y ago
> You don't shit 10x as much every 3 yrs. All that means is the ongoing infrastructure costs and technology upgrades required are even higher. I don't see how that makes it less like water and electricity infrastructure, surely it makes it even more of an extreme example of the same thing? The fact is a lot of countries have successfully opened up their telecoms markets to competition through regulation. So the US telco company's assertions that this cannot work has been proven to be false. It has been done, therefore it's a thing that is doable. This very much reminds me of the US mobile operator's arguments that the European model of standardizing mobile infrastructure on GSM was market interference that would harm consumers. What it did was establish an open market in which consumers could freely switch between providers thanks to common technical standards. Meanwhile the US market was ghettoized into GSM and CDMA silos.

whoopdedo 10y ago

> You don't shit 10x as much every 3 yrs. I buy a new house when I'm single. Three years later I'm married and have two kids. More new houses have been built in my neighborhood, and they all have families moving into them. I sure hope whoever laid the sewer pipes at year zero anticipated at least 10x capacity in three years.

maxerickson 10y ago
On the other hand, 3 years from now, the typical house will have approximately the same sewer needs that it has now. What perseusprime11 is pointing out is that the typical house will consume much more broadband in a few years than it does now, not just the houses with carefully chosen stories.
- pharrlax 10y ago
  I don't understand how this relates to whether broadband is a natural monopoly. Certainly it's one that demands more frequent upgrades, but that seems to be missing the point.
stordoff 10y ago
I think the key part is _every_ 3 years. With the sewerage pipes, you can plan around the maximum capacity of the house, and the required capacity of the pipes will remain pretty much constant. You don't have the same upper limit on Internet capacity.
xenadu02 10y ago
A physical fiber strand is mostly agnostic to the technology used (yes I know there are differences). The government should lay fiber to every home and business, then sell access to that fiber at cost. Let ISPs setup equipment racks at a local POP and do the termination & CPE. Now you can innovate by replacing the equipment at either end without digging a single trench.

ChefDenominator 10y ago

Some people perceive that their lives are not a toy thing for some far away central planners.

st3v3r 10y ago
Then those people should really hate the broadband companies.
rhizome 10y ago
Your libertarian slip is showing.

dangjc 10y ago

The last mile wires going into your home aren't changed every 3 years. Those should be shared through a regulated utility. The telcos can compete building connectivity between neighborhoods and cities.

ScottBurson 10y ago

So you think the broadband infrastructure should be nationalized, but not treated as a utility? That seems inconsistent. Anyway, I think Andreessen's argument is greatly exaggerated. 20 years ago I had ISDN at 128kb, if memory serves; now I have a cable modem that bursts to something like 90Mb. That's a CAGR of 39%, or a factor of 2.7 every 3 years. Give me gigabit fiber and I'll be happy as a clam for years to come. (I don't expect my cable speed to increase significantly from this point either; that 39% CAGR is not going to be maintained.)

kalleboo 10y ago
I got 100 Mbps in 2005, 1 Gbps in 2016. The same fiber ought to scale fine another order of magnitude to 10 Gbps in 10 years. Fierce competition made sense in the 90's and 00's when all the last mile technologies were duking it out. Now we know that DSL and Coax cable don't have a future. It'll be either wireless or fiber, and you just can't go wrong with fiber.
- RugnirViking 10y ago
  'I got 100 Mbps in 2005, 1 Gbps in 2016.' Where the heck do you live? 100mbps is like science fiction where I live, and we are all on fiber at like 10mbps
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    Sweden before, Japan now
  - dpark 10y ago
    > we are all on fiber at like 10mbps Where the heck do you live that runs fiber to the home but can't deliver better than 10mbps?
    - RugnirViking 10y ago
      Here in the UK the max I have ever heard of is 200mbps in inner cities and everywhere else its basically 10mbps or nothing

creeble 10y ago

I don't use 10x as much bandwidth every 3yrs either. I don't use 3x. I don't come anywhere near my "unlimited cap", nor do I use anywhere near my 80mbps limit, except the occasional download (from a very well-connected source). Consumers at home use bandwidth for exactly one thing: video. I can only watch so much video (just as I can only shit so much). And the cable that comes into my home - like the sewer line - is 30 years old, and has never been upgraded.

