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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

by 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.
    - lugg 12y ago
      Thanks mostly confirming what I suspected. I did think we would be able to use the spectrum more efficiently over time with better, more precise measurements but my guess is that will scale to its own limits a lot faster than a hard line will.
      - martinald 12y ago
        Much like procesing power and moore's law, we're getting very close to shannon's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem. Wireless isn't this huge gamechanger that people may think. To beat shannon's law you would need so many base stations in the long term it looks awfully like what we have now with DSL/Fiber/DOCSIS and wifi APs.
    - exelius 12y ago
      It all depends how much bandwidth you need for a given use case. For most use cases other than video, existing wireless technologies are sufficient and will only continue to improve as things like beam shaping and micro cells become more prevalent. Wireless is easier to deploy and as its use grows, more spectrum will likely open up. Free markets have the benefit of deploying scarce resources where they are most in demand. Implementing that spectrum is often as easy as a configuration change that can be deployed remotely. The biggest advantage of a wired home broadband connection over a wireless one that I see is the ability to stream video. A wired connection has a lot of disadvantages: it's useless outside the home and the infrastructure is significantly more expensive. Wireless has signal and coverage issues for sure, but wireless is a much more competitive industry than wired access in no small part because it's cheaper to deploy. I don't think it would be going out on a limb to say the HN audience is much wealthier and more technology-literate than the average citizen, and thus would be more likely to want multiple Internet connections and have more use cases such as running file servers, etc. I think the HN crowd overestimates what people use their Internet connections for; the average person uses their home broadband connection primarily to watch video. It's not a bad use case by any means; but I'm not sure the government needs to be building infrastructure that will be primarily used by video streaming companies. Traditional cellular wireless (which can use any mix of wireless, wired or satellite backhaul depending on the application) and Wi-Fi are flexible enough to cover the "access" part of Internet access; especially in an increasingly post-PC world.
- fizx 12y ago
  The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem limits the information that can be transmitted through a given channel. If you want to send more wired data, you add more channels by adding more wires. Wireless doesn't have that luxury.
  - Maakuth 12y ago
    Strictly speaking this is true, however you can add more base stations with lower transmit power so the shared media is shared by lower number of clients. This is what is already done in urban areas with smaller base stations.
- exelius 12y ago
  Wired connectivity certainly isn't either. I find myself using my home internet connection almost exclusively for movies and games -- not exactly the great innovative services everyone talks about. I use my phone for almost everything else: online shopping, communication, news consumption, even work since I tether my laptop to it when I'm on the go. It's a lot more convenient; and the only thing I really need high bandwidth for is media playback.
  - nknighthb 12y ago
    How do you think your wireless signals get to the rest of the world? Microwave backhaul is almost dead, those cell towers (and there are tons of them in urban environments, partly for want of spectrum) are wired up with fiber.
    - edraferi 12y ago
      exactly. Plus even if I'm on my phone I prefer the speed and reliability of my own Wi-Fi.
    - exelius 12y ago
      Of course wired is used for backhaul between wireless nodes and the internet; but I'm speaking as a consumer technology. Wired access is definitely here to stay for infrastructure uses.
sliverstorm 12y ago
Wireless serves the needs of low-bandwidth information consumption quite well these days, and at a significantly lower cost How do you figure? I pay $30/month each for wireless & wired services. My wired services are unlimited; wireless is capped.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Its a reasonable question, the challenge is spectrum management. As the city would provide layer 1 (connectivity) not any above layers, they would have to become the spectrum manager for wireless base stations. That is percieved to be too complex. Also this has to meet the needs of consumers and businesses alike. Currently fiber scales from 1mbit > 1TBit [1] so it has that flexibility. Maintenance of the fiber is independent of the special laser you would attach to it if you were say, the new LinkedIn headquarters, versus a consumer. Not that fiber is particularly "easy", looking over street maps and figuring out what sort of bundles/routing you need to get full coverage is quite an exercise in itself. [1] http://www.lightreading.com/optical/400g-terabit/euronews-bt-alcalu-claim-fiber-speed-record/d/d-id/707365 http://www.lightreading.com/optical/400g-terabit/euronews-bt...
- exelius 12y ago
  If it's too complex for a municipality to manage the right technology, is it the right thing to deploy the only technology they can manage? There are market solutions in place for wireless; and spectrum management is already handled by the FCC (would a municipality even have jurisdiction?) I guess I remain unconvinced how this is not effectively a subsidy to the media companies (Netflix et. al; including Comcast once they start offering a cable-over-internet product) given that the primary use case of wired high-speed internet access is overwhelmingly streaming video (since over 80% of Internet traffic is streaming video). I also don't imagine it would lower costs significantly over a company like Comcast in the long run; the margins aren't great on a business like that and line maintenance is much more expensive long-term than people realize.

