5 ms·

Most 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

by acd 9y ago

Most 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 ago
I 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 ago
  That 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 ago
    According 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...
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      Less of that three digit cable bill goes to the company than you might expect. Content providers don't give it away for free. ESPN is notorious for eating a huge % of the bill.
      - notmetoday3426 9y ago
        Not just content, also peering and data transit; you pay at the IPX, or you have no internez for selling. You need a customer services organisation - perhaps minimal, but people will write to the CEO so you need some way of handling contact. You need billing, you need security, you need repair and diagnostics, and you need capital ready to meet unexpected expenses, like storm damage, or power surges. Oh Oh I forgot, power, power costs also. But true point: none of the above is competitive in the current market. To compete you need content, many customers are willing to pay for football. Some customers don't give a toss about football, but not enough customers don't care about content and do care about good internet to make things work. Believe me - it makes me sad.
      - loooooooooooool 9y ago
        And the fuckers will not sell you internet without you also buying their useless phone and/or TV services...
    - wahern 9y ago
      In San Francisco Sonic charges $50 + taxes for 100Mb/s fiber service, and they're profitable. IIRC, the CEO of Sonic has hinted their connection cost per house is closer to $400 (at least during a roll-out in an SF suburb), though I can't find any references. They forced AT&T's hand, which began rolling out their service in the city about a year later. AT&T charges $70 or more, I think. It's cheaper to do this stuff than the big companies let on. The problem is that they can make even _more_ money investing in other services and products, like cellular and cable TV. Worse, fiber eats into their cable TV profits and jeopardizes their wet dreams about 5G cellular data plans. [1] It's $40 + $10 router rental, or $50 if you have your own router. But $50 for the service alone isn't promotional, whereas the $40 + rental is technically promotional and might become $50 + rental down the road.
- Jemmeh 9y ago
  But we taxpayers already paid $400 billion to have fiber ran throughout the US, just never happened. ISPs took payment but didn't deliver. https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c5e97/eli5_how_were_isps_able_to_pocket_the_200_billion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c5e97/e...
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Right. So what can be done about telcos taking that money, and giving it to shareholders instead of delivering the infrastructure they committed to? Very little. That money is gone.
    - otakucode 9y ago
      It can be observed that they are a hostile party who have no place in our local communities and are not welcome. They can have their exclusive contracts to pole access and provision of telecom services revoked by municipalities who then construct an ISP as a regulated public utility like water or power. A private company runs the utility, one legally required to base their fees upon the actual cost of providing the service (which guarantees it drops as fast as tech costs drop - fast), has to appeal to a utilities commission if they wish to raise rates, while providing legitimate justification based upon an increase in the cost of providing the service, etc. Overnight government would be able to mandate universal service availability, and count on citizens having Internet access. That would mean being able to close physical government offices and let the clerks work from home. Billions saved right off the bat. It would mean less spying, as municipal people are not going to just bend over when the feds show up, they will actually demand to see a warrant - unlike any large American company who derives large amounts of their own income from being granted government contracts. It would mean no ridiculous upcharging for "business" connections (just like we don't charge restaurants more for tap water because they make soup out of it and sell it). It would also mean no more asynchronous connections which only exist to prop up the expensive business connections. It would mean an ISP that serves as infrastructure that improves society in a multitude of ways rather than a luxury good fed off of by a greedy tick that was lucky enough to hold exclusive sway over pole access rights and telecom rights when their single biggest competitor, the Internet, appeared on the scene. Letting companies like Comcast, Time Warner, etc run ISPs is sheer madness. They are media distribution companies. Their empires were built on that. And the Internet makes media distribution worthless. Any clever kid can run circles around them and provide a better service. And we let them have their hands on its throat?
- sp332 9y ago
  Right, 20:1 ratio means for 20mbit of bandwith to consumers you buy 1 mbit of bandwidth from a upstream provider. I don't think you're disagreeing.
- Retric 9y ago
  The marginal cost of a new 20Mbit customer when you have 500+ customers is 1 Mbit upstream bandwidth. However, you can't really get just 1 Mbit at those scales so it's closer to 100 extra customers cost 100Mbit.
notmetoday3426 9y ago
Your UK bb reference is from 2007; it's an interesting historical read, although I can't find the information about contention ratio easily. Could you give the page number please? I think that modern use cases require very much more significant bandwidth, and sustaining sufficient bandwidth with QoS for 2018 use cases (and think 2025 for the purposes of sane investment) is quite beyond wifi mesh. 5G will potentially meet these cases outside and with a dense fibre backhaul, internally I think we're talking plasticised fibre.
jsoc815 9y ago
> You can buy commercial Internet uplink and link up your neighbours... Thanks for this. I've been wondering about this for the last few years now. Guess the idea isn't completely nuts and will have to research further.
- dboreham 9y ago
  Alternatively go get a pile of money and prepare to set fire to it. Source: did this for 10 years.
  - mnzaki 9y ago
    I would be very interested to hear more about your experience dboreham! I'm assuming you mean you ran a small/local ISP and it was an overall loss? What do you think of something like Hyperboria (https://hyperboria.net/ https://hyperboria.net/) which is based on CJDNS, so there's no "ISP" really, but each peer sort of is a very small very local service provider to whoever they decide to peer with. I was imagining some peers will charge other peers money to act as their gateway to the public network. Or maybe a bunch of people will pool their money and buy commercial network access
    - dboreham 9y ago
      Mesh networking is completely useless for providing anything other than last-ditch service. It originated in a) academia where it's a nice thing to tinker with and write PhD theses and b) in the military where having a network connection no matter how crappy can make the difference between life and death. It has no place imho in delivering any kind of service that someone would use day-to-day and certainly not one that anyone would pay for. WISP networks are built with point-to-point links: the appropriate technology for delivering good QoS. Since radios and antennas are extremely cheap this is the way to go. The rock you'll flounder upon is that you need to buy a pretty beefy connection to serve any number of customers (even 1). The cost of said connection in most places is quite high. This places a lower bound on the number of paying customers you need to break even. That number is somewhere around 100. This is before you factor in the cost of customer support, schlepping around on people's roofs, finding and negotiating leases on repeater locations, etc. The number of places where there is not a better competitive offering available to customers (or a high likelihood one will show up before you recoup your investment) is low. Current wireless technology (and according to Shannon, any wireless technology we can imagine) has quite a low upper bound to throughput -- much lower than is achievable with coax for example. So you can't complete on speed with anyone except DSL and Satellite.

