Fiber Optic Bliss
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The whole infrastructure argument is getting absurd. KPUD can't sell to end users because Washington law prohibits it. I have service but might not someday "just because." A city in Washington that owns its own utility agency could serve but has to do it by selling bonds that require 60% voter approval. Meanwhile, everybody is left wondering what next.
Much like a lot of things, folks here are generally opposed unless or until it directly impacts them. There is a group in Seattle that is pushing for a ballot initiative with accompanying property tax levy to get the city to build an open-access last mile system. The areas of the city that already have good service, whether Comcast or CenturyLink fiber, poll at slightly under 50% support. Areas that are stuck with Wave Broadband or only CenturyLink DSL poll at well above 70%.
for each people that is completely out of coverage, there are another 100,000 that is in a monopolistic coverage that probably had to pay for TV and other shenanigans on top of a ridiculous price just so they could get the service they wanted.
I called my local cable company and contracted their 50 mbps plan. Had a lot of issues with the installation and never really received the complete service. They didn't had enough bandwith in the zone so very few times I received my contracted bandwith.
At the end I contacted a Telcom (EnlaceTPE) which specialize in providing fiber internet to companies. They did the entire fiber instalation to my home. I only had to commit to 3 years paying around 70 usd with a 200 mbps service. From the first call to installation took around 3 months, best decision made so far.
The service by itself is expensive, considering it's just Internet. The most common package for internet + phone, on the most popular provider, costs around 24 USD monthly. If you want cable add another 20 bucks.
According to some websites the median wages in Mexico per home at 2013 was around 740 USD monthly.
USA: 2.8% of household income; Mexico: 3.2% with your number
So, they're quite similar. For that, I get 50Mbps down and a fraction up for $70. You get 200Mbps down and how much up? Either way, you're getting a good deal as a percentage of income. If you're better than $740/mo, you're getting a really good deal. I'm envious. :)
Cost is probably the main one, though. This company has way less overhead and more flexibility than Comcast.
Good on KPUD for putting in a solid effort here too: looks like everyone in the area might benefit from this one.
isn't having in writing the intent to go against the law (even if creatively) a very dumb thing to do?
I hereby announce my intent to pay as little taxes as legally possible.
the gist is that he got his series A or B, on a french bank, frozen because the US IRS told them to, because he gave up his green card (not even a full citizenship yet!) to go back to his home france and start a company there.
I am not actually a user of HamWAN--I'm down in Tacoma and my line-of-sight is impeded by terrain and building a tower in my dense urban neighborhood isn't an option. Also, I have biz-class Comcast.
Losing that capability would severely limit the internet for most folks...
Does not seem suitable.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-bui...
Deploying to rural is quite an uphill battle. But their model seems to be doing the job. Might be worth copying aspects in deployments like original post's.
Why should they have to sell it to you?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/24/america...
Why does the law forbid selling directly to consumers?
http://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblock...
I do have a specific example, though. My background is high assurance security & systems. The government once used incentives + good criteria to get market to create quite a few products their pentesters couldn't break. Then, NSA started competing with private sector under a new initiative. Market went away with Boeing guy clear that was largely why. Only a few remain and stay stagnant because companies won't invest much further in them due to risk posed by both market demand and government decisions.
http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Bell-Looking-B...
I also note that you have proven the nonexistence of private security companies, since they compete with the police and are much more restricted, by law, in what they can do.
And there can't be any private shuttle bus services, because there are municipal bus services.
I think you need to modify your claim.
All of these companies do reasonably well by competing with government-run services by offering things that the government isn't providing and is unlikely to provide because it unreasonably benefits a single user: on-demand pickups and guaranteed delivery times; full-time guards in a particular location; a bus that runs directly to your campus.
For instance, much USPS expense comes from the fact that they have to ship cheap anywhere. The overlap between them and private sector is the closest you come to a valid example. Private security in most states doesn't have to do much past issue warnings and call the police, while police can take direction action. A bus that runs directly to your campus isn't a general purpose bus or serving most people. So, yeah, it's certainly easier to offer a service that does less than the government one for fewer people and be successful.
