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I talked with the mayor of Los Altos Hills, CA yesterday where I advocated for a municipal fiber ISP. It seems crazy to me that in Silicon Valley, and specifica

I talked with the mayor of Los Altos Hills, CA yesterday where I advocated for a municipal fiber ISP. It seems crazy to me that in Silicon Valley, and specifically in one of its richest towns, that broadband is not available to every residence. She makes a good point: the residents don't care. Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population. And further - that for those who find that inadequate - Comcast is often (but by no means universally) available. I write this tethered to the cell network because I can't get a decent wired internet solution here, with direct line-of-sight to Google's headquarters and the mega-offices of many of tech's largest players. As I am stuck at home, constantly turning off others' video streams while I try to engage with my coworkers remotely, I deeply wish that we had either a more competitive marketplace or a more belligerently pro-consumer regulator. And, by the way, the FCC thinks I have a dozen options for broadband. That is false.

Zhenya 7y ago
Not that this is a solution but get a good directional antenna and point it at Google - instant guest network(advice not guaranteed to work)!
tarde 7y ago
> Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough that is insane. How having no internet is fine because 20mbps is enough? That could be a good argument against fiber (which i also think is overkill, decent cooper is lower maintenance and with enough repeaters as good as) but it is hardly an argument against it being available to all as a public utility. > And, by the way, the FCC thinks I have a dozen options for broadband. That is false. and the real enemy shows up. FCC, from the bush-omaba-trump admin become the most corrupt organization one can think of. They openly lie and laugh when someone point out the lie.
- coldpie 7y ago
  > from the bush-omaba-trump admin become the most corrupt organization one can think of I don't know whether they were corrupt, but Tom Wheeler did a fantastic job from a consumer rights & Internet health perspective during the Obama admin. Most notably he implemented Title II regulations to enforce net neutrality (since undone by a Republican), but also supported municipal broadband (since undone by a Republican), fought against several huge communication company mergers (since undone by a Republican), and supported content providers against ISPs charging interconnection fees. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/how-a-former-lobbyist-became-the-broadband-industrys-worst-nightmare/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/how-a...
  - tarde 7y ago
    on his first year he passed the "internet fast lane" regulation, against net neutrality, and made lots of profits for his cable and wireless business. only to four months later start a huge campaign with obama pro net neutrality for the classification of ISPs as utilities under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (with profitable exceptions). Opening the floodgates on direct white house influence on the FCC and permanently making it the political tool which Ajit Pai wields.
    - plussed_reader 7y ago
      What choice is there when congress can't/won't legislate? The regulation is (still) badly needed. We see the shortcomings of the current delivery system laid bare but if a company won't invest to keep a competitive advantage, again what choice is there?
      - int_19h 7y ago
        > What choice is there when congress can't/won't legislate? Work on electing different people to Congress, and meanwhile try to implement it on state level? I mean, the whole point of having Congress is so that the executive can't just do whatever it wants.
    - tzs 7y ago
      > on his first year he passed the "internet fast lane" regulation, against net neutrality, and made lots of profits for his cable and wireless business No, he proposed a net neutrality regulation that would allow fast lanes, and said he was open to a stronger rule if it had enough support. The comments on the first proposal overwhelmingly favored a stronger approach, and so the final rule that he actually passed was the Title II reclassification. He took this approach because the courts had struck down the Open Internet Order of 2010, and this was the safest way to restore as much of that as possible without doing a very politically difficult and risky Title II reclassification. And what do you mean "his cable and wireless business"? In the distant past he had held executive positions in first the main cable trade group, and later the main wireless trade group, but the first was something like 30 years before he was on the FCC and the second something like 10 years before he was on the FCC. The cable stuff was so long ago that it was just television--the cable modem had not yet been invented. It was also a time when the cable industry was the disruptive new kid on the block trying to bring competition for the big entrenched OTA broadcast networks. Same thing when he worked for the wireless industry. It was when they were the new thing trying to make inroads against the big landline telecom companies.
- greedo 7y ago
  I'm not sure why you think "decent cooper" is as good as fiber. Unless you can deliver me 1Gbps symmetrically like my current fiber, you're inadequate. I currently have two kids doing remote learning, a wife who's starting to VPN at times, and I myself work remotely at least 9 hours a day for the last 20 days. My podunk town has FTH through a municipal partnership. It works great. If my town can do it, I expect every other town above a population of 300K to do it as well. It's not rocket science. The problem is with people saying crap like "good enough." The Network Director at my company said that a wireless (GSM) connection of 1Mbps was "good enough." I laughed and said that explains why our LAN and WAN speeds are so bad. WiFi in a conference room with an access point directly overhead fails half the time. Good enough... Times are changing. 20 years ago I worked at a distance learning company creating H.S. courseware. Cutting edge stuff that was lost in a market that didn't care. Too many competing interests. But I bet all those education administrators wish they had invested in more than Chromebooks that don't have courseware.
