9 ms·

This is how it should probably be done if we were starting from scratch. A system like the one you describe would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500

by exelius 12y ago

This is how it should probably be done if we were starting from scratch. A system like the one you describe would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500 billion; which isn't completely insane as far as national infrastructure projects go. The problem is that we're not starting from scratch. It's a lot harder for the government to justify that expense when there are a number of viable privately-owned alternatives. Or to put it another way: if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose? Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't. All I have to do is look at the pothole-strewn roads outside my house to know that. Fiber optics are awesome now; but what happens in 10 years when we need a new type of quantum fiber made from carbon nanotubes to go faster? Will the cities be able to make the investments? I have my doubts given the overall poor state of municipal infrastructure around the country for things like water and sewage. The system we have now is far from perfect, but we're going to need to figure out how to make something work within the confines of what we have today: a privately owned and operated physical infrastructure controlled by a small number of companies. How do we craft regulation such that those companies are more profitable when they do what we want them to do?

alex_doom 12y ago
> if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose? They'll choose D. Build a new sportsball arena
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- swimfar 12y ago
  That would be enough money for 500-1000 large stadiums. Citi Field in New York: $900 million Allianz Arena in Munich: 340€ million
zokier 12y ago
> The problem is that we're not starting from scratch But actually we did have an opportunity to reboot last-mile networks from scratch, because FTTx is essentially all-new network.
- rosser 12y ago
  And FTTx could be done at considerably lower cost, if we simply had the will to do it, and the patience to leverage existing work. For example, last week, they were tearing up the street in front of my building to put in new sewer lines. I don't even want to speculate what that might have cost. But now that the work is done, to lay fibre, they'll have to do it again. If, instead, they'd said, "Well, while we're here, let's just drop some conduit for fibre", and continued to do that going forward, a national FTTx last-mile infrastructure would cost considerably less. It wouldn't be free, of course. It's not merely "[dropping] some conduit", and there are plenty of places where they'd probably have to tear up the streets just for this purpose anyway. But, if every time we tore up the street for unrelated work, we leveraged that to put in place the FTTx-relevant things we'd also need to tear up the street for, we'd be so much closer, and at so much lower a cost...
  - danielweber 12y ago
    You think people who tear up the street to put in sewers have never thought "hey, while we are at it, let's build some conduit down here and then sell that?" I know they literally work on sewers, but they aren't dumb. They understand their business better than random people on the Internet do.
    - mentat 12y ago
      So please tell us, why is it not done? Contract provisions? Lack of profit?
      - amatix 12y ago
        Both. Most common, SewerCo says "pay for half of our digging costs" and FibreCo says "You're getting paid by the city to dig it up already! Why should we pay again?"and round and round we go. Also, if either SewerCo or FibreCo's work has delays, then there's another whole drama about who pays/is responsible for additional work, penalties, and so on. And the respective Project Managers don't give a rat's ass about the other company since hitting their budget/timeline is the only thing that matters. Seems like something that can (and should) be worked out, but unless local government steps in and mediates/forces their hand there doesn't seem to be a great urgency. Locally (in NZ) ElectricCo and FibreCo are starting to be the same company in a number of cases, in which case "stop arguing and just do it" is just a management edict.