3 ms·

It's also an example of how it's already been lost.

by bmitc 5y ago

mnd999 5y ago
That’s pretty defeatist. A cartel of corrupt politicians and large cable companies conspired to regulate against it. These regulations can just as easily be removed and replaced with proper net neutrality rules.
- bmitc 5y ago
  I didn't say it couldn't be regained. But it will be an increasingly uphill battle. Regulators and politicians have been sold to the highest bidders.
- jrockway 5y ago
  There is the cartel effect going on (lobbying against municipal broadband), but even in the absence of that, it's still tough to be an ISP. Think about how much money it costs to dig up a street and put cables under it, and then run them into each house along that street. People that want to use the Internet don't have enough money to do that, and that's why the business is tough. My experience from working at fiber ISPs is that the infrastructure is the hard part. Google Fiber got a good deal in its partner cities to run the fiber next to existing power lines (which not every city has, they're all underground here). When they ran out of easy install opportunities, expansion stopped. My experience was the same at a NYC-based ISP. If your building was on a street that already had open access tunnels, then we could serve you. If not, you were out of luck. If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I've seen proposal after proposal for trenching, microtrenching, nanotrenching, picotrenching, attotrenching... and none of these worked in the real world. (I might have made some of those up; I think "attotrenching" is what I called just running cables into people's windows and not burying them. Didn't try it, but I imagine it would irritate people with its intrinsic flakiness and ugliness.) The rest is simple, you can set up a full fledged fiber ISP for under $1000 in equipment! Figure out how to dig up the street profitably and you unlock a ton of wealth. (This, incidentally, is why people keep trying to sell wireless solutions. No streets to dig up. WiFi with pringles can antennas! 5G! A huge constellation of satellites! And honestly, it kind of works. But not so well that people are switching from their fiber connection to Starlink or whatever.)
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    >If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, The same way we got power to the homes which was government assistance and the private companies not expecting them to be totally profitable in a few years.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    FWIW In my place grave diggers is a synonym for a least paid profession.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    >> If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I Same as they did with electricity a century ago. If you want to provide service to the profitable urban area then you must run wires to the non-urban areas too.
    - hedora 5y ago
      Heh. Instead, you just need to sell the unprofitable parts of your network to Frontier. Their business model seems to be using sales volume to make up for marginal losses.
  - hedora 5y ago
    There are plenty of feasible wireless ISP technologies. They have a directional antenna on the subscriber side, pointed at a shared tower. I've had mixed experiences with them. The wireless link itself tends to be 100% uptime with no bandwidth contention. The quality of the network between the tower and the internet backbone varies wildly depending on the ISP. Anyway, last mile of 10's to 100's MBit symmetric over multiple miles is a solved problem these days. The remaining problems are mostly political. Sadly, that's been true since dial up modems became obsolete.
  - ogurechny 5y ago
    > I think "attotrenching" is what I called just running cables into people's windows and not burying them. Behold, MSU dorm LAN in early 2000s. https://medium.com/@pv.safronov/moscow-state-university-network-built-by-students-211539855cf9 https://medium.com/@pv.safronov/moscow-state-university-netw... Partial “topology” shot: https://chronicles.igmsu.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/topology_1.gif https://chronicles.igmsu.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/topo... Home LANs and early ISPs were built with the same equipment by the same kind of enthusiasts. Typical commieblocks have enough place for cable shafts inside, though. Then the building roofs would get connected (with any kind of cable having any properties you could find) in the same grassroot manner. All that free libertarian enterprise, and now, after a number of tech upgrades, mergers, and so on, you can get gigabit for ten bucks. I get it's not that suitable for suburbian installations, but the idea is that it all starts small and ugly. That's why your cable corporations are never ever going to allow even a tiny bit of alternative to happen, heh.
freemint 5y ago
Compliance can be forced by law in a country which is capable of self regulation.
ineedasername 5y ago
In the US we had it for a brief period of time. Then we got an FCC chair who not only took it away, but actively trolled people who were angry about it. (And that's before we even get into the issue of the public comment ballot box getting stuffed by copypasta spam in favor of killing net neutrality and wink-and-nudge blind eye turned away from it.) That's the double edged sword in the US of having executive level departments with wide latitude to set regulations with the weight of law behind them but not the same high barrier of changing them as it takes to change a law. Technically this allows agencies to be more nimble, or as much as possible in any lumbering bureaucracy. On the other hand it means that very important pieces of public policy are even further removed from election accountability and subject to the whims of different administrations. Whether you're for or against it, the Keystone pipeline is a prime example of the insanity that results from this. It was approve & construction begun on one administration, a final portion for it put on hold by another, then opened again by a third, a fourth stopped it again resulting in its backers cancelling it (seemingly) once and for all. Forget about the difficulties of generation-long projects, this makes anything longer than 4 years highly uncertain.
- serenitylater 5y ago
  You can have plenty of projects get done that take longer than 4 years. You will have problems getting projects done that half the country hates if it takes longer than 4 years. This seems like a feature not a bug.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    It's not about "half the country hates it", though. Plenty of projects have widespread support, but are only backed by one party (or no party). It's clearly a bug, as it causes undue preference for the status-quo above and beyond the popular will (and the common good).
  - hackernewds 5y ago
    something half the country hates can be good for the whole country. think COVID vaccines and lockdowns

It's also an example of how it's already been lost.

by bmitc 5y ago

It's also an example of how it's already been lost.