by acd 9y ago

bronco21016 9y ago

I 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 ago
That 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 ago
  According 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...
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    Less of that three digit cable bill goes to the company than you might expect. Content providers don't give it away for free. ESPN is notorious for eating a huge % of the bill.
    - notmetoday3426 9y ago
      Not just content, also peering and data transit; you pay at the IPX, or you have no internez for selling. You need a customer services organisation - perhaps minimal, but people will write to the CEO so you need some way of handling contact. You need billing, you need security, you need repair and diagnostics, and you need capital ready to meet unexpected expenses, like storm damage, or power surges. Oh Oh I forgot, power, power costs also. But true point: none of the above is competitive in the current market. To compete you need content, many customers are willing to pay for football. Some customers don't give a toss about football, but not enough customers don't care about content and do care about good internet to make things work. Believe me - it makes me sad.
    - loooooooooooool 9y ago
      And the fuckers will not sell you internet without you also buying their useless phone and/or TV services...
  - wahern 9y ago
    In San Francisco Sonic charges $50 + taxes for 100Mb/s fiber service, and they're profitable. IIRC, the CEO of Sonic has hinted their connection cost per house is closer to $400 (at least during a roll-out in an SF suburb), though I can't find any references. They forced AT&T's hand, which began rolling out their service in the city about a year later. AT&T charges $70 or more, I think. It's cheaper to do this stuff than the big companies let on. The problem is that they can make even _more_ money investing in other services and products, like cellular and cable TV. Worse, fiber eats into their cable TV profits and jeopardizes their wet dreams about 5G cellular data plans. [1] It's $40 + $10 router rental, or $50 if you have your own router. But $50 for the service alone isn't promotional, whereas the $40 + rental is technically promotional and might become $50 + rental down the road.
Jemmeh 9y ago
But we taxpayers already paid $400 billion to have fiber ran throughout the US, just never happened. ISPs took payment but didn't deliver. https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c5e97/eli5_how_were_isps_able_to_pocket_the_200_billion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c5e97/e...
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Right. So what can be done about telcos taking that money, and giving it to shareholders instead of delivering the infrastructure they committed to? Very little. That money is gone.
  - otakucode 9y ago
    It can be observed that they are a hostile party who have no place in our local communities and are not welcome. They can have their exclusive contracts to pole access and provision of telecom services revoked by municipalities who then construct an ISP as a regulated public utility like water or power. A private company runs the utility, one legally required to base their fees upon the actual cost of providing the service (which guarantees it drops as fast as tech costs drop - fast), has to appeal to a utilities commission if they wish to raise rates, while providing legitimate justification based upon an increase in the cost of providing the service, etc. Overnight government would be able to mandate universal service availability, and count on citizens having Internet access. That would mean being able to close physical government offices and let the clerks work from home. Billions saved right off the bat. It would mean less spying, as municipal people are not going to just bend over when the feds show up, they will actually demand to see a warrant - unlike any large American company who derives large amounts of their own income from being granted government contracts. It would mean no ridiculous upcharging for "business" connections (just like we don't charge restaurants more for tap water because they make soup out of it and sell it). It would also mean no more asynchronous connections which only exist to prop up the expensive business connections. It would mean an ISP that serves as infrastructure that improves society in a multitude of ways rather than a luxury good fed off of by a greedy tick that was lucky enough to hold exclusive sway over pole access rights and telecom rights when their single biggest competitor, the Internet, appeared on the scene. Letting companies like Comcast, Time Warner, etc run ISPs is sheer madness. They are media distribution companies. Their empires were built on that. And the Internet makes media distribution worthless. Any clever kid can run circles around them and provide a better service. And we let them have their hands on its throat?
sp332 9y ago
Right, 20:1 ratio means for 20mbit of bandwith to consumers you buy 1 mbit of bandwidth from a upstream provider. I don't think you're disagreeing.
Retric 9y ago
The marginal cost of a new 20Mbit customer when you have 500+ customers is 1 Mbit upstream bandwidth. However, you can't really get just 1 Mbit at those scales so it's closer to 100 extra customers cost 100Mbit.