  - creato 7y ago
    > Unless you can deliver me 1Gbps symmetrically like my current fiber, you're inadequate. I currently have two kids doing remote learning, a wife who's starting to VPN at times, and I myself work remotely at least 9 hours a day for the last 20 days. This really shouldn't require such exotic internet. Unless you are downloading large files, it's hard to use more than a few megabits per person on average. Often the nice thing about fiber is the surrounding infrastructure is newer and better.
    - zbrozek 7y ago
      Try living in a place with only 3 mbps down. You'll find your various computing devices are constantly pegging the connection doing nothing but downloading updates. I have a lot of computing devices. Probably more than the average American. But both of those numbers are only going up.
    - Klinky 7y ago
      >This really shouldn't require such exotic internet. Unless you are downloading large files, it's hard to use more than a few megabits per person on average. You're assuming averages, but just looking at Youtube buffering, it downloads videos in bursts, despite being a "streaming" service. Combine bursty behavior with latency sensitive applications like video conferencing or gaming, and having that headroom is nice. That said 1000/1000 may not be absolutely needed, but 100/100 or even 100/10 does not seem like it should be that big of an ask.
- maheart 7y ago
  > decent cooper is lower maintenance This is interesting. Do you have a reference for that? Everything I've read seems to claim that fibre is lower maintenance than copper -- but I'd love to read something to the contrary.
dylan604 7y ago
I understand that running physical cable to all locations is expensive, and if there is not a guarantee of minimum customer buy in it makes no financial sense for companies to do that. I grew up in the 80s and should be of the MTV generation, but because of the economics I never had an option for cable until I moved away from the parental units. I couldn't imagine not having access to the internet in today's society. I have hopes that with 5G, we could have a way to deliver gov't subsidized internet plans that allow everyone to be able to have a minimum amount of reliable bandwidth. Buy your $20USD receiver to receive a basic 10Mbps down, 1.5Mbps up connection. I think that should be free. Just enough to watch some video, enough to push normal attachments in email/web post (homework, resumes, etc). After that, if you want/need more bandwidth, then buy what you want. But at least this would provided a way to get past that last mile problem while making basic internet for all a viable thing.
- zbrozek 7y ago
  Comcast offered to connect my place for something around $22,000. When I asked them to write a bid, they vanished. So as far as I can tell, they were bluffing and did not expect me to call them on it. And on 5G? I have little hope. At least here in the US where we've decided that it should be millimeter-wave, the range is insufficient to circumvent NIMBYism and FUD around installation and RF emissions.
  - int_19h 7y ago
    I thought there's already a bunch of low-band deployments in US?
jimmaswell 7y ago
I'm hopeful for that satellite internet from SpaceX to solve availability.
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  Why should that be what it takes to solve this issue, though? We have the capabilities down here on Earth; they're just stymied by crony capitalism and regulatory capture.
  - gdubs 7y ago
    It’s pretty exciting for rural areas — not that it should be hard to run fiber everywhere (not my area of expertise). It just seems like a very quick way to turn on access for a lot of areas. Especially places just beyond towns and cities that are still well within civilization, but just not connected. Current satellite is ok but the latency is pretty unfortunate.
wpietri 7y ago
I don't think her DSL argument is coherent. The only reason DSL is available to most houses is that those wires were put in by a municipal phone company or highly regulated monopoly. Anybody who has talked to a DSL tech knows that a lot of that infrastructure is creaky, many decades old. We need to figure out what to do for the next century. Personally, I think we should at least look at the local loop as a natural monopoly. Just like the city is expected to own and maintain the road to your house, it should own and maintain the digital equivalent. From your house to the POP, it's city fiber. From the POP onward, sure, let that be run commercially, with a free minimum tier, say 5 mb/s. If you want anything more, you can contract with any ISP who has a presence in your POP. That way we get both a truly competitive marketplace and universal access.
- mehhh 7y ago
  Those same DSL techs often know exactly what needs to be done to save the telecom company they work for, deploy GPON. Verizon broke new ground and did it in the early 2000s, and its the only reason they still have as many customers as they do. The assets they sold to Frontier were partially upgraded, and have taken a beating due to Frontier's internal incompetence and poor service. Reactivating service to an existing ONT should not take more than a few minutes, yet it takes 24+hrs with Frontier. The cable companies are willing to do what is neccesary to get customers up and running, which is how they have hollowed out the incumbent telecom's business.
- cheez 7y ago
  Here's the sad truth: you're not going to be able to do anything for the next century. The next century will not happen in the US cities you are thinking about. They will happen in other US cities or elsewhere in the world.
- Lammy 7y ago