Back to the actual topic at hand: fiber infrastructure. Laying out fiber all over the place has a high cost with low amount of money coming in. That's for lowest tiers. The Tier 1's expend 8-9 digits maintaining backbones. So, if government started competing, you can bet the private market would suffer & re-consider new fiber investments. The only model making sense at that point would be offering value-added services on top of connectivity while doing private investments where government wouldn't go.
I'm not saying people shouldn't have internet access. They absolutely should. But it's not something you can just should into existence, either.
The population density excuse is just that, an excuse not to do cell and broadband service properly. As such broadband definitrly falls into the should category.
The U.S. has a larger percentage of people on fiber, and Finland has a much larger proportion of people on fixed wireless. The U.S. has way more people on cable, while Finland has way more people on DSL.
94% of the U.S. has access to at least 4 mbps broadband. 59% has access to at least 100 mbps, versus 50% for Finland. According to Akamai, average connection speeds are about the same for the two countries: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/report/aka....
https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics...
The access methods by popularity are: xDSL, cable, Ethernet, FTTH and others, which might include some obscure fixed wireless operators using Wimax in the 3.5 Ghz band.
In Finland everybody that wants broadband can get broadband. In fact everybody that wants it has it. 92% of Finns have an Internet connection, either fixed only (22%), mobile broadband only (i.e. 3G or 4G at 28%) or a combination of both (42%). Source: https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics...
Fast broadband (100 Mbps or faster) is actively promoted and developed by the government. All permanent recidences shall be within a mile of an Internet backbone access point where service is available at 100 Mbps or more. This means local residents, co-ops or ISPs will easily be able to hook up anybody at 100 Mbps or more. Since a mile is the maximum distance average loop lenghts will be much shorter. Source: http://www.lvm.fi/pressreleases/4425644/broadband-for-all-20...
Funds are actually made available to provide broadband access to not-spots. The last 5% of a population is always hard to reach with fixed broadband, but subsidies are provided to hook up areas which aren't commercially viable otherwise. Source: same as above.
3G/4G mobile broadband is cheap, unlimited and uncapped with three facilities based operators and a handfull of MVNOs on top of that. 4G is actually faster and cheaper than a xDSL connection. Mobile broadband is thus actually a viable fixed broadband substitute.
20% have a fixed broadband connection of 100 Mbps or more. Not as in has access to, but as actual delivered connections. 46% have 10 Mbps or more and 7% 30 Mbps or more. Source: https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics...
It is left as an excercise for the reader to figure out why Finland does better at broadband than the US despite a low population density.
Further required reading: Regulatory capture in telecommunications
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for anything that looks vaguely like a solution to that problem, and not merely gloating about it.
EDIT: I'm sorry for the tone, but I see no value in pointing out flaws and failings without offering solutions to them. It's plenty easy in today's world to hate on the US. Most of it is probably even deserved. But it doesn't make anything better, so I don't see what it contributes to the discussion, beyond an opportunity for smugness.
EDIT: my actual reply to rayiner wasn't made to gloat, but to point out the substantial differences as a counterpoint to the statement that the US and Finland are statistically similar. It also contained the core problem, the lack of a properly constructed regulatory regime, which also points out the obvious thing to fix i.e. the solution required.
However if political activism isn't your thing then the only other solution is to build your own network.
I don't think you can actually reconcile that with the available data.
> 92% of Finns have an Internet connection
Yes, 92.4% of Finns versus 87.4% of Americans: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2?order=wba....
> Fast broadband (100 Mbps or faster) is actively promoted and developed by the government.
Maybe so, but access to 100 mbps connections is pretty much the same between the two countries: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/10/finland-plan-for-uni... ("Parantainen also provided government figures showing half of all Finns currently have a 100Mbps connection available to their door."); http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/usbb_avail_r... (see table on page 5, showing 47% access to 100 mbps+ wired broadband). Both are 2012 data.
According to Akamai, average speeds are pretty much the same too: http://readwrite.com/2014/10/08/us-broadband-speed-global-ra... (11.7 mbps for Finland, 11.4 mbps for U.S.)