notmetoday3426 9y ago

Your UK bb reference is from 2007; it's an interesting historical read, although I can't find the information about contention ratio easily. Could you give the page number please? I think that modern use cases require very much more significant bandwidth, and sustaining sufficient bandwidth with QoS for 2018 use cases (and think 2025 for the purposes of sane investment) is quite beyond wifi mesh. 5G will potentially meet these cases outside and with a dense fibre backhaul, internally I think we're talking plasticised fibre.

jsoc815 9y ago

> You can buy commercial Internet uplink and link up your neighbours... Thanks for this. I've been wondering about this for the last few years now. Guess the idea isn't completely nuts and will have to research further.

dboreham 9y ago
Alternatively go get a pile of money and prepare to set fire to it. Source: did this for 10 years.
- mnzaki 9y ago
  I would be very interested to hear more about your experience dboreham! I'm assuming you mean you ran a small/local ISP and it was an overall loss? What do you think of something like Hyperboria (https://hyperboria.net/ https://hyperboria.net/) which is based on CJDNS, so there's no "ISP" really, but each peer sort of is a very small very local service provider to whoever they decide to peer with. I was imagining some peers will charge other peers money to act as their gateway to the public network. Or maybe a bunch of people will pool their money and buy commercial network access
  - dboreham 9y ago
    Mesh networking is completely useless for providing anything other than last-ditch service. It originated in a) academia where it's a nice thing to tinker with and write PhD theses and b) in the military where having a network connection no matter how crappy can make the difference between life and death. It has no place imho in delivering any kind of service that someone would use day-to-day and certainly not one that anyone would pay for. WISP networks are built with point-to-point links: the appropriate technology for delivering good QoS. Since radios and antennas are extremely cheap this is the way to go. The rock you'll flounder upon is that you need to buy a pretty beefy connection to serve any number of customers (even 1). The cost of said connection in most places is quite high. This places a lower bound on the number of paying customers you need to break even. That number is somewhere around 100. This is before you factor in the cost of customer support, schlepping around on people's roofs, finding and negotiating leases on repeater locations, etc. The number of places where there is not a better competitive offering available to customers (or a high likelihood one will show up before you recoup your investment) is low. Current wireless technology (and according to Shannon, any wireless technology we can imagine) has quite a low upper bound to throughput -- much lower than is achievable with coax for example. So you can't complete on speed with anyone except DSL and Satellite.