  Of course it's not coherent, it's just a roundabout way to say they don't want to give anyone any reason to move to LOH. Read between the lines.
claydavisss 7y ago
Most residents of Los Altos Hills could afford to have dedicated fiber brought directly to their homes, including all of the hardware to terminate it. But thanks for your humblebrag...I'm sure we'll make it a top priority to attend to the poor residents of America's most expensive zip code.
kekeblom 7y ago
The city of Zurich has what to my understanding is public fiber which is available to most buildings. (I assume there are some exceptions). It is managed by the electricity company run by the city. https://zuerinet.ch https://zuerinet.ch Setting up routers, billing etc. has been delegated to any third party ISP willing to do the job. I think they can charge what they want, as there are some very small differences in price. I pay ~44CHF/month for 100mb/s. While not dirt cheap, It's ok considering the price of other stuff here. Service so far has been very reliable.
- pdonis 7y ago
  This is the sort of model that many US municipalities have tried to implement. Unfortunately, many of them have been blocked from doing so by ISP lawsuits.
- threentaway 7y ago
  > ~44CHF/month for 100mb/s. While not dirt cheap That _is_ dirt cheap by US prices. Comcast (my only option) is $75/mo for 250/5 (yes, only 5 megabit up!).
  - amylene 7y ago
    I’m on a 2 year contract with Comcast and getting 600 down for $60. You might give them a call to see if they can lower your rate.
  - hiram112 7y ago
    That's approximately $46 USD, which is actually in line with most cable companies when you are a new customer. Of course, they get you by turning that $45 for 100Mb down with the modem rental for $10 / month, the 'fees' and taxes that are another $10 / month. Then, after your 'introductory' prices expire, you end up at $70 / month for the same 100Mb. But listen to this - a deal you can't refuse when your intro prices expire: They will sell you a 'bundle' with included cable TV for the same price of $70. And now you're looking at the original $70... plus digital box fee of $10 / month x 2 or 3 outlets, and also another $5 for sports programming fees you never watch, DV recorder boxes for all the outlets, so you can record that one show, and even an HBO Go trial that was 'free' for 6 months, but then turns into a $10 / month recurring charge. And this is how the average household in America ends up paying $150 / month, when all they really wanted in the first place was a $40 /100MB internet connection. Unless you're making below poverty rates, where the telecoms are forced to offer you a basic internet plan for under $20, you're going to get screwed because there is no way to get just decent internet without all the add-ons.
pshiryaev 7y ago
So basically you are advocating that someone else (the taxpayers) picks up you internet connection bill? Have you considered to move somewhere else with a better internet rather than complain about everything and everyone?
- dang 7y ago
  This comment breaks the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them and commenting in the intended spirit of the site? We'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
gigatexal 7y ago
All it would take to get muni-fiber to really get going would be for the FCC to get behind it and for federal aid to spur development in places to go to these muni-fiber cooperatives rather than the telcos. I see the internet as a road. I think it’d be cool if road tech advanced but if it didn’t the economy would still function because all of the things built on the robust road system are there.
- gigatexal 7y ago
  Also nothing is going to make entrenched telcos innovate more than having to compete with 10s or hundreds more players.
ProZsolt 7y ago
> ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population I used 30 mbps internet for years till my ISP upgraded my lovest tear and I worked from home. Even gigabit was available I don't really care about speed. If you don't work with big files that needs to be synced often slow speed is fine. I only care that my internet is stable. In this regard, fiber is way better, but for most elderly even a few hours a week downtime is not a big deal.
cbhl 7y ago
I daresay, it's even worse than that. Your neighbors are actively fighting against the installation of infrastructure that would enable faster internet speeds. AT&T tried to bring FTTN to San Francisco years ago, but neighbors decried the "ugly" green boxes that would run down the street. Boxes that are standard in literally any suburb with fast internet. There are limited parts of the bay area with gigabit fiber, including some large apartment buildings. The rent is higher in those places, of course.
- bluejekyll 7y ago
  AT&T can put those under the ground. They are ugly. And they take up already limited sidewalk space in many areas.
  - plussed_reader 7y ago
    Do you want to put up taxes for additional trenching, nevermind the overhead associated with the different agencies when digging is involved?
    - bluejekyll 7y ago
      Put them in the street, take up parking spaces from cars. The attitude that people don’t deserve the same guarantees as cars is a bad one.
      - wizzwizz4 7y ago
        People will drive into them.
    - UnpossibleJim 7y ago
      Taxes paid for the initial cost of not only most of the infrastructure of internet but also cable. This was "paid back" at zero interest loan payments over dozens of years, in most municipalities.
- jessriedel 7y ago
pgt 7y ago
We tried this in South Africa. It ended badly with Telkom.
gnopgnip 7y ago
Common.net is planning on gigabit wireless service in Alameda and San Leandro later this year. And they offer 300mbit service now. The technology is there to do this without laying fiber or other traditional infrastructure. If there are many people that want something better than DSL start a wireless ISP.
LatteLazy 7y ago
Who needs electricity when we have candles?
