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My parents have no access to high speed internet, except over 4G. Which I find unacceptable. Even DSL would be fine...but ISPs have discontinued that and are ex
by partiallypro 7y ago
My parents have no access to high speed internet, except over 4G. Which I find unacceptable. Even DSL would be fine...but ISPs have discontinued that and are expanding fiber. So that basically adds maybe 5-10 more years before they'd ever get it?
I generally don't agree with Bernie's whole premise here, but I do think he has the right idea. We should up high speed requirements, but also OTA should not count. The reason wireless (5G, 4G, Satellite) shouldn't count is...well the data caps are so limiting that you can't possibly do anything with the service. Or the equipment and setup is so expensive you'd have to be a company to afford it. I don't agree that high speed is a "human right," I really think such statements add nothing of value and make such proposals easy to mock. The argument should simply be to treat high speed land lines as a public utility and requirement, like electricity.
- cortesoft 7y agoInstead of saying OTA doesn't count, why don't you just set the requirements as both speed and data cap requirements? So that an OTA solution that has high enough speed and high enough data caps would count. I don't think encoding a current limitation into law is a good idea. If they can provide a wireless internet that meets the requirements, that is good enough for me.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoI’d add a latency maximum too, which would be low enough to disqualify wireless connections. A fiber circuit to each home is the minimum I would accept.
- jakemal 7y agoWhile I agree access to the wealth of information on the internet should be a right, I don't think it's necessary to require every household to have gaming level latency. OTA latency is generally good enough for doing what really matters on the internet.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoIt really helps with communications, and there’s just no reason not to since a symmetric connection is going to be fiber anyway, might as well beef it up for low marginal cost and make it a little future proof.
- dillonmckay 7y agoI think we can all agree on a maximum of say 300ms, right?
- isostatic 7y agoWhat latency? 100ms is fine for pretty much every internet use there is.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoUsing the internet with connections that have 5ms latency is a far better experience than 100ms, especially with real time communications. Also, everyone should have symmetric connections, none of this 250mbps down and 3mbps up BS.
- EpicEng 7y agoSure, and living in a mansion is a far better experience than living in public housing. We're talking about service as a "right", right?
- mcny 7y agoOn the other end of the spectrum, why does the federal government spend money on the "interstate" highway in Hawaii? Why does every state (even Wyoming) have two senators? I think we should have use common sense here. Fiber deployment is expensive but it is probably worth pulling fiber at least to every post office in these United States.
- wool_gather 7y agoDo you literally mean internet access in the post office building, or are you using that as a metonym for population centers?
- mcny 7y ago> Do you literally mean internet access in the post office building, or are you using that as a metonym for population centers? I didn't even know the word metonym but you said it better than I could have. Yes, I mean population centers. I mean we have to be reasonable. If someone moves to the South Pole and demands we run fiber there, we might have to say no. I don't know where we exactly draw the line though. My understanding is that there is a lot of "dark fiber" criss crossing the country that can be "lit up" so the "long haul" isn't so much of a problem as the "last mile". I could be wrong though. I don't know much about these things.
- Mindless2112 7y agoThe speed of light through optical fiber is slower than the speed of electromagnetic waves through air, so good wireless could be lower latency than good fiber.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoYes, but for whatever reason, no wireless connection is as good as a wired connection today, and as far as I know, wired will still be superior to wireless for a long time.
- cortesoft 7y agoWith 5G, the 'air latency' will be about 8-12ms. That is about the same as a wired connection (from your house to the ISP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G
- lotsofpulp 7y agoThat will be nice, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Tech claims are usually exaggerated, or ignore overhead in the real world.
- partiallypro 7y agoI guess it would depend, I do understand that they could build a 4G tower near everyone that serves well and has no datacaps...but what happens when people clog up the tower? Wireless has a lot of problems landlines (generally) don't have. I guess OTA would be fine, if the telecom could prove that it could handle over a certain amount of traffic without throttling (this is generally why throttling exists.)
- isostatic 7y agoWhat happens when your 1G FTTP is plugged into a 48 port switch with a 10G uplink and you're throttled to 200M?