That’s pretty defeatist. A cartel of corrupt politicians and large cable companies conspired to regulate against it. These regulations can just as easily be removed and replaced with proper net neutrality rules.

bmitc 5y ago
I didn't say it couldn't be regained. But it will be an increasingly uphill battle. Regulators and politicians have been sold to the highest bidders.
jrockway 5y ago
There is the cartel effect going on (lobbying against municipal broadband), but even in the absence of that, it's still tough to be an ISP. Think about how much money it costs to dig up a street and put cables under it, and then run them into each house along that street. People that want to use the Internet don't have enough money to do that, and that's why the business is tough. My experience from working at fiber ISPs is that the infrastructure is the hard part. Google Fiber got a good deal in its partner cities to run the fiber next to existing power lines (which not every city has, they're all underground here). When they ran out of easy install opportunities, expansion stopped. My experience was the same at a NYC-based ISP. If your building was on a street that already had open access tunnels, then we could serve you. If not, you were out of luck. If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I've seen proposal after proposal for trenching, microtrenching, nanotrenching, picotrenching, attotrenching... and none of these worked in the real world. (I might have made some of those up; I think "attotrenching" is what I called just running cables into people's windows and not burying them. Didn't try it, but I imagine it would irritate people with its intrinsic flakiness and ugliness.) The rest is simple, you can set up a full fledged fiber ISP for under $1000 in equipment! Figure out how to dig up the street profitably and you unlock a ton of wealth. (This, incidentally, is why people keep trying to sell wireless solutions. No streets to dig up. WiFi with pringles can antennas! 5G! A huge constellation of satellites! And honestly, it kind of works. But not so well that people are switching from their fiber connection to Starlink or whatever.)
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  >If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, The same way we got power to the homes which was government assistance and the private companies not expecting them to be totally profitable in a few years.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  FWIW In my place grave diggers is a synonym for a least paid profession.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  >> If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I Same as they did with electricity a century ago. If you want to provide service to the profitable urban area then you must run wires to the non-urban areas too.
  - hedora 5y ago
    Heh. Instead, you just need to sell the unprofitable parts of your network to Frontier. Their business model seems to be using sales volume to make up for marginal losses.
- hedora 5y ago
  There are plenty of feasible wireless ISP technologies. They have a directional antenna on the subscriber side, pointed at a shared tower. I've had mixed experiences with them. The wireless link itself tends to be 100% uptime with no bandwidth contention. The quality of the network between the tower and the internet backbone varies wildly depending on the ISP. Anyway, last mile of 10's to 100's MBit symmetric over multiple miles is a solved problem these days. The remaining problems are mostly political. Sadly, that's been true since dial up modems became obsolete.
- ogurechny 5y ago
  > I think "attotrenching" is what I called just running cables into people's windows and not burying them. Behold, MSU dorm LAN in early 2000s. https://medium.com/@pv.safronov/moscow-state-university-network-built-by-students-211539855cf9 https://medium.com/@pv.safronov/moscow-state-university-netw... Partial “topology” shot: https://chronicles.igmsu.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/topology_1.gif https://chronicles.igmsu.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/topo... Home LANs and early ISPs were built with the same equipment by the same kind of enthusiasts. Typical commieblocks have enough place for cable shafts inside, though. Then the building roofs would get connected (with any kind of cable having any properties you could find) in the same grassroot manner. All that free libertarian enterprise, and now, after a number of tech upgrades, mergers, and so on, you can get gigabit for ten bucks. I get it's not that suitable for suburbian installations, but the idea is that it all starts small and ugly. That's why your cable corporations are never ever going to allow even a tiny bit of alternative to happen, heh.

freemint 5y ago

Compliance can be forced by law in a country which is capable of self regulation.

ineedasername 5y ago

In the US we had it for a brief period of time. Then we got an FCC chair who not only took it away, but actively trolled people who were angry about it. (And that's before we even get into the issue of the public comment ballot box getting stuffed by copypasta spam in favor of killing net neutrality and wink-and-nudge blind eye turned away from it.) That's the double edged sword in the US of having executive level departments with wide latitude to set regulations with the weight of law behind them but not the same high barrier of changing them as it takes to change a law. Technically this allows agencies to be more nimble, or as much as possible in any lumbering bureaucracy. On the other hand it means that very important pieces of public policy are even further removed from election accountability and subject to the whims of different administrations. Whether you're for or against it, the Keystone pipeline is a prime example of the insanity that results from this. It was approve & construction begun on one administration, a final portion for it put on hold by another, then opened again by a third, a fourth stopped it again resulting in its backers cancelling it (seemingly) once and for all. Forget about the difficulties of generation-long projects, this makes anything longer than 4 years highly uncertain.

serenitylater 5y ago
You can have plenty of projects get done that take longer than 4 years. You will have problems getting projects done that half the country hates if it takes longer than 4 years. This seems like a feature not a bug.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  It's not about "half the country hates it", though. Plenty of projects have widespread support, but are only backed by one party (or no party). It's clearly a bug, as it causes undue preference for the status-quo above and beyond the popular will (and the common good).
- hackernewds 5y ago
  something half the country hates can be good for the whole country. think COVID vaccines and lockdowns