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Right, and 40A was good, so let's deliver 400A to every house. Actually 4kA. 4MA! Yes, every house needs a little mini-nuke, tear up everybody's backyard to put in a coal plant - no wait, that didn't happen because it turns out "enough electricity" is good not "more electricity is better". Always On Internet access matters. But bandwidth, like electricity, is something that you can just have enough of and then more doesn't make much difference. And because of Buffer Bloat people tend to wildly over-estimate how much bandwidth they actually need/ benefit from.
  - endgame 7y ago
    You snark, but what happens when EV adoption picks up and suddenly those houses need to move a lot more electrons?
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      A large (probably over-size for most users) EV battery is 360MJ. It seems reasonable we should be able to fill the EV battery overnight, let's say 10 hours between we plug the EV in to charge (empty) and expect to find it full. So that 36000 seconds, and conveniently that gives us 10kW power input. Which sure enough is about 40A. So, not "a lot more" electrons. Transitioning other energy uses to electricity will increase the load at individual homes and to the grid but it isn't an order of magnitude thing. A mistake commonly made here is that people look at energy equivalence charts and they assume that 10GJ of gasoline means we'd need 10GJ of electricity to do the same job. But in fact ICE is hideously inefficient, we used it because it was convenient and for no other reason, so electric cars have always been several times more efficient than 1:1 on that basis - that just wasn't good enough reason to switch before.
      - tehlike 7y ago
anderspitman 7y ago
If you have LOS to GOOG headquarters, you probably have LOS to someone with fast internet. You can set up plug-and-play directional internet bridge over several km for a couple hundred USD, and split their internet bill with them. Yeah there's a lot of hurdles, but if you don't have another option might be worth looking in to.
- zbrozek 7y ago
  There's a couple of dishes in a box downstairs. It's on the to-do list. :)
hkmurakami 7y ago
There are some efforts in LAH at the grassroots level. https://lahcommunityfiber.org/ https://lahcommunityfiber.org/ I imagine the low density of LAH makes the cost of installing fiber throughout town more of a barrier than other areas.
- zbrozek 7y ago
  I went to their most-recent meeting. I have some hope for the project, but I don't think it's likely to make it my way before I'm part of the 20-mbps-is-ok elderly population. They've really got to figure out how to be a real ISP and use the preexisting utility easements rather than try to get new ones. As for the cost, they were talking about $1-3k/house depending on how many signed up in a "corridor". That's peanuts, especially for the area.
  - hkmurakami 7y ago
    So iirc LAH doesn't have (or has very few of?) conduits that the town itself owns. The part that'll likely happen first is a "dig once" installation of the Utility tunnels that are publicly owned. Gary Kremen (of match.com fame, who's on the water district as well) has been fighting hard for this, and I'd encourage you to reach out to him. There's an utility undergrounding effort over near the Foothill college fire station area that'll hopefully be the pilot project for this. What I wasn't aware of until recently was how spotty the broadband coverage is in the town. There are areas with 100mbps, and others with barely any coverage at all from what I've heard. The situation really isn't pretty. I think the $1k-$3k cost is if you have an existing backbone(?) endpoint near your residence. If you happen to not be close to an existing one, the costs will be much higher. I think the group has some ideas for some short term workarounds.
    - zbrozek 7y ago
      Thanks for the pointer! I sent a note on Nextdoor. I'm not opposed to spending money on infrastructure, but so far I haven't found a viable avenue for actually doing so. I've also reached out to Common and Sail to see if they'd be willing to try to make something out of my commanding line-of-sight. Historically that has not been the case. I think the nearest AT&T fiber node is a few minutes' walk away and I'd love to pay to cut a trench to it. But I haven't been able to find anyone there willing to entertain the idea. I'm also trying to find a business within my line-of-sight that will let me pay them for roof and utility access so that I can beam something to myself.
hanniabu 7y ago
> She makes a good point: the residents don't care. Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population. I'd say that's a horrible point. Many people don't care about having guns or being monitored 24/7. That doesn't mean we shouldn't provide those as liberties.
- kspacewalk2 7y ago
  For most non-Americans, it's fairly non-controversial that one of those should definitely be severely restricted.
MarkSweep 7y ago
I mean, you would also expect one of the richest cities in the country to have sidewalks and street lights. They have different priorities.
justicezyx 7y ago
> She makes a good point How can that be a good point?... I think we all know that until an amazing product is presented to the customers, and the customers start to actually use it in its designated ways, the truly amazing product will be loved and touted by the people. For example, China Mobile was routinely instructed by government to cut price [1]. In 2018-09, I visited Shenzhen, and spend 1 RMB and purchased 1GB cellular data package. This change absolutely is critical to China's booming gig-economy, and general digital transformation (I'll leave the privacy and propaganda debate outside, just for economy). At the time, can China Mobile claim that "people do not care"? They absolutely can. But government is created to think in long-term prospect. [1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201803/23/WS5ab491d8a3105cdcf6513d74.html http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201803/23/WS5ab491d8a3105cdcf...
xtat 7y ago
TBH silicon valley broadband is way worse than the service I had in rural PA