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Good points, allow me to share with you a bit of my strategy. There is a case to be made that much of the tearing up of the streets is a function of people laying down multiple communication infrastructures along side each other. We looked though the permits for the last 12 months and compared that activity to a on-going repaving and road maintenance work. There are several interesting variables at play in that, cost to maintain (tax based), property tax (revenue), new permits (revenue). If you consider switching the physical layer to an infrastructure basis you eliminate multiple fiber/copper paths under the street, multiple fiber/copper vaults in sidewalks and on street corners, and replace them with a common set of conduits. That helps a number of costs, site surveys for digs, delays for city work, and multiple trenching/paving jobs with different standards of integrity. My city, Sunnyvale, is dealing with ways to make maintaining the city more efficient. This sort of change helps that in ways that are not immediately obvious to folks because they happen with dozens of different actors across dozens of different departments. My goal is to get the city thinking differently about communications (more like roads and sewers than 'optional thing some folks have') so that we can move past the current hodgepodge into a more efficient and maintainable system. If I can get my city to change, then other cities can see the change and see how it helps or hurts and decide independently to change. As a particularly tech savvy city we have a strong alignment with citizens who want better communications, and we've seen from places like Kansas with Google fiber that such communications upgrades increase property values, which increases property tax revenues. My hope is we can get everyone (communication providers, city, citizens) all aligned on this idea. If so it will get done.
- exelius 12y ago
  This is all well and good if you're talking about relatively wealthy cities like Sunnyvale with a good tax base, but many cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are literally crumbling. They operate much more in a "try to keep the lights on" capacity because they just don't have the money to do anything else. The roads are constantly torn up from traffic and just never get fixed, water and sewer don't always function properly and the schools are an utter disaster. Basically, many cities have much more pressing problems than telecom infrastructure. Not to mention that federally, the FCC holds jurisdiction and thus final say over what cities can and can't do. What may look like standardization to you in Sunnyvale starts to look like a hodgepodge of municipal implementations at a federal level, and the FCC may stop you from standardizing at the local level until they've developed standards at the federal level. It's bureaucracy at its finest; but it does serve a purpose.
otterley 12y ago
> The problem is that we're not starting from scratch. It's a lot harder for the government to justify that expense when there are a number of viable privately-owned alternatives. This is what the condemnation process is for. The government is unlikely to have to spend $500B to rebuild it; probably much less for the depreciated capital. > Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't. All I have to do is look at the pothole-strewn roads outside my house to know that. I wouldn't judge that quality of municipal infrastructure maintenance by the number of potholes, because fuel taxes pay for road maintenance, and many jurisdictions haven't raised fuel taxes in decades (i.e. they're not keeping up with inflation). Instead, you might look to your water, sewage, garbage and electricity services - there, public utilities score quite well, and it's because they're usually not operating at a significant loss.
Nimi 12y ago
"How do we craft regulation such that those companies are more profitable when they do what we want them to do?" Sounds like the U.S. already has such regulation - anti-trust regulation. As ChuckMcM noted above, the problem is that Comcast has a monopoly over the last mile. Effective and enforced anti-trust regulations would break up this monopoly into several different competing companies. BTW, here in Israel, the government apparently has taken the position that services requiring significant infrastructure investment (Internet or cellular networks) are best handled by handing out a limited number of licenses using a bid. We then get an oligopoly where the companies are wildly profitable, until the government has decided we got the infrastructure we wanted, and removes the barrier to entry. Specifically for Internet, we have a duopoly over the last mile "going until the city exchange" to put it in ChuckMcM's terms, then a lot of ISPs taking it from there. IMO, not a bad way to go - we don't pay a lot and get decent Internet everywhere in the country.
- rcthompson 12y ago
