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Harvard Study Shows Why Big Telecom Is Terrified of Community-Run Broadband
- asabjorn 9y agoLiving in Oakland I wish I could replace my slow, expensive and high-latency Comcast broadband connection with Fiber. It is crazy that we in silicon valley practically have no competition.
- HarryHirsch 9y agoPeter Thiel explained it for you: competition is for suckers
- aeontech 9y agoNot that I am a big fan of AT&T, but they have started offering fiber gigabit in Oakland over the past year. I switched from Comcast in December. Wish Sonic or Monkeybrains would become available here.
- asabjorn 9y agoWhat did you switch to?
- aeontech 9y agoTo AT&T fiber, for now, pending a better option.
- malyk 9y agoI switched a couple of months ago from DSL to AT&T fiber and it's been fantastic. Helped that I was already an AT&T phone customer, but the fiber hasn't been available for that long, so it was nice discovery when I went to pick up my wife's iphone.
- passthefist 9y agoWhen I was in Oakland I was able to get Webpass with my building. $500/yr and 200mbit, though in practice it was actually higher. Never had a problem real with them, and their service was great. Per latency, my ping when playing games was sub 20 (but to be fair the servers were in California).
- grahamburger 9y agoWhat part of Oakland? You might check out common.net. We can cover some parts of Oakland now and hopefully more soon. I work there.
- nixpulvis 9y agoObviously. This is Econ 101.
- rsbartram 9y agoI hope new technology continues to provide new options and services for consumers. https://latechnews.org/eliminate-dropped-calls/ https://latechnews.org/eliminate-dropped-calls/ Read about ABWN and their new tech to eliminate dropped calls.
- Gys 9y ago'community-owned broadband networks provide consumers with significantly lower rates than their private-sector counterparts'
- tooltalk 9y agois it cheap and fast because they are run efficiently? or because they are subsidized by taxpayers or they are not burdened by the same rules that potential competitors have to hoop through? Having worked for a small gov't agency in NYC and personally witnessed all sorts of waste and incompetence, I'm a bit skeptical that this is at all possible. I don't think efficiency or cost-effectiveness is not something that comes to my mind when someone talks about gov't services.
- mnzaki 9y agoCommunity-owned does not necessarily mean govt owned: look at peer-to-peer mesh networks (https://hyperboria.net/ https://hyperboria.net/). Private citizens run their own nodes and connect to the nodes near them (and potentially help their neighbours by hooking them up and so on). The community members literally own the infrastructure; not through the abstraction of government. They have incentive to keep things running well and efficiently because well it's you and your friends and neighbours!
- timdellinger 9y agoThe community-owned options are only considered cheap and fast because they're being compared to monopoly or near-monopoly ISPs, which can get away with inflated prices and poor service because they have no competition. And while it's true that government bureaucracies tend to drift toward inefficiency, private monopolies are very similar. Comcast is basically so bad that they're unfixable.
- baby_wipe 9y agoAre community-run broadband providers cheaper because they are subsidized by taxes?
- mschuster91 9y ago> Are community-run broadband providers cheaper because they are subsidized by taxes? No, they are cheaper because the local monopolists/duopolists can charge the customers through the nose, as they don't have any alternative. Any form of competition leads to a reduction in costs for the consumer. In addition, stuff like eight-digit compensations (Comcast: 37.5M $ for the CEO alone, https://www1.salary.com/Stephen-B-Burke-Salary-Bonus-Stock-Options-for-COMCAST-CORP.html https://www1.salary.com/Stephen-B-Burke-Salary-Bonus-Stock-O...), marketing (TV ads, but also sponsoring, e.g. Comcast/ESL) or the costs associated with running e.g. decades-old mainframe stuff for CRM/financial systems or simply maintaining even older copper lines vs brand new fibre stuff sums up to quite a bunch of money - humble local ISPs don't have all that crap and therefore can pass on the savings to customers.
- pascalxus 9y agoAnd let's not forget their grand incompetence as well. At&t and comcast spend huge amounts on wasted advertisement. I get ads for At&T all the time. I hate them so much, I repeat click on their ads just to waste more of their marketing dollars. Obliviously, they keep sending me the same ads.
- loooooooooooool 9y agoOfcourse they show you more ads of them... You show you're interested by clicking. Ever thought about an ad blocker?