Also according to Akamai, average peak connection speeds in the U.S. (a good measurement of the total capacity of the link) are slightly higher in the U.S. https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/report/aka... (40.6 mbps versus 36.5 mbps).
If you look past the rhetoric at the actual statistics, I think it's pretty clear that at the median, the internet situation is about the same between the two countries.
Now, within the bottom 15-20% I'm fully willing to bet Internet access and speed is worse in the U.S. than in Finland, but so is pretty much everything else. We have higher income inequality and more systematic poverty. The U.S. has about 20% of children in poverty versus less than 5% for Finland. Nothing really unique to internet service.
Broadband statistics for the US are of notorious bad quality, so any findings are to be taken with a grain of salt. The FCC statistics are useless and unless the NTIA statistics have been published in full and vetted then I'm inclined to put them into the category of wishful thinking.
The World bank data is also not comparable since it uses both narrowband and broadband access to tabulate Internet access. 92% of Finns have a broadband internet connection (see previous post for primary source). How many Americans have the same is an unknown quantity based on the data.
The key point is that Finland is inclusive with regards to broadband access while the US is exclusive.
Look, I'm not disagreeing with you that broadband access should be a universal thing. I emphatically agree that it should, which I'd have hoped one might have inferred from my comment, given, you know, that I said exactly that. But should, by itself, won't make a damned thing happen. Someone still has to pay for it, and I don't see the entrenched mobile (or wired) carriers in the flyover parts of the US jumping up and down with checkbooks in hand.
The US, whether for cynical, bureaucratic, pragmatic, or other reasons, doesn't have a legal regime mandating that kind of coverage. I wish to hell it did. But calling BS on reality, as time-honored of an internet tradition as that may be, is a pretty lousy place from which to start changing it...
The US has roughly twice the population density of Finland. Thus it would be roughly half as expensive per subscriber to wire up the US compared to Finland. The key takeaway here is that Finland has shown that it can be done and has been done.
As to whether it should be a should thing or not, it most definitely should be. The regulatory framework already exists for it, it's called the Universal Service Fund. The only thing lacking is that it is not being used for broadband. That needs to change, but as you said there isn't a legal regime mandating that...
In closing, population density isn't the real issue. Otherwise we would not be lamenting that you can't get broadband in California.
For example, the average density of the universe is 3-6 atoms per cubic meter. And that includes things like mountains, people, and stars.
When you're talking about provisioning broadband access, you have to provision for the worst case (or close enough that the differences are insigificant), not the average. Otherwise, you're looking at half the population being under- or unserved.
If you want a better estimator we can use linear density. The US has 321 million people and 4 million miles of roads. Finland has 5.5 million people and 282 thousand miles of roads.
US: 80 people per mile Finland: 20 people per mile
By this estimate average cost for a network that covers all roads, and thus all permanent residences and businesses, would be significantly cheaper in the US than in Finland.
KPUD isn't a "company." It's a public utility district.[1] It wouldn't exist without "laws."
[1] With special powers of condemnation and taxation. See 54.16.005 RCW et seq.
These systems can be very valuable in ways you may not expect. My parent's recently captured video of a car accident in front of their house. This video greatly benefited a long-time neighbor and friend.
Anyway you get a system that has good video coverage of your building's doors and windows and can record say a few days worth of video. You're golden, right? Unfortunately you are vulnerable in a fundamental way. An intruder can find the video recorder box and destroy it. I personally know individuals this has happened to. So you come home from a long week and find your building broken into and the video lost. What can you do about this?
Simple... find a neighbor/AWS/colo box/etc and stream the video there too. It records a few TB of data and provides a backup in case of theft or destruction. This differs from typical backup situations of home users because of the bandwith involved.
Because ideally you would stream the video directly from the cams. If you have 10 cams producing 2 mbps, thats 20mbps. That's a lot of upload for the typical home connection, but for a symmetrical gigabit connection it's a drop in the bucket.
This is just one example. Having the bandwidth available makes so many things easy that were previously very difficult.