  Anti-trust laws are not ideal, though. They effectively act as thresholds or hard lower limits on allowed competition, but they don't directly address the economies of scale and barriers to entry that push the market toward a monopoly state.
  - Nimi 12y ago
    Agreed. I have been looking now for a while for a rigorous treatment of how to deal with monopoly-related problems (hopefully this would be a summary of the current consensus among economists), are you by chance familiar with one?
    - whatevsbro 12y ago
      > I have been looking now for a while for a rigorous treatment of how to deal with monopoly-related problems http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10a.asp http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10a.asp there are two, and only two, ways to settle what the prices of goods will be. One is the way of the free market, where prices are set voluntarily by each of the participating individuals. In this situation, exchanges are made on terms benefiting all the exchangers. The other way is by violent intervention in the market, the way of hegemony as against contract. Such hegemonic establishment of prices means the outlawing of free exchanges and the institution of exploitation of man by man—for exploitation occurs whenever a coerced exchange is made. If the free-market route—the route of mutual benefit—is adopted, then there can be no other criterion of justice than the free-market price, and this includes alleged “competitive” and “monopoly” prices, as well as the actions of cartels. In the free market, consumers and producers adjust their actions in voluntary cooperation.
mbell 12y ago
> if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose? I don't think that is a hard choice at all. I've see what happens when the government tries to 'overhaul the education system', and it isn't pretty. I'd rather they stay out of that market and leave it to the local governments. Laying fiber on the other hand, that they may be able to accomplish.
AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> Fiber optics are awesome now; but what happens in 10 years when we need a new type of quantum fiber made from carbon nanotubes to go faster? Fiber optics are awesome now. Fiber optics were awesome in the 2000s, and the 90s, and the 80s, and the 70s... Quantum fiber isn't a thing. Nobody has even proposed anything to replace fiber with and copper has lasted more than a hundred years. You can get Tbps out of fiber so we should be good for a while. If somebody invents something to replace fiber with, we can deal with that when it happens (probably a hundred years from now).
- sounds 12y ago
  Thanks for saying this! It's worth pointing out the economic benefit to whoever invents the Next Big Thing -- if they make it compatible with existing conduit, it can just be pulled through replacing existing infrastructure. It turns out the only irreplaceable part is the tubes. Think datacenters, high density offices and apartments, Level 3's long haul links, etc. They will all be looking for a way to pull Next Big Thing like it was fiber.
TomGullen 12y ago
> Or to put it another way: if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose? Pretty sure that's a false dichotomy, there's no reason you can't have both (given a few years). US military budget is ~$650 billion. Is that more important than investing in an educational system that desperately needs overhauling?
jmcqk6 12y ago
>Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't. I hear this criticism quite a bit, but I really don't understand. Do we have any evidence at all that the government is actually less efficient, less trustworthy than private companies? The problem we're discussing is caused by private companies not living up to their responsibilities. There are endless examples of this other places as well. Sure, there are dangers inherent in public services that are not present in private, but the inverse is true as well. What we're talking about in this specific instance is infrastructure that is a societal benefit, and if that doesn't fall into the domain of public government, I don't know what does.
criley2 12y ago
Let me just point out that $500 billion is larger than the entire yearly non-defense discretionary budget of the US, itself the largest discretionary budget of any government. >But criley2, how do we spend trillions if $500B is larger than our budget Discretionary budget, not mandatory spending like social security or welfare. $500B is an enormous sum of money, it truly is. $500B/10Y would still be an incredibly large sum subject to an incredible amount of corruption and graft...