Zhenya 7y ago

Not that this is a solution but get a good directional antenna and point it at Google - instant guest network(advice not guaranteed to work)!

tarde 7y ago

> Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough that is insane. How having no internet is fine because 20mbps is enough? That could be a good argument against fiber (which i also think is overkill, decent cooper is lower maintenance and with enough repeaters as good as) but it is hardly an argument against it being available to all as a public utility. > And, by the way, the FCC thinks I have a dozen options for broadband. That is false. and the real enemy shows up. FCC, from the bush-omaba-trump admin become the most corrupt organization one can think of. They openly lie and laugh when someone point out the lie.

coldpie 7y ago
> from the bush-omaba-trump admin become the most corrupt organization one can think of I don't know whether they were corrupt, but Tom Wheeler did a fantastic job from a consumer rights & Internet health perspective during the Obama admin. Most notably he implemented Title II regulations to enforce net neutrality (since undone by a Republican), but also supported municipal broadband (since undone by a Republican), fought against several huge communication company mergers (since undone by a Republican), and supported content providers against ISPs charging interconnection fees. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/how-a-former-lobbyist-became-the-broadband-industrys-worst-nightmare/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/how-a...
- tarde 7y ago
  on his first year he passed the "internet fast lane" regulation, against net neutrality, and made lots of profits for his cable and wireless business. only to four months later start a huge campaign with obama pro net neutrality for the classification of ISPs as utilities under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (with profitable exceptions). Opening the floodgates on direct white house influence on the FCC and permanently making it the political tool which Ajit Pai wields.
  - plussed_reader 7y ago
    What choice is there when congress can't/won't legislate? The regulation is (still) badly needed. We see the shortcomings of the current delivery system laid bare but if a company won't invest to keep a competitive advantage, again what choice is there?
    - int_19h 7y ago
      > What choice is there when congress can't/won't legislate? Work on electing different people to Congress, and meanwhile try to implement it on state level? I mean, the whole point of having Congress is so that the executive can't just do whatever it wants.
  - tzs 7y ago
    > on his first year he passed the "internet fast lane" regulation, against net neutrality, and made lots of profits for his cable and wireless business No, he proposed a net neutrality regulation that would allow fast lanes, and said he was open to a stronger rule if it had enough support. The comments on the first proposal overwhelmingly favored a stronger approach, and so the final rule that he actually passed was the Title II reclassification. He took this approach because the courts had struck down the Open Internet Order of 2010, and this was the safest way to restore as much of that as possible without doing a very politically difficult and risky Title II reclassification. And what do you mean "his cable and wireless business"? In the distant past he had held executive positions in first the main cable trade group, and later the main wireless trade group, but the first was something like 30 years before he was on the FCC and the second something like 10 years before he was on the FCC. The cable stuff was so long ago that it was just television--the cable modem had not yet been invented. It was also a time when the cable industry was the disruptive new kid on the block trying to bring competition for the big entrenched OTA broadcast networks. Same thing when he worked for the wireless industry. It was when they were the new thing trying to make inroads against the big landline telecom companies.
greedo 7y ago
I'm not sure why you think "decent cooper" is as good as fiber. Unless you can deliver me 1Gbps symmetrically like my current fiber, you're inadequate. I currently have two kids doing remote learning, a wife who's starting to VPN at times, and I myself work remotely at least 9 hours a day for the last 20 days. My podunk town has FTH through a municipal partnership. It works great. If my town can do it, I expect every other town above a population of 300K to do it as well. It's not rocket science. The problem is with people saying crap like "good enough." The Network Director at my company said that a wireless (GSM) connection of 1Mbps was "good enough." I laughed and said that explains why our LAN and WAN speeds are so bad. WiFi in a conference room with an access point directly overhead fails half the time. Good enough... Times are changing. 20 years ago I worked at a distance learning company creating H.S. courseware. Cutting edge stuff that was lost in a market that didn't care. Too many competing interests. But I bet all those education administrators wish they had invested in more than Chromebooks that don't have courseware.
- creato 7y ago
  > Unless you can deliver me 1Gbps symmetrically like my current fiber, you're inadequate. I currently have two kids doing remote learning, a wife who's starting to VPN at times, and I myself work remotely at least 9 hours a day for the last 20 days. This really shouldn't require such exotic internet. Unless you are downloading large files, it's hard to use more than a few megabits per person on average. Often the nice thing about fiber is the surrounding infrastructure is newer and better.
  - zbrozek 7y ago
    Try living in a place with only 3 mbps down. You'll find your various computing devices are constantly pegging the connection doing nothing but downloading updates. I have a lot of computing devices. Probably more than the average American. But both of those numbers are only going up.
  - Klinky 7y ago
    >This really shouldn't require such exotic internet. Unless you are downloading large files, it's hard to use more than a few megabits per person on average. You're assuming averages, but just looking at Youtube buffering, it downloads videos in bursts, despite being a "streaming" service. Combine bursty behavior with latency sensitive applications like video conferencing or gaming, and having that headroom is nice. That said 1000/1000 may not be absolutely needed, but 100/100 or even 100/10 does not seem like it should be that big of an ask.
maheart 7y ago
> decent cooper is lower maintenance This is interesting. Do you have a reference for that? Everything I've read seems to claim that fibre is lower maintenance than copper -- but I'd love to read something to the contrary.

