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One reason we lack Internet competition: Starting an ISP is hard
- noname123 13y agoI just listened to NPR's Planet Money latest episode about the lack of choices in ISP in America. Very interesting indeed: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/04/04/299060527/episode-529-the-last-mile http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/04/04/299060527/episode-...
- JumpCrisscross 13y agoI enjoy every Planet Money episode I've found linked to from HN. Does NPR have an email notification for new episodes? Ideally, the email would contain a transcript.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- icebraining 13y agoI've never seen email notifications, but they do have RSS, and there are some RSS-to-email services, like Blogtrottr and feedmyinbox.
- thirdsun 13y agoWhy not just subscribe to the podcast with a podcast player of your choice? You may have your reasons but I can't see how email would beat an established concept like podcasts/rss feeds when it comes to being notified about new episodes.
- maxcan 13y agoif you're in SF - webpass. I have it in my building, about $40/mo. They claim that its a 200mbps shared across my 100 unit building. In actual speedtest.net testing I almost always get north of 200mbps up and down. I've seen it clock over 300 now and then. also, no throttling, "real" downloads regularly come in over 10 MB/sec or higher.
- ceslami 13y agoIs Webpass the SF ISP that is partnering with Artemis to deploy a test network of pCells. The idea of everyone who shares the connection clocking the speed of the undivided pipe sounds a lot like Artemis' technology.
- djchen 13y agoSadly, fairly limited availability even in SF
- rdl 13y agoWhen I was looking for a place to live in SF, I started from the webpass coverage list, and then looked for properties at those addresses. It does restrict you to fairly large, fairly upscale condo/apartment buildings, though.
- alxndr 13y agoHow about MonkeyBrains?
- pseingatl 13y agoBack in the day, didn't someone market a product called, "Provider in a Box"? And didn't New York's Pipeline (before they were acquired) rather cheaply set up ISP services?
- toast0 13y agoIs New York's Pipeline described here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pipeline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pipeline If so, yes, starting a dialup ISP is not too expensive, and not too difficult. A local ISP I worked for in 1999 ended up using a wholesale provider for dialup, we just ran a radius server for authentication, and mail and web servers. Unfortunately, the market for dialup ISPs is drying up, many more users want broadband connections, and in the US, it's very hard to get access to the last mile connections for broadband, unlike how easy it was to setup a bank of modems.
- greenyoda 13y agoThere were other small ISPs in NYC too. Panix.com started up in NYC in 1989 on a Mac running Unix (A/UX) with a handful of dialup modems, and grew quickly. They're still around today as an ISP (DSL/T1/T3) and hosting provider.
- jlgaddis 13y agoYes, when everyone already had phone lines in their homes and you could get any number of phone lines you wanted to any location you wanted to terminate the modem calls. Nowadays you have to build out that "phone line" (a.k.a. "the last mile") to the customer which is sorta what this article talks about.
- igl 13y agoIts not tornados and overland lines?
- command_line 13y agoRelevant: The Cost to Connect - Internet Prices Around the World (http://valme.io/c/technology/vkqqs/the-cost-to-connect-internet-prices-around-the-world/ http://valme.io/c/technology/vkqqs/the-cost-to-connect-inter...)
- zxexz 13y agoThis is interesting, however they only pull 1 ISP per country. This is fine in countries like the US, where 1 company is representative of the rest (for the most part). But in countries like Lithuania, there is a massive discrepancy in prices (in a good way; there is lots of healthy competition). Also this list isn't very valuable without statistics on internet penetration.
- Taek 13y agoRouters are pretty cheap, and nice routers can cover half of a city block. What if you had an ISP that created a mesh among its local users. You'd need to capture large fractions of a neighborhood at once, but it would potentially save you a lot of the expense associated with wiring a neighborhood. If you can get a large enough local membership, you could have a mesh that spans multiple backbones. Your costs are then limited to getting enough people to join the network to actually form a mesh (and getting them all online at the same time), and then paying the backbones directly for the traffic you send them. Might this be a viable business strategy?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- taterbase 13y agoCheckout http://sudomesh.org http://sudomesh.org and https://peoplesopen.net https://peoplesopen.net
- gmazzotti 13y agoAlso https://fon.com https://fon.com
- icebraining 13y agoThat's not a mesh, each participant mush have another Internet connection already, it's just a way of sharing it for when you're not at home.
- jlgaddis 13y agoOne of the issues with that is you must have "the backbone" up and running before you can sign up any customers. Many different projects have been centered around the idea of a "mesh" network and I don't know of any that have really been successful.
