5 ms·

For the most part agreed. In general, if there is a 'natural monopoly' AND the private sector is failing to provide better service or better pricing or both as

For the most part agreed. In general, if there is a 'natural monopoly' AND the private sector is failing to provide better service or better pricing or both as a result of competition, I don't understand why we wouldn't simply treat it as a utility or fully make it public. One counter here is that the reason they have a monopoly is the last mile lines and easements, but arguably there is enough spectral bandwidth in the wireless realm that perhaps whats really missing is competition for home internet from wireless operators. I'm not sure where I stand here but I do think its interesting to consider whether it would be better to help bring competition somehow from that side into the home broadband realm or whether the landline route should be made more public. I'm sure there are some capacity limitations on the wireless side also that may make this a pipedream.

ComradeTaco 10y ago
I believe what you're talking about is called a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP). Netlinx is one example of it (http://netlinx.net/ http://netlinx.net/) I've read a bit about WISPs, because they seem like a happy solution to the whole monopoly problem but they haven't caught hold in the way that I've hoped. Latency seems to be a pretty significant issue. Consistency in signal strength is also a problem. I also sort of think that this is kind of the way we get out of problems without ever getting at the root cause. We look to technology that may exist at a later point to fix problems caused by underlying political, organizational and infrastructure issues. Always looking for the next band aid for the bullet hole I suppose.
- trome 10y ago
  Latency is often better than Cable ISPs and DSL (even with VDSL2 or Fastpath) on a WISP, and can easily compete with Fiber in terms of latency (wireless has less latency than optical glass), but where it falls down is in suburbia, where there isn't enough customer density to justify small cells and pole attachment costs don't allow you to feasibly put up nodes to blanket the neighborhood. Clearwire ran into many of these same issues, but they were able to operate at two orders of magnitude more power than most WISPs can (1 watt vs 150 watts) and had way more bandwidth around 2Ghz to work with, all of which was pristine.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    The fundamental problem with wireless is that in an area with even moderate density, you end up needing a wireless antenna within a mile of the customer's location, which itself needs a wired connection. And once you get that close you might as well bring the wire the rest of the way and not consume billions of dollars of wireless spectrum.
    - lewisl9029 10y ago
      All valid critiques, which is why I'm eagerly anticipating the new ISP that would hopefully come out of SpaceX's Low-Earth Orbit Internet Satellites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12982418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12982418
      - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        I don't think that actually replaces wired connections in urban or suburban areas, because it's susceptible to the same problem of needing shared wireless spectrum proportional to the number of regional users even though wireless spectrum is inherently limited by physical laws. What that would solve is high speed low latency access for rural areas.
    - upofadown 10y ago
      There is currently an idea floating around that you could put a wireless access point on every block and then provide gigabit wireless over millimetre wave spectrum. So a way of skipping the hard bit of fibre to the premises. Now all we need to do is actually make it work...
      - chrishacken 10y ago
        Like he said, you still need to spend an insane amount of money to acquire spectrum. Furthermore, High freq spectrum doesn't go through trees or buildings so any obstruction then makes dozens of properties unserviceable. Unless you put AP's every 500m, it doesn't work out the way you'd think it would, and at that point, you might as well just run a physical drop cable to the premise for a few hundred dollars.
raquo 10y ago
Wireless internet is not a solution – it's very obviously inferior to wired if you don't need the mobility. More expensive, lower bandwidth, higher latency, lower reliability.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
  "Fixed wireless" systems like microwave and other line-of-sight systems have negligible latency (and considerably less latency than DSL which never seems to go below 20ms for me) and you can theoretically get gigabit speeds, and because there's no last-mile infrastructure besides an antenna it's less expensive to set-up too. The only thing you mention that applies is limited bandwidth: such systems only work in low-population-density rural environments, it would not work in Manhattan. There needs to be more consumer education to allow them to differentiate between high-performance things like fixed-wireless compared to running their home internet off their phone's LTE connection. Funnily, my iPhone's LTE connection (according to SpeedTest) has very good latency and throughput: I get ~10ms to my nearest major city and ~30mbps downstream, sometimes my LTE upstream speed is faster than my home DOCSIS connection. Alas I can't use it as my home connection because I need a static IP address and more than a few gigabytes of data-transfer per month (more like a few terabytes...)
  - 69mlgsniperdad 10y ago
    I have a grandfathered 'unlimited' data plan with tmobile. I get 75mbit down and 40-70mbit up where I live and the places I spend 99% of my time. I often use a vpn(to hide user agent) and tether to get those speeds on my laptop when I'm not at home. Haven't had a problem with data caps yet, often use 50ish gigs of data, and have tethered over 20gb recently with no issue. Edit: Nexus 6p on LTE 700mhz
    - chrishacken 10y ago
      That only works because you're 1 person. If everyone in your town decided to do this your phone would be unusable. We have ~50 users on our unlicensed fixed wireless service and we've been running into numerous signal issues. Wireless isn't the answer.
belorn 10y ago
Maybe we should ask why so few cities provide free wifi in public spaces. As an example we can see what happened when New Orleans did that after Hurricane Katrina. Not only did Bell South take back donated resources to the rescue efforts, but they and several large telephone companies stepped up an aggressive lobby actions against the city during a time where focus should have been to save human lives and restore the infrastructure.
Yizahi 10y ago
Wireless is so so much harder and more expensive. I live in an average size apartment built from reinforced concrete panels and it is hell to setup wifi. Basically 2.4 GHz signal halves after each wall. 5 GHz is worse. I have two APs for 3 room 60 sq.m. apart and there are still dead zones everywhere. Same for GSM - if you are too high, too low, too far or in shadow from tower it just doesn't work properly. Holiday overload on the cell - goodbye internet. Wireless is barely functioning as it is and more customers will just make it worse. PS: also when something in the last mile is not working it is insane to debug it. Phone disconnects for some reason and that's it. Router is working but devices can't connect or auth. Some APs work and some aren't. My devices from same vendor and same model lineup can't even properly restart by themselves after power outage. I need to go and reboot them in order one by one each time. I hate wireless... :)
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  I think the fundamental problem is capacity. I haven't run a WISP, but my understanding is that a highly directional rooftop antenna solves most signal strength problems for individual subscribers. However, there's a practical requirement for the tower to have antennas with broader coverage (I think WISPs conventionally use sector antennas), because otherwise you'd just have too many antennas that need to continually be adjusted as subscribers come and go. Half-duplex medium and protocol overhead means that you're not going to get very many stations on a given combination of antenna and channel before performance starts taking a major hit. I've seen general guidelines that recommend no more than 20 stations per AP; I assume a WISP tower setup can optimize for more stations per channel, but I'd expect that to be on the order of a 2-5x multiplier, not 100x.