dylan604 7y ago

I understand that running physical cable to all locations is expensive, and if there is not a guarantee of minimum customer buy in it makes no financial sense for companies to do that. I grew up in the 80s and should be of the MTV generation, but because of the economics I never had an option for cable until I moved away from the parental units. I couldn't imagine not having access to the internet in today's society. I have hopes that with 5G, we could have a way to deliver gov't subsidized internet plans that allow everyone to be able to have a minimum amount of reliable bandwidth. Buy your $20USD receiver to receive a basic 10Mbps down, 1.5Mbps up connection. I think that should be free. Just enough to watch some video, enough to push normal attachments in email/web post (homework, resumes, etc). After that, if you want/need more bandwidth, then buy what you want. But at least this would provided a way to get past that last mile problem while making basic internet for all a viable thing.

zbrozek 7y ago
Comcast offered to connect my place for something around $22,000. When I asked them to write a bid, they vanished. So as far as I can tell, they were bluffing and did not expect me to call them on it. And on 5G? I have little hope. At least here in the US where we've decided that it should be millimeter-wave, the range is insufficient to circumvent NIMBYism and FUD around installation and RF emissions.
- int_19h 7y ago
  I thought there's already a bunch of low-band deployments in US?

jimmaswell 7y ago

I'm hopeful for that satellite internet from SpaceX to solve availability.

jakelazaroff 7y ago
Why should that be what it takes to solve this issue, though? We have the capabilities down here on Earth; they're just stymied by crony capitalism and regulatory capture.
- gdubs 7y ago
  It’s pretty exciting for rural areas — not that it should be hard to run fiber everywhere (not my area of expertise). It just seems like a very quick way to turn on access for a lot of areas. Especially places just beyond towns and cities that are still well within civilization, but just not connected. Current satellite is ok but the latency is pretty unfortunate.

wpietri 7y ago

I don't think her DSL argument is coherent. The only reason DSL is available to most houses is that those wires were put in by a municipal phone company or highly regulated monopoly. Anybody who has talked to a DSL tech knows that a lot of that infrastructure is creaky, many decades old. We need to figure out what to do for the next century. Personally, I think we should at least look at the local loop as a natural monopoly. Just like the city is expected to own and maintain the road to your house, it should own and maintain the digital equivalent. From your house to the POP, it's city fiber. From the POP onward, sure, let that be run commercially, with a free minimum tier, say 5 mb/s. If you want anything more, you can contract with any ISP who has a presence in your POP. That way we get both a truly competitive marketplace and universal access.

mehhh 7y ago
Those same DSL techs often know exactly what needs to be done to save the telecom company they work for, deploy GPON. Verizon broke new ground and did it in the early 2000s, and its the only reason they still have as many customers as they do. The assets they sold to Frontier were partially upgraded, and have taken a beating due to Frontier's internal incompetence and poor service. Reactivating service to an existing ONT should not take more than a few minutes, yet it takes 24+hrs with Frontier. The cable companies are willing to do what is neccesary to get customers up and running, which is how they have hollowed out the incumbent telecom's business.
cheez 7y ago
Here's the sad truth: you're not going to be able to do anything for the next century. The next century will not happen in the US cities you are thinking about. They will happen in other US cities or elsewhere in the world.
Lammy 7y ago
Of course it's not coherent, it's just a roundabout way to say they don't want to give anyone any reason to move to LOH. Read between the lines.

claydavisss 7y ago

Most residents of Los Altos Hills could afford to have dedicated fiber brought directly to their homes, including all of the hardware to terminate it. But thanks for your humblebrag...I'm sure we'll make it a top priority to attend to the poor residents of America's most expensive zip code.