- briandear 9y agoWhy do you want to make things more expensive? Wasting their marketing dollars means they have to charge a higher price for their services. It's like going into a grocery store and taking all of the advertisement circulars and throwing them into the toilet. A pointless exercise that drives up costs.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoI think it's quite obvious and doesn't require a "Harvard" study. Community broadband can offer customers something big telecom won't: Reliable, honest, responsive service.
- walshemj 9y agotrue but do these services have their own customer service reps probably not
- pascalxus 9y agoWell, some people won't take it seriously unless there's a big brand name attached to the report.
- singhrac 9y agoThat's not entirely fair. There's plenty of reasons why this wouldn't be obvious - if there's limited demand for local broadband because of e.g. bundling agreements (you want TV + internet + phone, but the local broadband can only provide internet), or because the infrastructure costs on the last mile make it impossible for small players to charge low prices (so they operate with premium service as their sell instead).
- Simulacra 9y agoSometimes researchers need things to study so they can justify their existence.
- lordnacho 9y agoWould it be possible to shut out such community ISPs by not peering with them? Is that something that might cause concern?
- cinquemb 9y agoId say its a concern in the short run, but that would incentivize neighboring communities to invest in shared infrastructure and to peer with each other in the long run, esp if their only other option is to be shut out of the market entirely.
- notmetoday3426 9y agopeering with each other is no good - you need to peer with a Tier 1 who is in the IPX or you have no internet.
- 5ilv3r 9y agoecommerce retailers would peer with them directly and the entertainment networks would then be left holding nothing.
- Rapzid 9y agoNon-ISP transit providers would fill that need. Perhaps the ISPs would pressure them to not. Eventually a lawsuit would put an end to that.
- cptskippy 9y agoPeering agreements are typically between two networks of comparable size. In the case of a regional ISP wanting to connect to the internet, they would paying for access to one or more Tier 1 or Tier 2 providers and possibly participating in an IXP. There is much more competition in these markets and plenty of ISPs (e.g. CenturyLink) are also Teir 1 providers in markets where they do not act as an ISP.
- acd 9y agoMost broadband providers work with overbooking / contention ratios, so if you sell 100/100mbit you buy 20:1 to 50:1 less from the upstream provider. Overbooking ratios for consumer internet can be between for example 20:1 to 50:1. That means for 20mbit of bandwith to consumers you buy 1 mbit of bandwidth from a upstream provider. Buying one megabit of uplink at current market rate is typically less than a dollar from upstream providers. Contention ratio of Uk broadband. https://web.archive.org/web/20070930041720/http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/technology/spectrum_efficiency_scheme/ses2003-04/ay4463a/rp_anx/ay4463a_anx.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070930041720/http://www.ofcom.... You can buy commercial Internet uplink and link up your neighbours for cheaper than broadband ratios. Digging fibre in the ground is fairly expensive but gives more stable connection and most bandwidth. A cheaper route is to go Wifi mesh networking but on normal wifi access points one radio per access point you get halving of bandwidth for each mesh hop. If you go open source mesh with 3 radios per AP you can get better bandwidth. Nasa study of Mesh networks. Mesh hops vs bandwith https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140011882.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201400...
- bronco21016 9y agoI think you’re mis-interpreting the overbooking ratios. My understanding is that a 20:1 ratio means that for 1 mbit you can serve 20 customers 1 mbit. Your point still stands though. That means if 1 mbit cost $1 then it costs $0.04/customer. The real cost is in deploying the wires and countless studies have shown the ROI on that, especially given the exorbitant rates, is typically 5 years or less per hookup. Can you imagine how much Comcast etc have made per house they’ve run coax to? The ROI must be mind boggling.
- walshemj 9y agoThat ignores that the USO does require some mind blowingly expensive links I doubt that laying new local plant is a positive roi in 5 years.
- bronco21016 9y agoAccording to NRTC [1] fiber deployments to the premises cost approximately $800/deployment. Ignoring uptake, operational expenses etc that’s $13/mo per deployment to recover cost in 5 years. I have no idea what the average consumer pays their residential provider but I would estimate it’s over $100/mo on average. It seems like it would be fairly easy to get return in 5 years. These are numbers for fiber. [1] https://www.nrtc.coop/rural-connect/cost-of-rural-ftth-deployment-is-dropping https://www.nrtc.coop/rural-connect/cost-of-rural-ftth-deplo...
- creeble 9y agoThe monopoly broadband providers are extremely good at spreading FUD based on (incorrect) market-based economies: that public-sector solutions are usually more expensive and less efficient than private-sector ones. This is only true in the presence of healthy competition, which is generally absent in US broadband. Broadband providers tend to point to their (at most) single competitor as evidence of a competitive market. It doesn't take collusion to fix prices if you only have one competitor.