- nrp 7y agoThe same thing that happens when wired ISPs oversubscribe their infrastructure. Users get less than than theoretical maximum speed. Wireless infrastructure doesn’t inherently have this problem and wired infrastructure doesn’t inherently solve it. The bigger problem with wireless internet access is probably geographical constraints where neighboring sites can have drastically different quality depending on what is between them and the closest tower.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoWired ISP over subscription is easy to solve.
- polski-g 7y agoBecause wireless spectrum is a finite resource. We literally can't use more of it than is available.
- cortesoft 7y agoWe are nowhere near the theoretical limits of the wireless bandwidth.
- xadhominemx 7y agoYour parents almost certainly have access to satellite broadband
- dillonmckay 7y agoLine of sight to the Clark Belt, correct?
- partiallypro 7y agoSatellite broadband is incredibly expensive and has data caps that are no different than 4G at around 5 - 15GB/month. Some setup costs are up near $500 and require a 1-2 year contract.
- xadhominemx 7y agoSo they get broadband, you just don’t like the price
- adventured 7y ago> So that basically adds maybe 5-10 more years before they'd ever get it? They'll have access to Starlink within the next few years. Proper broadband access at prices competitive to fast cable and fiber in the rest of the country.
- uoaei 7y ago> I don't agree that high speed is a "human right" What makes access to high-speed internet a privilege as opposed to a right? Why shouldn't everyone be guaranteed access to high-speed internet?
- Pigo 7y agoI fundamentally don't agree with an ever expanding list of "human rights", because it requires an every expanding government to fulfill them.
- charlesism 7y agoThat’s not very nuanced. A big Finnish government is different than, say, a big Russian government. To me it seems like saying: I fundamentally disagree with dining out because it requires restaurant, and restaurant is always bad.
- hollerith 7y agoRestaurants didn't kill 100 million people over the previous century.
- tharne 7y ago^This. Over the course of the 20th century, the vast majority of killings occurred at the hands of governments. Furthermore, it was typically governments killing their own people, not the people of other countries. Say what will about big greedy corporations, they're boy scouts when compared to the carnage brought about by governments in the last century.
- rini17 7y agoWhenever there was profit in the killing, corporations willfully helped. The distinction is meaningless.
- imglorp 7y agoThe part I don't agree with is paying for universal access, again. Those of us fortunate enough to have an ISP have been paying into the Federal Universal Service Fund for decades. Of course, that money went into the pockets and broadband is still not fully deployed in this century. I think every ISP which got FUSF money should deploy, now, as promised, with the money they've already been given, before we talk about giving them more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund#Controv...
- GeekyBear 7y agoI can remember back when telecommunications industry profit margins were strictly regulated by public service commissions. In return for the deregulation of the industry in the 90's, we were told that we were going to get upgraded to broadband access in everybody's home. It seems like we have already paid for universal broadband more than once.
- rayiner 7y ago> I can remember back when telecommunications industry profit margins were strictly regulated by public service commissions. Yes, and the industry stagnated for decades.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoAnd it has stagnated again.
- rayiner 7y agoStagnated what alternate reality? https://www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafband-faster-ookla https://www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafband-f... > U.S. internet speeds rose nearly 40 percent this year https://nypost.com/2018/07/11/the-average-internet-speed-has-risen-23-in-a-year/ https://nypost.com/2018/07/11/the-average-internet-speed-has... > News was particularly good for the United States, which moved up from the 21st-fastest country in 2017 to the 20th-fastest country in 2018. That might not sound like much of an improvement, but it was achieved by increasing speeds from an average 20 Mbps to nearly 26 Mbps, a bigger increase than the average. (In 2019, the US jumped from 20th to 15th in the M-lab data, ahead of Germany, France, the UK, and Italy.) Over the decade or so Akamai published its results on broadband speeds (the last one being in 2017) the US moved from the 20s into the top 10. The idea that US broadband is slow or stagnant is just totally false, to the point where you have to wonder where it comes from.
- fjabre 7y agoHigh speed most certainly is a human right. The internet is now a necessary feature of everyone’s personal and professional life. It should be a human right and if governments were smart they would blanket their countries with free high speed for the masses. Instead we contend with the likes of Verizon and ATT whose profit motives are at odds with the core principles of a free and open internet.
- tharne 7y ago> The internet is now a necessary feature of everyone’s personal and professional life You clearly don't know a very diverse group of people. Not everyone works in an office sitting behind a MacBook Pro. A lot of people still make things with their hands.