by exelius 12y ago

alex_doom 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
swimfar 12y ago
That would be enough money for 500-1000 large stadiums. Citi Field in New York: $900 million Allianz Arena in Munich: 340€ million

zokier 12y ago

> The problem is that we're not starting from scratch But actually we did have an opportunity to reboot last-mile networks from scratch, because FTTx is essentially all-new network.

rosser 12y ago
And FTTx could be done at considerably lower cost, if we simply had the will to do it, and the patience to leverage existing work. For example, last week, they were tearing up the street in front of my building to put in new sewer lines. I don't even want to speculate what that might have cost. But now that the work is done, to lay fibre, they'll have to do it again. If, instead, they'd said, "Well, while we're here, let's just drop some conduit for fibre", and continued to do that going forward, a national FTTx last-mile infrastructure would cost considerably less. It wouldn't be free, of course. It's not merely "[dropping] some conduit", and there are plenty of places where they'd probably have to tear up the streets just for this purpose anyway. But, if every time we tore up the street for unrelated work, we leveraged that to put in place the FTTx-relevant things we'd also need to tear up the street for, we'd be so much closer, and at so much lower a cost...
- danielweber 12y ago
  You think people who tear up the street to put in sewers have never thought "hey, while we are at it, let's build some conduit down here and then sell that?" I know they literally work on sewers, but they aren't dumb. They understand their business better than random people on the Internet do.
  - mentat 12y ago
    So please tell us, why is it not done? Contract provisions? Lack of profit?
    - amatix 12y ago
      Both. Most common, SewerCo says "pay for half of our digging costs" and FibreCo says "You're getting paid by the city to dig it up already! Why should we pay again?"and round and round we go. Also, if either SewerCo or FibreCo's work has delays, then there's another whole drama about who pays/is responsible for additional work, penalties, and so on. And the respective Project Managers don't give a rat's ass about the other company since hitting their budget/timeline is the only thing that matters. Seems like something that can (and should) be worked out, but unless local government steps in and mediates/forces their hand there doesn't seem to be a great urgency. Locally (in NZ) ElectricCo and FibreCo are starting to be the same company in a number of cases, in which case "stop arguing and just do it" is just a management edict.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Good points, allow me to share with you a bit of my strategy. There is a case to be made that much of the tearing up of the streets is a function of people laying down multiple communication infrastructures along side each other. We looked though the permits for the last 12 months and compared that activity to a on-going repaving and road maintenance work. There are several interesting variables at play in that, cost to maintain (tax based), property tax (revenue), new permits (revenue). If you consider switching the physical layer to an infrastructure basis you eliminate multiple fiber/copper paths under the street, multiple fiber/copper vaults in sidewalks and on street corners, and replace them with a common set of conduits. That helps a number of costs, site surveys for digs, delays for city work, and multiple trenching/paving jobs with different standards of integrity. My city, Sunnyvale, is dealing with ways to make maintaining the city more efficient. This sort of change helps that in ways that are not immediately obvious to folks because they happen with dozens of different actors across dozens of different departments. My goal is to get the city thinking differently about communications (more like roads and sewers than 'optional thing some folks have') so that we can move past the current hodgepodge into a more efficient and maintainable system. If I can get my city to change, then other cities can see the change and see how it helps or hurts and decide independently to change. As a particularly tech savvy city we have a strong alignment with citizens who want better communications, and we've seen from places like Kansas with Google fiber that such communications upgrades increase property values, which increases property tax revenues. My hope is we can get everyone (communication providers, city, citizens) all aligned on this idea. If so it will get done.

exelius 12y ago
This is all well and good if you're talking about relatively wealthy cities like Sunnyvale with a good tax base, but many cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are literally crumbling. They operate much more in a "try to keep the lights on" capacity because they just don't have the money to do anything else. The roads are constantly torn up from traffic and just never get fixed, water and sewer don't always function properly and the schools are an utter disaster. Basically, many cities have much more pressing problems than telecom infrastructure. Not to mention that federally, the FCC holds jurisdiction and thus final say over what cities can and can't do. What may look like standardization to you in Sunnyvale starts to look like a hodgepodge of municipal implementations at a federal level, and the FCC may stop you from standardizing at the local level until they've developed standards at the federal level. It's bureaucracy at its finest; but it does serve a purpose.

otterley 12y ago

> The problem is that we're not starting from scratch. It's a lot harder for the government to justify that expense when there are a number of viable privately-owned alternatives. This is what the condemnation process is for. The government is unlikely to have to spend $500B to rebuild it; probably much less for the depreciated capital. > Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't. All I have to do is look at the pothole-strewn roads outside my house to know that. I wouldn't judge that quality of municipal infrastructure maintenance by the number of potholes, because fuel taxes pay for road maintenance, and many jurisdictions haven't raised fuel taxes in decades (i.e. they're not keeping up with inflation). Instead, you might look to your water, sewage, garbage and electricity services - there, public utilities score quite well, and it's because they're usually not operating at a significant loss.