by exelius 12y ago

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.
  - lugg 12y ago
    Thanks mostly confirming what I suspected. I did think we would be able to use the spectrum more efficiently over time with better, more precise measurements but my guess is that will scale to its own limits a lot faster than a hard line will.
    - martinald 12y ago
      Much like procesing power and moore's law, we're getting very close to shannon's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem. Wireless isn't this huge gamechanger that people may think. To beat shannon's law you would need so many base stations in the long term it looks awfully like what we have now with DSL/Fiber/DOCSIS and wifi APs.
  - exelius 12y ago
    It all depends how much bandwidth you need for a given use case. For most use cases other than video, existing wireless technologies are sufficient and will only continue to improve as things like beam shaping and micro cells become more prevalent. Wireless is easier to deploy and as its use grows, more spectrum will likely open up. Free markets have the benefit of deploying scarce resources where they are most in demand. Implementing that spectrum is often as easy as a configuration change that can be deployed remotely. The biggest advantage of a wired home broadband connection over a wireless one that I see is the ability to stream video. A wired connection has a lot of disadvantages: it's useless outside the home and the infrastructure is significantly more expensive. Wireless has signal and coverage issues for sure, but wireless is a much more competitive industry than wired access in no small part because it's cheaper to deploy. I don't think it would be going out on a limb to say the HN audience is much wealthier and more technology-literate than the average citizen, and thus would be more likely to want multiple Internet connections and have more use cases such as running file servers, etc. I think the HN crowd overestimates what people use their Internet connections for; the average person uses their home broadband connection primarily to watch video. It's not a bad use case by any means; but I'm not sure the government needs to be building infrastructure that will be primarily used by video streaming companies. Traditional cellular wireless (which can use any mix of wireless, wired or satellite backhaul depending on the application) and Wi-Fi are flexible enough to cover the "access" part of Internet access; especially in an increasingly post-PC world.
fizx 12y ago
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem limits the information that can be transmitted through a given channel. If you want to send more wired data, you add more channels by adding more wires. Wireless doesn't have that luxury.
- Maakuth 12y ago
  Strictly speaking this is true, however you can add more base stations with lower transmit power so the shared media is shared by lower number of clients. This is what is already done in urban areas with smaller base stations.
exelius 12y ago
Wired connectivity certainly isn't either. I find myself using my home internet connection almost exclusively for movies and games -- not exactly the great innovative services everyone talks about. I use my phone for almost everything else: online shopping, communication, news consumption, even work since I tether my laptop to it when I'm on the go. It's a lot more convenient; and the only thing I really need high bandwidth for is media playback.
- nknighthb 12y ago
  How do you think your wireless signals get to the rest of the world? Microwave backhaul is almost dead, those cell towers (and there are tons of them in urban environments, partly for want of spectrum) are wired up with fiber.
  - edraferi 12y ago
    exactly. Plus even if I'm on my phone I prefer the speed and reliability of my own Wi-Fi.
  - exelius 12y ago
    Of course wired is used for backhaul between wireless nodes and the internet; but I'm speaking as a consumer technology. Wired access is definitely here to stay for infrastructure uses.

sliverstorm 12y ago

Wireless serves the needs of low-bandwidth information consumption quite well these days, and at a significantly lower cost How do you figure? I pay $30/month each for wireless & wired services. My wired services are unlimited; wireless is capped.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Its a reasonable question, the challenge is spectrum management. As the city would provide layer 1 (connectivity) not any above layers, they would have to become the spectrum manager for wireless base stations. That is percieved to be too complex. Also this has to meet the needs of consumers and businesses alike. Currently fiber scales from 1mbit > 1TBit [1] so it has that flexibility. Maintenance of the fiber is independent of the special laser you would attach to it if you were say, the new LinkedIn headquarters, versus a consumer. Not that fiber is particularly "easy", looking over street maps and figuring out what sort of bundles/routing you need to get full coverage is quite an exercise in itself. [1] http://www.lightreading.com/optical/400g-terabit/euronews-bt-alcalu-claim-fiber-speed-record/d/d-id/707365 http://www.lightreading.com/optical/400g-terabit/euronews-bt...

exelius 12y ago
If it's too complex for a municipality to manage the right technology, is it the right thing to deploy the only technology they can manage? There are market solutions in place for wireless; and spectrum management is already handled by the FCC (would a municipality even have jurisdiction?) I guess I remain unconvinced how this is not effectively a subsidy to the media companies (Netflix et. al; including Comcast once they start offering a cable-over-internet product) given that the primary use case of wired high-speed internet access is overwhelmingly streaming video (since over 80% of Internet traffic is streaming video). I also don't imagine it would lower costs significantly over a company like Comcast in the long run; the margins aren't great on a business like that and line maintenance is much more expensive long-term than people realize.