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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 Ph

by 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.

ryanhuff 12y ago
You have to start somewhere. Sometimes an incremental approach is the easiest to get rolling. Framing it as a national issue likely makes it more complex, however.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
A couple of points, first I talked with a lawyer who works with/for the FCC and established that if the city isn't involved in lighting up the pipes they don't care what they do. The regulations would apply to ISPs using those pipes but it would not apply to the folks maintaining them. He used the example that companies like the old AboveNet which ran dark fiber from place to place and kept it maintained were not liable to FCC regulation. The second thing that is interesting is that having a city maintained connectivity infrastructure actually has some positive social justice aspects as it starts to chip away at the digital divide. Once existing contracts have expired and the city is in a position to change things (current single provider contracts don't allow for this) a charitable organization could be an "ISP" without the cost of maintaining the physical plant to/from the subscribers. This greatly expands the available market and gives at risk populations more accessibility. Currently kids study at the city library (which has publicly accessible Internet) rather than at home. Keep them coming folks, these are exactly the sorts of things we're trying to surface and look at.
- exelius 12y ago
  How do we know that wired broadband is even the answer? Wouldn't wireless connectivity be more attractive if the goal is social justice? Many lower-income homes don't own a PC, and at this point they probably never will. How attractive is a home PC to you if all you've ever known are smartphones? Wired broadband, to me, is more of an entertainment consumption platform. Wireless serves the needs of low-bandwidth information consumption quite well these days, and at a significantly lower cost and better market dynamics. Wouldn't a city be better served by pushing Wi-Fi or 4G? Especially given the mass adoption of smartphones by all segments of the economy.
  - wtallis 12y ago
    The laws of physics prohibit wireless from serving current needs in an urban density. It's not a solution for the future.
    - lugg 12y ago
      Are you able to expand? I tend to agree but dont really know why or what / where the physical limits are. Is it the 4g etc tech that can't perform with real load or WiFi that will fall over? Is a mesh network an answer?
      - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
        The problem is that wireless is a shared medium. If you have a certain amount of spectrum, you can transfer a finite number of bits per second using it, and that capacity is shared between all devices in range. The bandwidth available in a certain chunk of spectrum is a physical limit. There is no way to expand capacity other than by allocating more spectrum, and radio spectrum is extremely scarce. So the more users you have using cellular for internet, the less bandwidth they each get. The solution when you want to have "wireless" devices but there isn't enough wireless spectrum is to use wireless for the "last 50 meters" rather than the last mile. In other words, you have fiber to the premises and then WiFi within the building. By keeping the wireless power levels as low as possible you reduce the number of other users you're sharing the spectrum with and allow each user to have a satisfactory amount of bandwidth. Then reserve cellular wireless for users not in a building, e.g. accessing a map from your car, and have all manner of stupid bandwidth caps to discourage usage of cellular wireless whenever it isn't strictly necessary. > Is a mesh network an answer? No. Mesh networks would allow you to have more bandwidth per user by reducing wireless power levels and shrinking the geographic size of the collision domain, but that would require peers to act as repeaters between other peers and the tower. That's an epic fail. It adds latency, reduces battery life, impacts reliability if any peer's device is flaky, has security implications, etc. Wireless mesh networks ironically work much better for fixed-position devices than mobile devices, because they can use directional antennas, don't have the extreme power constraints mobile devices do, etc.

by exelius 12y ago

ryanhuff 12y ago

You have to start somewhere. Sometimes an incremental approach is the easiest to get rolling. Framing it as a national issue likely makes it more complex, however.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

A couple of points, first I talked with a lawyer who works with/for the FCC and established that if the city isn't involved in lighting up the pipes they don't care what they do. The regulations would apply to ISPs using those pipes but it would not apply to the folks maintaining them. He used the example that companies like the old AboveNet which ran dark fiber from place to place and kept it maintained were not liable to FCC regulation. The second thing that is interesting is that having a city maintained connectivity infrastructure actually has some positive social justice aspects as it starts to chip away at the digital divide. Once existing contracts have expired and the city is in a position to change things (current single provider contracts don't allow for this) a charitable organization could be an "ISP" without the cost of maintaining the physical plant to/from the subscribers. This greatly expands the available market and gives at risk populations more accessibility. Currently kids study at the city library (which has publicly accessible Internet) rather than at home. Keep them coming folks, these are exactly the sorts of things we're trying to surface and look at.

exelius 12y ago
How do we know that wired broadband is even the answer? Wouldn't wireless connectivity be more attractive if the goal is social justice? Many lower-income homes don't own a PC, and at this point they probably never will. How attractive is a home PC to you if all you've ever known are smartphones? Wired broadband, to me, is more of an entertainment consumption platform. Wireless serves the needs of low-bandwidth information consumption quite well these days, and at a significantly lower cost and better market dynamics. Wouldn't a city be better served by pushing Wi-Fi or 4G? Especially given the mass adoption of smartphones by all segments of the economy.
- wtallis 12y ago
  The laws of physics prohibit wireless from serving current needs in an urban density. It's not a solution for the future.
  - lugg 12y ago
    Are you able to expand? I tend to agree but dont really know why or what / where the physical limits are. Is it the 4g etc tech that can't perform with real load or WiFi that will fall over? Is a mesh network an answer?
    - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
      The problem is that wireless is a shared medium. If you have a certain amount of spectrum, you can transfer a finite number of bits per second using it, and that capacity is shared between all devices in range. The bandwidth available in a certain chunk of spectrum is a physical limit. There is no way to expand capacity other than by allocating more spectrum, and radio spectrum is extremely scarce. So the more users you have using cellular for internet, the less bandwidth they each get. The solution when you want to have "wireless" devices but there isn't enough wireless spectrum is to use wireless for the "last 50 meters" rather than the last mile. In other words, you have fiber to the premises and then WiFi within the building. By keeping the wireless power levels as low as possible you reduce the number of other users you're sharing the spectrum with and allow each user to have a satisfactory amount of bandwidth. Then reserve cellular wireless for users not in a building, e.g. accessing a map from your car, and have all manner of stupid bandwidth caps to discourage usage of cellular wireless whenever it isn't strictly necessary. > Is a mesh network an answer? No. Mesh networks would allow you to have more bandwidth per user by reducing wireless power levels and shrinking the geographic size of the collision domain, but that would require peers to act as repeaters between other peers and the tower. That's an epic fail. It adds latency, reduces battery life, impacts reliability if any peer's device is flaky, has security implications, etc. Wireless mesh networks ironically work much better for fixed-position devices than mobile devices, because they can use directional antennas, don't have the extreme power constraints mobile devices do, etc.