ComradeTaco 10y ago

I believe what you're talking about is called a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP). Netlinx is one example of it (http://netlinx.net/ http://netlinx.net/) I've read a bit about WISPs, because they seem like a happy solution to the whole monopoly problem but they haven't caught hold in the way that I've hoped. Latency seems to be a pretty significant issue. Consistency in signal strength is also a problem. I also sort of think that this is kind of the way we get out of problems without ever getting at the root cause. We look to technology that may exist at a later point to fix problems caused by underlying political, organizational and infrastructure issues. Always looking for the next band aid for the bullet hole I suppose.

trome 10y ago
Latency is often better than Cable ISPs and DSL (even with VDSL2 or Fastpath) on a WISP, and can easily compete with Fiber in terms of latency (wireless has less latency than optical glass), but where it falls down is in suburbia, where there isn't enough customer density to justify small cells and pole attachment costs don't allow you to feasibly put up nodes to blanket the neighborhood. Clearwire ran into many of these same issues, but they were able to operate at two orders of magnitude more power than most WISPs can (1 watt vs 150 watts) and had way more bandwidth around 2Ghz to work with, all of which was pristine.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  The fundamental problem with wireless is that in an area with even moderate density, you end up needing a wireless antenna within a mile of the customer's location, which itself needs a wired connection. And once you get that close you might as well bring the wire the rest of the way and not consume billions of dollars of wireless spectrum.
  - lewisl9029 10y ago
    All valid critiques, which is why I'm eagerly anticipating the new ISP that would hopefully come out of SpaceX's Low-Earth Orbit Internet Satellites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12982418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12982418
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      I don't think that actually replaces wired connections in urban or suburban areas, because it's susceptible to the same problem of needing shared wireless spectrum proportional to the number of regional users even though wireless spectrum is inherently limited by physical laws. What that would solve is high speed low latency access for rural areas.
  - upofadown 10y ago
    There is currently an idea floating around that you could put a wireless access point on every block and then provide gigabit wireless over millimetre wave spectrum. So a way of skipping the hard bit of fibre to the premises. Now all we need to do is actually make it work...
    - chrishacken 10y ago
      Like he said, you still need to spend an insane amount of money to acquire spectrum. Furthermore, High freq spectrum doesn't go through trees or buildings so any obstruction then makes dozens of properties unserviceable. Unless you put AP's every 500m, it doesn't work out the way you'd think it would, and at that point, you might as well just run a physical drop cable to the premise for a few hundred dollars.