- gz5 9y agoThe only way to get the last mile competition we need in the US, and make net neutrality irrelevant, is for org-run fiber builds in which the org doesn't offer services. The org operates a multi-tenant fiber infrastructure in which you and I can pick (n) "service providers"...part of what I am hoping is a 2018 full of decentralization and distribution: https://goo.gl/DkpmU5 https://goo.gl/DkpmU5
- walshemj 9y agoOr just unbundle the local loop as we do in the UK
- gz5 9y agoyes although can be harder to retrofit, e.g. i don't believe many of the US fiber architectures were built to be multi-tenant with (n) service providers behind 1 operator. especially because the duopoly's control most of them. enter the muni-fiber and similar projects...but built to a different commercial model...
- walshemj 9y agoWell tough luck mate (you want to play in the big boys game ante up sub) Any how you can use ADSL variants or upgrade to FTC and use VDSL for the last drop.
- notmetoday3426 9y agoWell, ours wasn't either, but now it is. Note, the difficult bits aren't unbundled. We have market 1, market 2 .. The nice places mostly have cable too (which is not unbundled). Also OFCOM hasn't got a clue. Sorry venting... I keep meeting people who have build national broadband networks (from their opinions) at dinner parties and it's really got to me.
- gnopgnip 9y agoFor the urban, and dense suburban areas fiber is a great option and has much higher potential. But there will always be a large portion of the US that is not profitable to run fiber, and already has phone service. We already have multitenant access in the US for all phone service. Just extending the current regulation to cover DSL is all that is needed to allow for competition and improved internet speed. You can get up to 76mbps with VDSL2 over copper wire, just modern modems and provider side equipment. And there is newer technology that provides even better speeds over the same copper wire.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI always why there are MVNOs that can use the big cell networks but no alternative providers on cable. Was there regulation that forced cell providers to open their networks to third party sellers?
- FireBeyond 9y ago> Was there regulation that forced cell providers to open their networks to third party sellers? In many places, yes, because the spectrum is limited.
- jessaustin 9y agoNo regulation needed for this. MNOs make a profit from their MVNO business, and it allows them to overbid for spectrum in a relatively risk-free manner. Even if ATT can't get enough fools to sign up for their overpriced gold-plated mobile service to use all the spectrum they bought, they can tune the prices they charge MVNOs to fill the rest of the pipe. This arrangement also allow them to enjoy various other anticompetitive benefits like dictating "acceptable" marketing to MVNOs and forcing them to sign one-sided backhaul deals.
- mnzaki 9y agoWe can easily be running our own internet. I recenlty discovered CJDNS[1] (protocol for encrypted p2p address allocation and routing for mesh networks, so essentially OSI layer 3) and project Hyperboria[2] (a community of local WiFi initiatives) while exploring scuttlebutt[3]. Confirmed my suspicions that we could probably be getting waaay better internet connectivity at way lower prices. Decentralized tech is going to be the future. Now if we can only figure out how to not get squashed down by the powers that be. [1] https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns [2] https://hyperboria.net/ https://hyperboria.net/ [3] p2p social network https://scuttlebutt.nz https://scuttlebutt.nz
- msla 9y ago> CJDNS[1] (protocol for encrypted p2p address allocation and routing for mesh networks, so essentially OSI layer 3) and project Hyperboria[2] (a community of local WiFi initiatives) None of this addresses the big point, which is the backhaul, the transit networks, the big networks which knit together all of the smaller community networks and make them more useful. In short: If you make a nice little mesh network in your small town (New York City, say) you still haven't solved the problem of getting access to websites in Los Angeles, let alone Doha. Nobody talks much about that. Probably because it isn't possible for that to be decentralized or open in any meaningful sense, and it's certainly impossible for hobbyists to build it.
- a1371 9y agoThe mesh networks target the last mile problem. That is the big point to be addressed as it causes the affordability issues and is the main connectivity bottleneck. To improve the existing system full decentralisation is not necessary.
- djtriptych 9y agoExactly. It would allow companies like Google to get involved by leasing out their fiber backbone at cost for long-distance comms. Right now they're restricted by last mile costs, but otherwise they're incentivized to simply provide the fastest bandwidth to the most people, as their revenue simply scales with internet usage as a whole.