- drdaeman 13y ago> Routers are pretty cheap, and nice routers can cover half of a city block. Proper ones aren't really cheap. And to cover a reasonably large area with a big number of users (and I suspect everyone and their dog has some WiFi-capable device nowadays, even in poorer countries) one needs a reasonably large quantities of routers. Oh, and if that was the idea, I would really warn against trying to provide public connectivity this with commodity out-of-shelf consumer-grade routers. Prototypes work, but it doesn't scale well. My company (a small ISP) had tried and I'd say, in my personal opinion, we mostly failed (i.e., I mean, commodity routers are not fit for such job), even though our setup was much simpler than mesh as we had every router connected to a backbone. Short summary of issues others should be aware of, when dealing with consumer-grade devices: - First of all, QoS is a must - and it's a bit tricky to implement. Without QoS just 3-5 torrenting users will completely take the AP down. Getting QoS to work (and perform well) on cheap routers is hard, especially considering it's mostly done in software and their CPUs are slow. - Another problem is, routers seem practically limited in number of active peers they can handle, and putting too much of them too nearby had its own issues due to signal interference. Not that this is unavoidable, but it may add some headache. - And another issue is hardware supply. Imagine you polish a firmware so it works acceptably fine and consumers are satisfied. Next year, those routers go out of stock and you can't really get them anymore - only newer revisions or even models are available. A hardware change even between same model revisions could be drastic, so the development struggle never ends.
- jeza 13y agoInstalling infrastructure is never cheap nor easy. As such I'd categorise fibre as a natural monopoly. You only really need to install it once to every house hold and once it's there, terminal equipment can be upgraded to keep abreast with technological changes. It's better if the fibre is owned by a neutral entity, while internet services provided over the fibre can be provided by competing companies. The Australian government had this part right with the National Broadband Network. The fibre and backhaul infrastructure would be owned by the government, while retail companies would be allowed to sell internet connections, telephony and pay TV services over this network . A change of government has slowed things down a bit, but the same model appears to be in tact, where the current proposal is that the government will take ownership and upgrade coax cable (HFC) networks as an intermediate step.
- another-one-off 13y agoIt is debatable whether the Australian government got that right. The Australian government has set up a single corporation to roll out a broadband network to every house in Australia. This is something that the government has no special knowledge of, and no demonstrated ability to do. Governments have no business doing this thing. There is a very real risk that ideological differences between the Liberal and Labor parties will see NBN Co. mired in a similar situation to Telstra - a privatised monopoly with massive and unrivaled infrastructure funded by taxpayers with terrible customer service. What should be done is for the government to maintain an inter-town and inter-city fibre backbone, and cover the cost at taxpayer expense, then let local council and small business wire up individual towns and suburbs. Then let consumers hire an ISP who also handles maintenance of the fibre cables. Maybe give the installer of the cable a 10- or 20-year monopoly on maintaining the cable to allow them to recoup their cost. Granted, technically the government would want to retain official 'ownership' of the cables, and would still need some sort of administrative group to oversee who was responsible for which cable, but this would be a big improvement over how the rollout actually came together. Creating new government-backed corporations to own the infrastructure is not a winning formula. The entity building and maintaining the cables needs to be exposed to market forces, and it isn't difficult to see how it could be done. The government can handle the expensive parts like satellite connections for rural Australia and the inter-town links, if the market isn't likely to provide those things.
- beingpractical 13y agoAs Data takes over voice, all Telcos will eventually be ISPs providing voice.
- fredgrott 13y agoWhat the article misses is that many ISPs started as startups during dialup transitioned to fixed broadband.. One is in fact in my County near me. STarted as a startup in mid 1990s as a dialup ISP in a garage even.
- dba7dba 13y agoAs soon as a startup starts getting bigger and bigger, they become more and more like the established players.
- roma1n 13y agoIs it just hard, or downright impossible since IPv4 depletion?
- p1mrx 13y agoARIN hasn't reached zero yet: http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/ http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/ But if you're going to start an ISP, you'd best do it in the next few months. Europe and Asia are already screwed.
- hrrsn 13y agoHard, not impossible. I presume the second market for IPv4 addresses is going to go through the roof once we hit complete depletion. I'm with a ~6 month old ISP here in New Zealand, by default everyone is behind CG NAT, but you can request a public IP.
- p1mrx 13y agoYou at least give everyone a block of IPv6 without needing to ask, right?
