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> The funding is going to a mix of cable, fiber, and fixed wireless providers, plus SpaceX's Starlink satellite network. I think cable providers should be left

• technofiend 6y ago
  >They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. They can just use the free money they've already been given. I mean they could but they wont, and there was no reason to with Ajit Pai running the place. I daresay they'll have to be sued into compliance to do it now. Not that I object to that: they need to refund the taxpayers' money or do what they promised with it.
  • smegger001 6y ago
    >they need to refund the taxpayers' money or do what they promised with it. plus interest.
  • gabereiser 6y ago
    They’ll just claim something something 5G and will be back in the feds good graces. Honestly the cable industry is a monopoly and has grown beyond government oversight. This needs to change but we don’t have any other option than nullifying anti-municipal fiber laws and start laying down new lines.
    • bredren 6y ago
      This is why starlink is so important. I can not wait to stop paying Comcast.
      • new_realist 6y ago
        Why don’t you move to 5G now?
        • Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
          Most of America doesn't have true (mm wave) 5g. About 1/3 of America lacks "5g" entirely. Assuming one does have access it's not financially prudent for most households to buy into 5g when the caps are as low as 100gb/mo. https://www.androidauthority.com/where-is-5g-available-in-the-us-1140484/ https://www.androidauthority.com/where-is-5g-available-in-th...
          • fulafel 6y ago
            Nitpick: mm-wave is just one of the dozen things that are in the 5G cornucopia of random technologies, it's not more or less "true 5G" than eg 5G edge computing.
            • gabereiser 6y ago
              In America 4>5 so we’ve appropriated “5G” to mean the mm-wave wireless transmission. There are still large pockets of the US on data caps as low as 10gb. Throttled connections. Asymmetric networks. All so we can be nickel and dimed to death on fees, privilege, bundles, and in some cases double paying for content.
              • smichel17 6y ago
                It's funny to me, reading "as low as 10gb". I used 45MB of data last month, and 9 of that was the Android OS. (And, yes, 4.33GB on wifi, of which 186MB was the OS). I know other people use their phones way more than I do, it's just a different world to me, where data limits are a thing to think about.
                • Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    • sofixa 6y ago
      > Honestly the cable industry is a monopoly and has grown beyond government oversight I think you mean an oligopoly.
  • lostapathy 6y ago
    > there was no reason to with Ajit Pai running the place This problem goes back WAY farther than Ajit Pai.
• markovbot 6y ago
  for-profit corporations should not own our communications infrastructure.
  • dheera 6y ago
    I don't see an inherent problem with for-profit companies owning infrastructure, but it needs to not be monopolized and it needs to not be owned by a bunch of public market shareholders and hedge funds who don't even use the product. Utility monopolies and public companies rarely put customers first.
  • sigstoat 6y ago
    can they own our food production infrastructure? how about our clothing industry? home construction? those all represent far more fundamental human needs than communication.
    • TulliusCicero 6y ago
      Those things all have much more redundancy than comms. The US has three mobile internet providers (there's also MVNO's, but they use the same physical infrastructure as the big three), and any given home will usually only have access to two or three landline ISP's in terms of infra (e.g. cable, DSL, fiber). In contrast, food can be shipped in to a city from innumerable farms, ditto for clothing. Home construction, there's lot of different home builders around, it's not a natural monopoly like communication. For food production, I don't really have to trust any particular two or three farming companies -- if they fuck up, food can be shipped in from elsewhere. Whereas if my local ISP's are exploitative or simply incompetent, what's my recourse?
    • jayd16 6y ago
      No one has monopoly control of the infrastructure in those industries. Anyone can buy and farm land, textile plants, etc. Its not possible to simply lay more conduit and compete.
    • function_seven 6y ago
      What "infrastructure" means needs to be nailed down before this can be discussed. Internet service is seen as something in the same league as roads, power, water, and other utilities. Things that require public rights of way, extensive digging, cooperations among many jurisdictions or land owners, and special rules to make it all possible. Clothing, food, and construction are all businesses that don't require that level of centralized coordination. Anyone can open their own bakery, or buy a farm. Anyone can set up sewing machines and purchase fabric, or get a contractors' license and start nailing sticks of wood together. Government still sets standards, of course. But these businesses don't have inherent monopolies the same way infrastructure businesses do.
• rayiner 6y ago
  > They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. Very little government money has been spent on broadband. Federal funding for broadband dates back only to the Obama administration. And cable companies have largely not received this money. You’re thinking of something else.
  • chromaton 6y ago
    To avoid another repeated thread, just read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 I just realized that you were posting on that thread as well.
    • rayiner 6y ago
      Whatever conclusions you reach from the points made in that thread, there is an important additional point here. That thread is talking about telephone companies. OP is talking about cable. We tend to think of both of them as just “broadband” today, but the regulatory structure is totally different. The central premise of the notion that telephone companies received “billions of dollars from the government” is that the government lifted rate regulation on telephone companies in the 1990s. Rate regulation told the companies what they could charge for local phone service. The argument is that phone companies made $200 billion more than they would have had had those regulations remained in place. I disagree with that assertion for phone companies, as addressed in the thread above. But even on its own merits that argument is not applicable to cable companies. Cable companies weren’t rate regulated (except that in some places there is a regulated minimum television service they must provide at a government-specified price). There was no government action in the 1990s that contemplated subsidies to create incentives for cable companies to build fiber.