raquo 10y ago

Wireless internet is not a solution – it's very obviously inferior to wired if you don't need the mobility. More expensive, lower bandwidth, higher latency, lower reliability.

DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
"Fixed wireless" systems like microwave and other line-of-sight systems have negligible latency (and considerably less latency than DSL which never seems to go below 20ms for me) and you can theoretically get gigabit speeds, and because there's no last-mile infrastructure besides an antenna it's less expensive to set-up too. The only thing you mention that applies is limited bandwidth: such systems only work in low-population-density rural environments, it would not work in Manhattan. There needs to be more consumer education to allow them to differentiate between high-performance things like fixed-wireless compared to running their home internet off their phone's LTE connection. Funnily, my iPhone's LTE connection (according to SpeedTest) has very good latency and throughput: I get ~10ms to my nearest major city and ~30mbps downstream, sometimes my LTE upstream speed is faster than my home DOCSIS connection. Alas I can't use it as my home connection because I need a static IP address and more than a few gigabytes of data-transfer per month (more like a few terabytes...)
- 69mlgsniperdad 10y ago
  I have a grandfathered 'unlimited' data plan with tmobile. I get 75mbit down and 40-70mbit up where I live and the places I spend 99% of my time. I often use a vpn(to hide user agent) and tether to get those speeds on my laptop when I'm not at home. Haven't had a problem with data caps yet, often use 50ish gigs of data, and have tethered over 20gb recently with no issue. Edit: Nexus 6p on LTE 700mhz
  - chrishacken 10y ago
    That only works because you're 1 person. If everyone in your town decided to do this your phone would be unusable. We have ~50 users on our unlicensed fixed wireless service and we've been running into numerous signal issues. Wireless isn't the answer.

belorn 10y ago

Maybe we should ask why so few cities provide free wifi in public spaces. As an example we can see what happened when New Orleans did that after Hurricane Katrina. Not only did Bell South take back donated resources to the rescue efforts, but they and several large telephone companies stepped up an aggressive lobby actions against the city during a time where focus should have been to save human lives and restore the infrastructure.

Yizahi 10y ago

Wireless is so so much harder and more expensive. I live in an average size apartment built from reinforced concrete panels and it is hell to setup wifi. Basically 2.4 GHz signal halves after each wall. 5 GHz is worse. I have two APs for 3 room 60 sq.m. apart and there are still dead zones everywhere. Same for GSM - if you are too high, too low, too far or in shadow from tower it just doesn't work properly. Holiday overload on the cell - goodbye internet. Wireless is barely functioning as it is and more customers will just make it worse. PS: also when something in the last mile is not working it is insane to debug it. Phone disconnects for some reason and that's it. Router is working but devices can't connect or auth. Some APs work and some aren't. My devices from same vendor and same model lineup can't even properly restart by themselves after power outage. I need to go and reboot them in order one by one each time. I hate wireless... :)

0xcde4c3db 10y ago
I think the fundamental problem is capacity. I haven't run a WISP, but my understanding is that a highly directional rooftop antenna solves most signal strength problems for individual subscribers. However, there's a practical requirement for the tower to have antennas with broader coverage (I think WISPs conventionally use sector antennas), because otherwise you'd just have too many antennas that need to continually be adjusted as subscribers come and go. Half-duplex medium and protocol overhead means that you're not going to get very many stations on a given combination of antenna and channel before performance starts taking a major hit. I've seen general guidelines that recommend no more than 20 stations per AP; I assume a WISP tower setup can optimize for more stations per channel, but I'd expect that to be on the order of a 2-5x multiplier, not 100x.