- dijit 13y agoyeah everyone gets a /64, however, since 90% of sites (even if they claim to have AAAA records) do not actually support ipv6 yet. I'm one of those people unfortunately, mostly because my DDoS mitigation and countermeasures are not IPv6 ready- and I can't risk my companies business since it's all public facing ecommerce. :\ although, yeah, you could put everyone behind a NAT for ipv4, but then you have the same problem as with Quatar (or was it Saudi Arabia) where masses of people are blocked because they all exit onto the internet from the same place.
- print123 13y agoYes, Internet marketing in now having lot of compitations over the business for products and services. A best Digital marketing firm here http://www.aimaxprovider.com http://www.aimaxprovider.com
- tn13 13y agoThan you Captain.
- sixQuarks 13y agoWhy aren't phony lawsuits designed to deplete funds of an upstart considered a crime, or at least anti-competitive behavior?
- timthorn 13y agoIs there no local loop wholesale in the USA?
- Gusfoo_2 13y ago> Is there no local loop wholesale in the USA? No, not in the USA. Unique for a western ISP market AFAIK.
- rhino369 13y agoThere is but only for the telecom's telephone wire system, which allows DSL by local loop wholesale. The cable companies don't have to share their network, and I don't think their network is structured in a way that would make local loop even possible. I don't believe they have a dedicated local loop per customer. Fiber installations by the telecoms don't either because they are in a competitive market. Also, only Verizon has laid out FTTH.
- bigbugbag 13y agoI'm not sure you have to build and own your own fiber network to start an ISP, actually there's a trend of people making their own ISP and they report that it's not that hard: "Y U NO ISP, taking back the Net [30c3]" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPIoO3Pkc5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPIoO3Pkc5U
- jlgaddis 13y ago> "... and they report that it's not that hard" Heh, I've heard my boss (the co-owner of an ISP) say those exact words I don't know how many times. NB: It's harder than it sounds.
- davidw 13y agoLots of things are hard. If the margins are juicy enough though, competitors will show up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis
- JunkDNA 13y agoI would actually really like to see a lengthy investigative journalism piece that looks at all the factors that go into the costs of internet access around the world. I hear lots of hand-wavey stuff all the time about how Japan or Singapore have low population density so it's cheaper there relative to the US. But that can't be the total picture. Major US cities also have high population densities and that doesn't seem to be enough. Different countries have also spent public funds to build out infrastructure which likely never goes into the quoted prices of access. Japan's price for 2 gigabit (quoted here: http://valme.io/c/technology/vkqqs/the-cost-to-connect-internet-prices-around-the-world/ http://valme.io/c/technology/vkqqs/the-cost-to-connect-inter...) is a good example. What's the hidden cost? How much do taxpayers pay to maintain the parts of that infrastructure that are government owned? There are lots of countries that have higher tax rates than the US to subsidize public services. In some places, people are probably paying a lot for this stuff, just parts of it are hidden because they are indirect through taxation. However, I bet that's not totally the case in all areas (perhaps in a place like Romania, given the comments elsewhere in this thread). Are there any places that have vibrant commercial competition for broadband in the absence of significant government intervention? Are there places where because of government ownership of infrastructure in part of the market (e.g. fiber backhaul) there is increased consumer choice in providers, such that the fully-loaded costs are cheaper that the current US situation? We know from numerous markets that lots of competition drives down prices and drives up quality. The problem with broadband is it feels like a situation where you have a natural monopoly, so what is the right policy mix to enable competition? Or isn't there one?
- kansface 13y agoI don't think any in depth analysis is really needed for the US. Lack of density is certainly a problem, but not the main one. In nearly every major market, broadband is dominated wholly by a single company through municipally granted monopolies. Cities do this because they get kickbacks from the ISPs and other concessions like internet for unprofitable (poor) neighborhoods. In our system, ISPs offer an palatable municipal tax (by any other name) whereby the ISP becomes the hated party. Fortunately for them, ISPs aren't elected. If you want faster internet in the US, start with your local government.
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- protomyth 13y agoI wonder what would happen if an electric company or gas company decided to start and ISP. Both businesses are familiar with selling a commodity and have right of way.
- codgercoder 13y agohttp://www.he.net/?a=39098199433&n=g&pos=1t1&p=&t=&m=e&k=hurricane%20electric&gclid=CJvLxpzt070CFTMV7AodOScAPQ http://www.he.net/?a=39098199433&n=g&pos=1t1&p=&t=&m=e&k=hur...
- codgercoder 13y agoUh, no. There were once 15,000 ISPs! They were killed off when incumbents flexed their monopoly power. Instead of disrupting telecom, the new ISPs were forced into the old ways of state utility commissions. When the war was over, the incumbents picked up infrastructure for cents on the dollar. The 1996 Telecom Deregulation Act totally failed.