  • greedo 6y ago
    I think the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was supposed to help improve Internet access through its Universal Service provision. Of course all the telecoms pocketed the money and didn't do shit. https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service
• mixmastamyk 6y ago
  How much does it cost? Here Spectrum keeps upping the cost during the pandemic, now at $75/m for decent bandwidth.
  • spaceisballer 6y ago
    We have either DSL or Comcast. 300/10mbps costs $100. Total rip-off but that’s the price of our county signing a 10 year exclusive deal with them. Now it’s expired but nobody is going to bring business in.
  • epmaybe 6y ago
    In my area there was good competition with the new fiber infrastructure, so Spectrum offered $30/mo for two years with 400/25
• totalZero 6y ago
  If the issue is link speed symmetry, then cable should be out of the running entirely. Even my phone offers better upload speed than cable in my neighborhood. Same for my parents' place across the country. New money should go to fiber, satellite, wireless, or nothing at all.
  • plantain 6y ago
    DOCSIS 3 (from 2006) can do 100/100 over cable - it's the decision of the provider not the technology.
    • CKN23-ARIN 6y ago
      It's at least somewhat inherent to the technology. DOCSIS download channels are shared among subscribers; upload channels are allocated exclusively per-subscriber. This architecture provides economic incentives for the provider to provision asymmetric circuits rather than symmetric ones.
    • supertrope 6y ago
      100 Mbps up requires expanding the uplink band from 5-42MHz to 85MHz. That requires changing outdoor components like amplifier and filters, and upgrading millions of cable TV boxes, splitters and modems inside customers' homes. The combined cost of hiring more technicians and buying boxes might approach the cost of upgrading to fiber. Altice USA decided to skip DOCSIS 3.1 and start dragging fiber.
      • StillBored 6y ago
        Which is all stuff they are doing anyway. Cable modems, even when not integrated with wifi don't last more than a couple years before someone adds a couple more channels, or tweaks the spec. Etc, Docsis 3.1 modems were available in the local best buy for probably 5+ years before my cable company would even provision them in docsis 3.0 modes. They might have some excuses with the amps, but again, those can be upgraded as they age out/die too. This was the excuse 20 years ago when the amps didn't allow any upstream signals through in many areas. If a cable company hasn't been preparing/slowly rolling out new equipment as soon as the specs are available that is their own fault. Like any other technology you either get on the train, or you get left behind.
• jjcm 6y ago
  Including cable providers is fine. The issue is how this money is structured. It needs to be a loan where the debt is forgiven once you reach certain milestones. The issue with the money earlier was there wasn't any teeth when it came to enforcing what was to be done with the funds. Make the loan be equally competitive - any company can apply for any amount of money, and a small amount of the loan is forgiven per user they bring above the 100/100 mark (with possibly a bonus to rural users). Any backbone infrastructure created with these loans needs to be peerable as well.
• Phylter 6y ago
  Cable isn't the only problem, companies like AT&T are too. I don't think the money has to go to municipal fiber though. I'm currently in a rural city running 1Gbps/1Gbps with no data caps because of a small company got extra funding.
• fossuser 6y ago
  With Starlink I think the competition will get more real for them. In the rare markets with actual competition the shitty cable companies provide at least okay service. In Palo Alto I can get 1gbps down/35mbps up on Comcast for $89 (with 1TB data cap I have to pay $50 extra to remove). That's not too bad. They also offer a 2gbps down and up service called gigabit pro, but it requires installation and it's pretty expensive: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comcast_gigabit_pro/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comc.... It's also hard to get because the reps on the phone are not well trained and don't know about it. This is only because there are a few internet options here. Where I grew up there is one provider (Spectrum, was Time Warner, and Adelphia before that), the service is bad and the price is at least double. I recently moved to SF and I'm in a newer building with Google Fiber Webpass, it's 1gbps down and up with no cap for $57/month - it's awesome. The worst part about Comcast (ignoring the 35mbps up which is pretty bad) is everything around the service. Their website is extremely hostile. It's impossible to do anything online. Their pricing is heavily obscured. They push shitty TV packages I don't want or care about. It's hard to cancel without going through retention. Google Webpass? I signed up online in 5min, connected my own equipment and was good to go. Hopefully with real competition the old services will either get competitive or die. I don't really care which.
  • martinald 6y ago
    This. I think the really confusing thing is why so few new entrants have joined the US telecom market. There is masses of cheap capital to build these networks out. Most of Europe seems to be moving to this kind of model: A cable TV provider using DOCSIS or FTTH (and expanding their footprint) Existing incumbent telco providing service via VDSL/FTTH (rapidly rolling out FTTH) New "altnets" (as they are called here) doing new build FTTH (like webpass in the US, but they are not just aimed at apartment buildings). This has led to really significant competition. In portugal I have access to at least 1 FTTH and DOCSIS3.1. In London the same, my last flat actually had the option of 2 seperate FTTH providers (not sharing infrastructure) plus DOCSIS based cable. I think the altnets are the key to forcing investment by the otherwise duopolistic incumbent telcos and cable companies. I think what the FCC should be looking at is how to allow altnets to roll out service quicker. There is so much state/municipal legislation that I imagine that is the main blocker of doing this at scale.
• amelius 6y ago
  Or always pay them after they complete a part of the network instead of upfront?