Nimi 12y ago

"How do we craft regulation such that those companies are more profitable when they do what we want them to do?" Sounds like the U.S. already has such regulation - anti-trust regulation. As ChuckMcM noted above, the problem is that Comcast has a monopoly over the last mile. Effective and enforced anti-trust regulations would break up this monopoly into several different competing companies. BTW, here in Israel, the government apparently has taken the position that services requiring significant infrastructure investment (Internet or cellular networks) are best handled by handing out a limited number of licenses using a bid. We then get an oligopoly where the companies are wildly profitable, until the government has decided we got the infrastructure we wanted, and removes the barrier to entry. Specifically for Internet, we have a duopoly over the last mile "going until the city exchange" to put it in ChuckMcM's terms, then a lot of ISPs taking it from there. IMO, not a bad way to go - we don't pay a lot and get decent Internet everywhere in the country.

rcthompson 12y ago
Anti-trust laws are not ideal, though. They effectively act as thresholds or hard lower limits on allowed competition, but they don't directly address the economies of scale and barriers to entry that push the market toward a monopoly state.
- Nimi 12y ago
  Agreed. I have been looking now for a while for a rigorous treatment of how to deal with monopoly-related problems (hopefully this would be a summary of the current consensus among economists), are you by chance familiar with one?
  - whatevsbro 12y ago
    > I have been looking now for a while for a rigorous treatment of how to deal with monopoly-related problems http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10a.asp http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10a.asp there are two, and only two, ways to settle what the prices of goods will be. One is the way of the free market, where prices are set voluntarily by each of the participating individuals. In this situation, exchanges are made on terms benefiting all the exchangers. The other way is by violent intervention in the market, the way of hegemony as against contract. Such hegemonic establishment of prices means the outlawing of free exchanges and the institution of exploitation of man by man—for exploitation occurs whenever a coerced exchange is made. If the free-market route—the route of mutual benefit—is adopted, then there can be no other criterion of justice than the free-market price, and this includes alleged “competitive” and “monopoly” prices, as well as the actions of cartels. In the free market, consumers and producers adjust their actions in voluntary cooperation.

mbell 12y ago

> if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose? I don't think that is a hard choice at all. I've see what happens when the government tries to 'overhaul the education system', and it isn't pretty. I'd rather they stay out of that market and leave it to the local governments. Laying fiber on the other hand, that they may be able to accomplish.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago

> Fiber optics are awesome now; but what happens in 10 years when we need a new type of quantum fiber made from carbon nanotubes to go faster? Fiber optics are awesome now. Fiber optics were awesome in the 2000s, and the 90s, and the 80s, and the 70s... Quantum fiber isn't a thing. Nobody has even proposed anything to replace fiber with and copper has lasted more than a hundred years. You can get Tbps out of fiber so we should be good for a while. If somebody invents something to replace fiber with, we can deal with that when it happens (probably a hundred years from now).

sounds 12y ago
Thanks for saying this! It's worth pointing out the economic benefit to whoever invents the Next Big Thing -- if they make it compatible with existing conduit, it can just be pulled through replacing existing infrastructure. It turns out the only irreplaceable part is the tubes. Think datacenters, high density offices and apartments, Level 3's long haul links, etc. They will all be looking for a way to pull Next Big Thing like it was fiber.

TomGullen 12y ago

> Or to put it another way: if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose? Pretty sure that's a false dichotomy, there's no reason you can't have both (given a few years). US military budget is ~$650 billion. Is that more important than investing in an educational system that desperately needs overhauling?

jmcqk6 12y ago

>Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't. I hear this criticism quite a bit, but I really don't understand. Do we have any evidence at all that the government is actually less efficient, less trustworthy than private companies? The problem we're discussing is caused by private companies not living up to their responsibilities. There are endless examples of this other places as well. Sure, there are dangers inherent in public services that are not present in private, but the inverse is true as well. What we're talking about in this specific instance is infrastructure that is a societal benefit, and if that doesn't fall into the domain of public government, I don't know what does.

criley2 12y ago

Let me just point out that $500 billion is larger than the entire yearly non-defense discretionary budget of the US, itself the largest discretionary budget of any government. >But criley2, how do we spend trillions if $500B is larger than our budget Discretionary budget, not mandatory spending like social security or welfare. $500B is an enormous sum of money, it truly is. $500B/10Y would still be an incredibly large sum subject to an incredible amount of corruption and graft...