- rndmize 9y agoThe prequalification walls stuff is bullshit and should be illegal. Twice now I've moved to a recently constructed place where it was impossible to get any information on offerings or prices before completion - and putting in neighbor's addresses is an infuriating process of trying to find one who has ISP A instead of B repeatedly until I don't get a "this address already has service please login" message. So help me God I will get involved in local government if for no other reason that to advocate for municipal broadband and requiring fiber be laid for all new construction.
- pmarreck 9y agoThese shenanigans are why telcos/cell networks, and not ISP's/cable networks, are probably going to end up controlling all Internet traffic someday
- jdlyga 9y agoThey saw what happened to AOL, and they know it can happen to them too.
- pixelpp 9y agoThis article basically said that water is wet.
- tomkat0789 9y agoUseful resource for checking how many ISPs you have in your area: https://broadbandnow.com/ https://broadbandnow.com/ Though I'm skeptical at how accurate their maps are. It SAID that another provider covered my area, but when I called them that turned out to not be the case.
- abandonliberty 9y agoI see two factors: 1. 'Big Telecom', has all the problems of publicly traded large companies: Focus on creating shareholder value, complexity, inertia, etc. This is inefficiency due to objectives and organization. 2. Payoff horizon. It's easy/cheap to buy technology and set up a network for today, but are they charging enough to update all the hardware in a few years when technology improves? In Canada, even with aggressive government subsidization, multiple attempts to create new independent wireless carriers(Fido, Wind) have failed when they could not afford to grow their network beyond initial investments. It'll be very interesting to see how this develops and find out whether 1 trumps 2: will small community organizations be sufficiently efficient, or will they struggle with faster obsolescence than expected and be forced to acquire more capital.
- sethrin 9y agoI have for many years suspected that the US telecoms have colluded to set a price floor for broadband service at $60/mo, and for mobile data services at $40/mo. It strains credulity that data services would be markedly cheaper in nearly every other country.
- analog31 9y agoAsk HN: If I wanted to create a very small cooperative ISP for my family and a handful of neighbors, it doesn't seem like rocket science, except... At some point it has to connect to the Internet, meaning I have to buy some sort of connection. How's that work?
- afeezaziz 9y agoI have been wondering about this. Appreciate it if anyone provide some idea. I mean it it quite easy nowadays to set up a network both wired and wireless to share among neighbours. I did that. But lastly, it needs to be connected to the internet/first mile. If I can negotiate enough numbers and do the fiber laying work myself, how can i get the internet connection at wholesale?
- amazon_not 9y agoYou can buy wholesale Internet bandwidth from most larger ISPs. Get quotes by contacting the carriers in your area. Expect to pay a few grand per month for the pleasure. Give me a shout for more details.
- afeezaziz 9y agoHi, is this applicable even for outside US?
- amazon_not 9y agoYes, this is pretty much how is works everywhere.
- eksemplar 9y agoSeveral Danish municipalities have begun running their own WANs on loraWAN tech because it’s virtually free once the initial fee of setting it up has been paid. It’s not real internet, but it’s the only way we can connect our IOT and smart city stuff in a way that is economically feasible because we can’t afford to pay fees on connections for thousands of devices. We could set up our own internet, and I think we should, unfortunately this would be illegal as the large telecoms have lobbied their way into legislation ensuring that people pay, what is essentially a private tax, on their utilities.
- duncan_bayne 9y agoIt'd be nice to use terminology that distinguishes between infrastructure that is provided and maintained voluntarily, and infrastructure that is compulsorily funded by taxpayers. The difference is relevant from economic, moral and design perspectives.
- quantum_state 9y agoVery interesting possibilities ... network is really same as physical highways ... should be funded and run by the locales and federated into a wider network ... let’s start the journey ...
- doggydogs94 9y agoGovernment entities are fine for running utilities based on slow moving technologies (e.g. community sewer system). They would also be good for version 1 of your community internet service. But what about version 2? By the time the government is ready to roll out the version 2 internet backbone, it will be obsolete.
- amazon_not 9y agoFiber lasts for decades. It does not go obsolete. If you want something faster or better change the electronics on each end. If you are worried about the governed not keeping up, let the government put in the fiber and have somebody else light it.
- RichardBennett 9y agoNot so much. @HighTechForum: Berkman at Harvard study finds public networks to be nearly 7 Mbps slower than commercial ones; but hey, they’re often cheaper! See Community Broadband is Cheaper – and Slower” http://hightechforum.org/community-broadband-cheaper-slower/ http://hightechforum.org/community-broadband-cheaper-slower/