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> "upgrading our network" They actually where not doing this before because it's probably a bad idea. Modern cable networks look like this. https://en.wikiped

> "upgrading our network" They actually where not doing this before because it's probably a bad idea. Modern cable networks look like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial#/media/File:HFC_Network_Diagram.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial#/media/Fi... Fiber goes to copper which then splits out to a large number of homes. The copper line near your home can do multiple gigabit but that needs to be shared with everyone else on the tree. So selling higher speeds is easy, but reaching them for everyone requires splitting trees with new fiber drops. Providers usually do the first and only some or none of the second in order to sell bigger numbers and compete with Fiber. A similar thing happened to DSL trying to compete with cable, lets look where that is now. https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broadband-america/measuring-fixed-broadband-eighth-report https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad... See chart 15.3, DSL across the ISP industry only provides advertised download speeds 40% of the time. In any other industry this would be considered blatant fraud.

imglorp 7y ago
Fraud yes, because they're underprovisioned if everyone asks for 1 Gb, but the ponzi scheme continues to work okay because many households will find that median 72 Mbps is enough for several vid streams so they're good to go. The bigger problem is the industry which can do horrible, abusive things to its customers and communities. They'll try anything except delighting their customers. If any of the upcoming WISP solutions like Starlink take off, you might imagine a serious disruption.
- antisemiotic 7y ago
  How is this a Ponzi scheme?
  - imglorp 7y ago
    As GP (and FCC) indicates, you pay for a service but only get what was promised if the collective load permits. If everyone hits their lines at the same time, there's not enough capacity to maintain advertised service.
    - homonculus1 7y ago
      That doesn't describe a Ponzi scheme though.
      - tyingq 7y ago
        I think it's a very high level comparison to the idea that the funds/rewards in a Ponzi scheme are underprovisioned. Edit: Yes, it's not a great analogy.
        homonculus1 7y ago
        But on an even higher level, a Ponzi scheme is outright fraud where most victims get nothing. Underprovisioned internet bandwidth gives every customer part of what they were promised, which is plenty for most of them anyway. Using sensational words imprecisely distorts meaning.
    - Retric 7y ago
      Similar problems occur with the electric grid or water etc, but the thing is as long as there is excess capacity 24/7 you can’t tell the difference. Unlike money you can’t bank unused bandwidth. The reality of 1Gbps networks is people have trouble saturating the line for very long. Even 5 different 4K streams is not hitting anywhere close to that. Being able to download a 20GB file quickly is the benefit, even if you don’t download many of those per month.
- q3k 7y ago
  > Fraud yes, because they're underprovisioned if everyone asks for 1 Gb All residential ISPs overprovision [1] at some point or another - be it at the acccess level (as with shared mediums like DOCSIS and GPON), distribution/aggregation (metro Ethernet switch and (V)DSL DSLAM uplinks) or at peering/upstream level (always). You cannot expect to have non-overprovisioned 1Gbps at $60/mo, when global transit is currently around $0.6/Mbps/mo. Typical overprovisioning levels range from 1:8 to 1:16. [1] - From the point of view of offered speeds vs. underprovisioning infrastructure, as you put it. EDIT: corrected that DSL is not shared medium
  - josh2600 7y ago
    GPON is the least over provisioned of these, but it is definitely overprovisioned. DSL is the worst. Local VRADs just get slammed, particularly in areas with long connection runs.
  - iptrans 7y ago
    $0.6/Mbps/month is a bit on the high side for IP transit at scale. You can buy IP transit for under 10 cents per Mbps at well connected datcenters. Additionally, any ISP with peering at an Internet exchange will have a lower blended costs as a lot of content can be accessed over settlement free peering and local CDN nodes.
  - guan 7y ago
    There is a neighborhood community ISP in Copenhagen called Bryggenet. They used to make it very clear how much overprovisioning was going on, and have two different options each subscriber could pick with different levels of overprovisioning. I understand from some people who were involved that it caused some initial confusion and complaints, especially when comparing to advertised speeds of commercial offerings, but people understood eventually. They now seem to have moved away from that model, based on a quick look at their website. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryggenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryggenet
josh2600 7y ago