kekeblom 7y ago

The city of Zurich has what to my understanding is public fiber which is available to most buildings. (I assume there are some exceptions). It is managed by the electricity company run by the city. https://zuerinet.ch https://zuerinet.ch Setting up routers, billing etc. has been delegated to any third party ISP willing to do the job. I think they can charge what they want, as there are some very small differences in price. I pay ~44CHF/month for 100mb/s. While not dirt cheap, It's ok considering the price of other stuff here. Service so far has been very reliable.

pdonis 7y ago
This is the sort of model that many US municipalities have tried to implement. Unfortunately, many of them have been blocked from doing so by ISP lawsuits.
threentaway 7y ago
> ~44CHF/month for 100mb/s. While not dirt cheap That _is_ dirt cheap by US prices. Comcast (my only option) is $75/mo for 250/5 (yes, only 5 megabit up!).
- amylene 7y ago
  I’m on a 2 year contract with Comcast and getting 600 down for $60. You might give them a call to see if they can lower your rate.
- hiram112 7y ago
  That's approximately $46 USD, which is actually in line with most cable companies when you are a new customer. Of course, they get you by turning that $45 for 100Mb down with the modem rental for $10 / month, the 'fees' and taxes that are another $10 / month. Then, after your 'introductory' prices expire, you end up at $70 / month for the same 100Mb. But listen to this - a deal you can't refuse when your intro prices expire: They will sell you a 'bundle' with included cable TV for the same price of $70. And now you're looking at the original $70... plus digital box fee of $10 / month x 2 or 3 outlets, and also another $5 for sports programming fees you never watch, DV recorder boxes for all the outlets, so you can record that one show, and even an HBO Go trial that was 'free' for 6 months, but then turns into a $10 / month recurring charge. And this is how the average household in America ends up paying $150 / month, when all they really wanted in the first place was a $40 /100MB internet connection. Unless you're making below poverty rates, where the telecoms are forced to offer you a basic internet plan for under $20, you're going to get screwed because there is no way to get just decent internet without all the add-ons.

pshiryaev 7y ago

So basically you are advocating that someone else (the taxpayers) picks up you internet connection bill? Have you considered to move somewhere else with a better internet rather than complain about everything and everyone?

dang 7y ago
This comment breaks the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them and commenting in the intended spirit of the site? We'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

gigatexal 7y ago

All it would take to get muni-fiber to really get going would be for the FCC to get behind it and for federal aid to spur development in places to go to these muni-fiber cooperatives rather than the telcos. I see the internet as a road. I think it’d be cool if road tech advanced but if it didn’t the economy would still function because all of the things built on the robust road system are there.

gigatexal 7y ago
Also nothing is going to make entrenched telcos innovate more than having to compete with 10s or hundreds more players.

ProZsolt 7y ago

> ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population I used 30 mbps internet for years till my ISP upgraded my lovest tear and I worked from home. Even gigabit was available I don't really care about speed. If you don't work with big files that needs to be synced often slow speed is fine. I only care that my internet is stable. In this regard, fiber is way better, but for most elderly even a few hours a week downtime is not a big deal.

cbhl 7y ago

I daresay, it's even worse than that. Your neighbors are actively fighting against the installation of infrastructure that would enable faster internet speeds. AT&T tried to bring FTTN to San Francisco years ago, but neighbors decried the "ugly" green boxes that would run down the street. Boxes that are standard in literally any suburb with fast internet. There are limited parts of the bay area with gigabit fiber, including some large apartment buildings. The rent is higher in those places, of course.

bluejekyll 7y ago
AT&T can put those under the ground. They are ugly. And they take up already limited sidewalk space in many areas.
- plussed_reader 7y ago
  Do you want to put up taxes for additional trenching, nevermind the overhead associated with the different agencies when digging is involved?
  - bluejekyll 7y ago
    Put them in the street, take up parking spaces from cars. The attitude that people don’t deserve the same guarantees as cars is a bad one.
    - wizzwizz4 7y ago
      People will drive into them.
  - UnpossibleJim 7y ago
    Taxes paid for the initial cost of not only most of the infrastructure of internet but also cable. This was "paid back" at zero interest loan payments over dozens of years, in most municipalities.
jessriedel 7y ago

pgt 7y ago

We tried this in South Africa. It ended badly with Telkom.

gnopgnip 7y ago

Common.net is planning on gigabit wireless service in Alameda and San Leandro later this year. And they offer 300mbit service now. The technology is there to do this without laying fiber or other traditional infrastructure. If there are many people that want something better than DSL start a wireless ISP.