enraged_camel 10y ago
>>I don't use 10x as much bandwidth every 3yrs either. 10 years ago, how many static web pages had several megabytes of JavaScript just to render three paragraphs of text? :)
nightski 10y ago
Well you are not typical then. I just had a long conversation with our cable guy as he was installing internet in a new place. He said that more & more people are trying to stream 4k video and hitting their caps within hours/days. It's kind of a problem. It's really funny because they offer gigabit speed internet but it's cap is lower than the 100Mbit. So you get faster transfer speeds but less actual data. Also our city (which is relatively small in the 200k range) has two competing cable providers installing fiber for gigabit internet across the city. This doesn't seem uncommon and I'd call that a total replacement.
- fattire 10y ago
  You live in a 200k-person "city" and everyone's buying 4k-capable TVs? This doesn't sound like a typical town to me.
  - omarchowdhury 10y ago
    There are 40 inch 4K TVs for $400 now.
- creeble 10y ago
  That doesn't mean they need to upgrade the wire going into the house then.

codehusker 10y ago

Andreesen is right about the past, but we're near the inflection point where the curve smooths out. 8K video (near IMAX quality) can be compressed into a 500mbps stream[0], so gigabit should have decent lifespan. If we lay fiber to the premises then we can increase speeds in the future without digging everything up. [0] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130238-8k-uhdtv-how-do-you-send-a-48gbps-tv-signal-over-terrestrial-airwaves https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130238-8k-uhdtv-how-do-y...

mncharity 10y ago
So if VR next year is 2K per eye, and is hypothetically cloud rendered, then that means gigabit would support 16-ish people? Sounds good. 2K per eye was at CES last month, and is badly needed. But 4K per eye prototypes exist, and will almost certainly be at CES next year. And will ship, maybe next year, maybe the year after. That's 4-ish people on gigabit? Hmm. Doesn't that seems a little bit tight to be confident that "gigabit should have decent lifespan"?
- momerath 10y ago
  Cloud rendering is a fantasy for games on flat screens, because the latency is too high. To maintain 'presence' and not get sick in VR, the motion-to-photons latency has to be _consistently_ <20ms. 360 video for VR is certainly a bandwidth-hog, but I think that could well be offset by most VR content being game-like, where, though the game might weigh in at 40G, you download it once, and spend 40 hours in it, vs a 4k movie at the same size, which lasts 2 (and which you'd likely re-stream if you watched it again). In other words, widespread VR use, even with next-gen hardware, could actually lead to a reduced demand for bandwidth.
  - mncharity 10y ago
    > Cloud rendering is a fantasy for games on flat screens, because the latency One approach I've seen mentioned is sending a larger-than-used field of view (and resolution), and then locally deciding, with more recent orientation data, which portion to use. Also depth segregation of the scene, and sending multiple copies of nearfield, selected by recent position. These approaches might result in sending more data than the displayed video. I don't necessarily disagree with your suggestion of gigabit adequacy. Though after hearing similar suggestions so many times over the decades, about everything on Moore's law curves, and then having them almost always be wrong, I'm... leary of this form of suggestion. But one way such estimates fail, is being hit by an "oh, we didn't expect that one". So I'm brainstorming (well, merely sort of musing) about potential surprises. Hmm, surprises... One advantage of a single video stream is the system always knows what's needed next. The user may turn it off, but not much else. The above are perhaps examples of needing to send speculative content, which acts a demand multiplier. The future equivalent of web page preloading. As people acquire automated assistants, one thing they may do is speculative exploration and data gathering. When a user's eye pauses on a github project, not just download everything about the project, to produce the desired pithy little briefing popup, but also other pages associated with the repo authors (still alive? any replacement project?), news articles, related work, and so on. Automation of the 'github project evaluation dance', which in the fine-grained node.js ecosystem, is frequent. So what is now a few bytes of web link, and a rare on-demand textual mouse popover, followed by slow manual surfing, might be become an immediate massive demand spike, and pervasively common? One potential of VR vs 2D screen UIs, is that while screen realestate must be severely managed, else clutter, VR may permit vastly greater inclusion of speculative "some related stuff", blended as low-cognitive-overhead ambiance. Once upon a time, a web page had the bandwidth demands of a few lines of ascii email from a dumb terminal - no longer.

nojvek 10y ago

That's not necessarily true. There is some limit to what we consider fast Internet. Suppose you build a pipe to provide 1gigabit/person that should he more than enough for the future. Multiple streaming HD videos /person in peak time. That capacity should last quite a while

simonh 10y ago

> You don't shit 10x as much every 3 yrs. All that means is the ongoing infrastructure costs and technology upgrades required are even higher. I don't see how that makes it less like water and electricity infrastructure, surely it makes it even more of an extreme example of the same thing? The fact is a lot of countries have successfully opened up their telecoms markets to competition through regulation. So the US telco company's assertions that this cannot work has been proven to be false. It has been done, therefore it's a thing that is doable. This very much reminds me of the US mobile operator's arguments that the European model of standardizing mobile infrastructure on GSM was market interference that would harm consumers. What it did was establish an open market in which consumers could freely switch between providers thanks to common technical standards. Meanwhile the US market was ghettoized into GSM and CDMA silos.