Basically every telecom network is built as fiber to the node not fiber to the premises. The nasty truth of all communication and transportation systems is that arteries are cheap and capillaries are expensive. If I am building roads, it is WAY cheaper to just build highways than it is to build the small roads to everyone’s homes. When doing construction for telecom, the payback calculations are based upon “passings” which basically says “if I lay this cable, how many potential subscribers will I get?” which is a function of addressable users and sales modeling. Comcast used to believe that in a new market, competing against att only, they could win more than 50% of customers over just by connecting them to the Comcast network. Please always remember, telecom, and transportation, are not technology businesses, they are real estate businesses. Telecom’s real estate are exclusive operation licenses, the most important of which being wireless spectrum, and the second most important of which being the places where they can exclusively tear up the earth to lay cable. Circling back on my point at the beginning, if we laid fiber to every home, we would not need to upgrade the network connection itself for a long, long time. As it stands now, we have a lot of work to do if we want real high speed options in the future. More fiber to the home, less fiber to distribution nodes!!
- kls 7y ago
  So we had this in the Florida Keys with AT&T who is the service provider of our area. I live 2 miles out on a peninsula of an island named Summerland, anyway I bought my house and AT&T assured me that I could get DSL but fiber would not be an option. I knew it was copper all the way to my home so I figured it would be the case. Anyways, I buy said house AT&T comes out and tried to get DSL working, and the lines have been so patched and spliced that they cannot even get 1mbps, so they basically tell me I am screwed that it would not be cost effective to run new copper down a 2 mile stretch and that my only option would be to pay (or band my neighbors together to pay -- All 2 of them) for them to string fiber the whole way. I think it would be something like 70k. 2 Months later Hurricane Irma hits and rips down every poll down our street, and AT&T is forced to restring the whole street due to the fact that they are legally required to provide phone service to every customer in their "exclusive" area or they loose said exclusivity. Fortunately for me they opted to string it with fiber, and provided fiber to the home. My point is, I don't see how allowing these "exclusive" coverage monopolies does anything but harm the consumer. I imagine a community based provider like the one in the article would be met with a host of legal challenges here.
tonyb 7y ago
Fiber to the home/GPON is also a shared medium. One OLT (the fiber device in the headend) port generally goes out to a splitter in the field that then goes to 128,64,or 32 customers which has about ~2.5 gbps of downstream speed that is probably also shared with the video service. That is generally more capacity than DOCSIS but it isn't a fiber straight from the customer house back to the provider network. Modern DOCSIS networks are much more capable than the linked diagram. The general guideline is that your top speed package shouldn't be any more than half of the node capacity (which ends up being similar to GPON that often does a 1gbps service on a shared ~2.5gbps network). The video portion of a HFC network also doesn't share the bandwidth that has been assigned to Data. The diagram shows a node of 500-2000 homes - that is a HUGE number, I've worked on networks with nodes much larger than they should be and about 250 is the biggest node. ~100 customers per node is more common and in newer or upgraded HFC networks the goal is normally N+1 or N+0 (Node plus one active device or zero active devices - the linked diagram is N+10) those numbers get down to the 32-64 customers/node range. I do work on DOCSIS networks for small providers but some of the tools the big guys use to monitor the RF quality is pretty amazing. They are able to read the RF Spectrum of every modem in the network and find common impairments in the cable plant and they can also assign individual modems different modulation profiles, so if your inside wiring and drop cable are capable of it your modem gets a higher modulation profile (and higher speed) than your neighbors that have crappy radio shack cable (the inside wiring has a huge impact on the signal quality). Traditionally you would have to set the service to work for the lowest common denominator but the emerging technologies are changing that. That doesn't necessary mean the big guys don't have capacity issues in other places (example: Netflix peering) but there is quite a bit of work and technology behind the last mile delivery. You also can't ignore the business aspects - there is significant capital investment in upgrading any last mile network. I can take a group of 200 customers at 50mbps and upgrade them to 200mbps and the overall traffic pattern doesn't hardly change at all. That makes it hard for operators to justify to shareholders why spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to go from 500mbps to 1gbsp is a good investment.
- novok 7y ago
  It's because software services are built according to the infrastructure of their typical customer. If symmetrical connections were the standard in america, how would that change the software landscape today?