LatteLazy 7y ago

Who needs electricity when we have candles?

tialaramex 7y ago
Right, and 40A was good, so let's deliver 400A to every house. Actually 4kA. 4MA! Yes, every house needs a little mini-nuke, tear up everybody's backyard to put in a coal plant - no wait, that didn't happen because it turns out "enough electricity" is good not "more electricity is better". Always On Internet access matters. But bandwidth, like electricity, is something that you can just have enough of and then more doesn't make much difference. And because of Buffer Bloat people tend to wildly over-estimate how much bandwidth they actually need/ benefit from.
- endgame 7y ago
  You snark, but what happens when EV adoption picks up and suddenly those houses need to move a lot more electrons?
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    A large (probably over-size for most users) EV battery is 360MJ. It seems reasonable we should be able to fill the EV battery overnight, let's say 10 hours between we plug the EV in to charge (empty) and expect to find it full. So that 36000 seconds, and conveniently that gives us 10kW power input. Which sure enough is about 40A. So, not "a lot more" electrons. Transitioning other energy uses to electricity will increase the load at individual homes and to the grid but it isn't an order of magnitude thing. A mistake commonly made here is that people look at energy equivalence charts and they assume that 10GJ of gasoline means we'd need 10GJ of electricity to do the same job. But in fact ICE is hideously inefficient, we used it because it was convenient and for no other reason, so electric cars have always been several times more efficient than 1:1 on that basis - that just wasn't good enough reason to switch before.
    - tehlike 7y ago

anderspitman 7y ago

If you have LOS to GOOG headquarters, you probably have LOS to someone with fast internet. You can set up plug-and-play directional internet bridge over several km for a couple hundred USD, and split their internet bill with them. Yeah there's a lot of hurdles, but if you don't have another option might be worth looking in to.

zbrozek 7y ago
There's a couple of dishes in a box downstairs. It's on the to-do list. :)

hkmurakami 7y ago

There are some efforts in LAH at the grassroots level. https://lahcommunityfiber.org/ https://lahcommunityfiber.org/ I imagine the low density of LAH makes the cost of installing fiber throughout town more of a barrier than other areas.

zbrozek 7y ago
I went to their most-recent meeting. I have some hope for the project, but I don't think it's likely to make it my way before I'm part of the 20-mbps-is-ok elderly population. They've really got to figure out how to be a real ISP and use the preexisting utility easements rather than try to get new ones. As for the cost, they were talking about $1-3k/house depending on how many signed up in a "corridor". That's peanuts, especially for the area.
- hkmurakami 7y ago
  So iirc LAH doesn't have (or has very few of?) conduits that the town itself owns. The part that'll likely happen first is a "dig once" installation of the Utility tunnels that are publicly owned. Gary Kremen (of match.com fame, who's on the water district as well) has been fighting hard for this, and I'd encourage you to reach out to him. There's an utility undergrounding effort over near the Foothill college fire station area that'll hopefully be the pilot project for this. What I wasn't aware of until recently was how spotty the broadband coverage is in the town. There are areas with 100mbps, and others with barely any coverage at all from what I've heard. The situation really isn't pretty. I think the $1k-$3k cost is if you have an existing backbone(?) endpoint near your residence. If you happen to not be close to an existing one, the costs will be much higher. I think the group has some ideas for some short term workarounds.
  - zbrozek 7y ago
    Thanks for the pointer! I sent a note on Nextdoor. I'm not opposed to spending money on infrastructure, but so far I haven't found a viable avenue for actually doing so. I've also reached out to Common and Sail to see if they'd be willing to try to make something out of my commanding line-of-sight. Historically that has not been the case. I think the nearest AT&T fiber node is a few minutes' walk away and I'd love to pay to cut a trench to it. But I haven't been able to find anyone there willing to entertain the idea. I'm also trying to find a business within my line-of-sight that will let me pay them for roof and utility access so that I can beam something to myself.

hanniabu 7y ago

> She makes a good point: the residents don't care. Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population. I'd say that's a horrible point. Many people don't care about having guns or being monitored 24/7. That doesn't mean we shouldn't provide those as liberties.

kspacewalk2 7y ago
For most non-Americans, it's fairly non-controversial that one of those should definitely be severely restricted.

MarkSweep 7y ago

I mean, you would also expect one of the richest cities in the country to have sidewalks and street lights. They have different priorities.

justicezyx 7y ago

> She makes a good point How can that be a good point?... I think we all know that until an amazing product is presented to the customers, and the customers start to actually use it in its designated ways, the truly amazing product will be loved and touted by the people. For example, China Mobile was routinely instructed by government to cut price [1]. In 2018-09, I visited Shenzhen, and spend 1 RMB and purchased 1GB cellular data package. This change absolutely is critical to China's booming gig-economy, and general digital transformation (I'll leave the privacy and propaganda debate outside, just for economy). At the time, can China Mobile claim that "people do not care"? They absolutely can. But government is created to think in long-term prospect. [1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201803/23/WS5ab491d8a3105cdcf6513d74.html http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201803/23/WS5ab491d8a3105cdcf...

xtat 7y ago

TBH silicon valley broadband is way worse than the service I had in rural PA