imglorp 7y ago

Fraud yes, because they're underprovisioned if everyone asks for 1 Gb, but the ponzi scheme continues to work okay because many households will find that median 72 Mbps is enough for several vid streams so they're good to go. The bigger problem is the industry which can do horrible, abusive things to its customers and communities. They'll try anything except delighting their customers. If any of the upcoming WISP solutions like Starlink take off, you might imagine a serious disruption.

antisemiotic 7y ago
How is this a Ponzi scheme?
- imglorp 7y ago
  As GP (and FCC) indicates, you pay for a service but only get what was promised if the collective load permits. If everyone hits their lines at the same time, there's not enough capacity to maintain advertised service.
  - homonculus1 7y ago
    That doesn't describe a Ponzi scheme though.
    - tyingq 7y ago
      I think it's a very high level comparison to the idea that the funds/rewards in a Ponzi scheme are underprovisioned. Edit: Yes, it's not a great analogy.
      - homonculus1 7y ago
        But on an even higher level, a Ponzi scheme is outright fraud where most victims get nothing. Underprovisioned internet bandwidth gives every customer part of what they were promised, which is plenty for most of them anyway. Using sensational words imprecisely distorts meaning.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Similar problems occur with the electric grid or water etc, but the thing is as long as there is excess capacity 24/7 you can’t tell the difference. Unlike money you can’t bank unused bandwidth. The reality of 1Gbps networks is people have trouble saturating the line for very long. Even 5 different 4K streams is not hitting anywhere close to that. Being able to download a 20GB file quickly is the benefit, even if you don’t download many of those per month.
q3k 7y ago
> Fraud yes, because they're underprovisioned if everyone asks for 1 Gb All residential ISPs overprovision [1] at some point or another - be it at the acccess level (as with shared mediums like DOCSIS and GPON), distribution/aggregation (metro Ethernet switch and (V)DSL DSLAM uplinks) or at peering/upstream level (always). You cannot expect to have non-overprovisioned 1Gbps at $60/mo, when global transit is currently around $0.6/Mbps/mo. Typical overprovisioning levels range from 1:8 to 1:16. [1] - From the point of view of offered speeds vs. underprovisioning infrastructure, as you put it. EDIT: corrected that DSL is not shared medium
- josh2600 7y ago
  GPON is the least over provisioned of these, but it is definitely overprovisioned. DSL is the worst. Local VRADs just get slammed, particularly in areas with long connection runs.
- iptrans 7y ago
  $0.6/Mbps/month is a bit on the high side for IP transit at scale. You can buy IP transit for under 10 cents per Mbps at well connected datcenters. Additionally, any ISP with peering at an Internet exchange will have a lower blended costs as a lot of content can be accessed over settlement free peering and local CDN nodes.
- guan 7y ago
  There is a neighborhood community ISP in Copenhagen called Bryggenet. They used to make it very clear how much overprovisioning was going on, and have two different options each subscriber could pick with different levels of overprovisioning. I understand from some people who were involved that it caused some initial confusion and complaints, especially when comparing to advertised speeds of commercial offerings, but people understood eventually. They now seem to have moved away from that model, based on a quick look at their website. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryggenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryggenet

josh2600 7y ago

Basically every telecom network is built as fiber to the node not fiber to the premises. The nasty truth of all communication and transportation systems is that arteries are cheap and capillaries are expensive. If I am building roads, it is WAY cheaper to just build highways than it is to build the small roads to everyone’s homes. When doing construction for telecom, the payback calculations are based upon “passings” which basically says “if I lay this cable, how many potential subscribers will I get?” which is a function of addressable users and sales modeling. Comcast used to believe that in a new market, competing against att only, they could win more than 50% of customers over just by connecting them to the Comcast network. Please always remember, telecom, and transportation, are not technology businesses, they are real estate businesses. Telecom’s real estate are exclusive operation licenses, the most important of which being wireless spectrum, and the second most important of which being the places where they can exclusively tear up the earth to lay cable. Circling back on my point at the beginning, if we laid fiber to every home, we would not need to upgrade the network connection itself for a long, long time. As it stands now, we have a lot of work to do if we want real high speed options in the future. More fiber to the home, less fiber to distribution nodes!!

kls 7y ago
So we had this in the Florida Keys with AT&T who is the service provider of our area. I live 2 miles out on a peninsula of an island named Summerland, anyway I bought my house and AT&T assured me that I could get DSL but fiber would not be an option. I knew it was copper all the way to my home so I figured it would be the case. Anyways, I buy said house AT&T comes out and tried to get DSL working, and the lines have been so patched and spliced that they cannot even get 1mbps, so they basically tell me I am screwed that it would not be cost effective to run new copper down a 2 mile stretch and that my only option would be to pay (or band my neighbors together to pay -- All 2 of them) for them to string fiber the whole way. I think it would be something like 70k. 2 Months later Hurricane Irma hits and rips down every poll down our street, and AT&T is forced to restring the whole street due to the fact that they are legally required to provide phone service to every customer in their "exclusive" area or they loose said exclusivity. Fortunately for me they opted to string it with fiber, and provided fiber to the home. My point is, I don't see how allowing these "exclusive" coverage monopolies does anything but harm the consumer. I imagine a community based provider like the one in the article would be met with a host of legal challenges here.

tonyb 7y ago

Fiber to the home/GPON is also a shared medium. One OLT (the fiber device in the headend) port generally goes out to a splitter in the field that then goes to 128,64,or 32 customers which has about ~2.5 gbps of downstream speed that is probably also shared with the video service. That is generally more capacity than DOCSIS but it isn't a fiber straight from the customer house back to the provider network. Modern DOCSIS networks are much more capable than the linked diagram. The general guideline is that your top speed package shouldn't be any more than half of the node capacity (which ends up being similar to GPON that often does a 1gbps service on a shared ~2.5gbps network). The video portion of a HFC network also doesn't share the bandwidth that has been assigned to Data. The diagram shows a node of 500-2000 homes - that is a HUGE number, I've worked on networks with nodes much larger than they should be and about 250 is the biggest node. ~100 customers per node is more common and in newer or upgraded HFC networks the goal is normally N+1 or N+0 (Node plus one active device or zero active devices - the linked diagram is N+10) those numbers get down to the 32-64 customers/node range. I do work on DOCSIS networks for small providers but some of the tools the big guys use to monitor the RF quality is pretty amazing. They are able to read the RF Spectrum of every modem in the network and find common impairments in the cable plant and they can also assign individual modems different modulation profiles, so if your inside wiring and drop cable are capable of it your modem gets a higher modulation profile (and higher speed) than your neighbors that have crappy radio shack cable (the inside wiring has a huge impact on the signal quality). Traditionally you would have to set the service to work for the lowest common denominator but the emerging technologies are changing that. That doesn't necessary mean the big guys don't have capacity issues in other places (example: Netflix peering) but there is quite a bit of work and technology behind the last mile delivery. You also can't ignore the business aspects - there is significant capital investment in upgrading any last mile network. I can take a group of 200 customers at 50mbps and upgrade them to 200mbps and the overall traffic pattern doesn't hardly change at all. That makes it hard for operators to justify to shareholders why spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to go from 500mbps to 1gbsp is a good investment.

novok 7y ago
It's because software services are built according to the infrastructure of their typical customer. If symmetrical connections were the standard in america, how would that change the software landscape today?