Modern games are huge and SSDs are small. Buy all your games on steam. When you want to play a game just tell steam to get it and it downloads at 50+ megabytes / second. Play your 20GB game in less than 7 minutes. When you're done just delete it.
There is no reason why games couldn't be designed for this use case and be playble immediately, downloading in the background.
I had 4ms ping flat and 0% packet loss to local LA Quake Live servers when I had FiOS in LA. Almost LAN-like play.
Cable internet is always has much higher ping, more jitter, and more packet loss.
Supposedly I can get gigabit internet from AT&T here in Cupertino but they cap at 1 TB and I'm not excited about paying $110/mo for the equivalent of a ~3 Mbps sustained connection.
FiOS keeps upgrading it every year or so (it started as a 15/5 I couldn't saturate), so that's nice. At least I'm basically in "first world" territory even if I live in the U.S.
I suppose when 4k video becomes more common I'll feel it, but I don't even have anything that can display 4k right now and Verizon will probably just upgrade it to 75/75 or 100/100 by that point.
One nice benefit, I have a plex server I can access remotely and it works well outside of my network. But I'd live with just my netflix account if I had to "rough it".
Unless you've throttled your torrents, or you're connected to a really slow swarm, you have almost certainly saturated your download. I have -er- 100/10 or 100/15 service from Comcast. If I'm downloading anything >= 100MB, and a member of the household is going to start a new Netflix stream, I need to pause the download, or else the stream will be degraded for a long time.
Also, unless you're using a decent router, it's very possible that your router can't route and/or NAT at 50mbit or faster. I know that Apple Airports can and Ubiquiti EdgeRouters[0] can. I would also expect that an ISP-provided router would route fast enough.
[0] If you're in the market for a new router and are somewhat network savvy, or are comfortable with running OpenWRT on your router, I strongly recommend the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It routes and firewalls at ~1Gbit/sec (when offloading is enabled) and costs right around $100. Check out the Newegg reviews that aren't "It's slower than I expected" or "It's totally broken" for an idea of what you'll be getting in to. I've had mine for nearly a year and -other than the eventually dodgy external power supply[1] it shipped with- it has been rock solid.
[1] The unit I got had been sitting in a box in a warehouse in Florida for ~two years before it arrived on my doorstep. The failing power supply presented as infrequent spontaneous reboots with nothing unusual in syslog, which became more and more frequent until the power supply just stopped providing power entirely. Replaced it with a wall wart that I had on hand and have had no trouble since.
I'm sure there's some kind of fallback to SD from Netflix, their webpage claims I need 5Mb/s to get 720p, and 25Mb/s for "Ultra HD" (whatever that is and I'm pretty sure I'm not getting that for old episodes of Firefly) leaving me with somewhere between 25-45Mb/s. I'm pretty sure my wife isn't gobbling all that up with whatever it is she's watching. Web browsing is much lighter.
So all told, worst case I'm looking at
- 6Mb/s torrents
- 5Mb/s Netflix
- let's say 5Mb/s for my wife's video
- some fraction of 1Mb/s for our collective web surfing
Maybe 17-20Mb/s?
Amazingly, with all that going on, if I go do a speed test, it still showed me around 40/50 so I'm definitely under that.
'Tis true that the forked version of Vyatta (Vyatta 6?) that the EdgeRouters use is rather different than OpenWRT, but if one has figured out how to work with OpenWRT's UCI configuration system, one can figure out how to work with Vyatta's configuration system, too. And, both OpenWRT and Vyatta run on top of Linux, so -if needed- one has a Linux system that one can configure directly.
We have a 3.0/0.5 DSL connection which can support 1 high quality or 2 medium to low quality Netflix streams. Web browsing is tolerable when everyone is online, but the second the uplink bandwidth is saturated (0.5Mbit/s) everything else grinds to a halt. I think you'd notice it too if your connection weren't symmetric. That is, your connection was 50/5 or 50/10.
We were on-track to get a 50/50 fiber connection (the service supports up to 1000/1000) - however the ISP hasn't yet started to build the network out to our village - a year later than they said it would be available. In contrast, our neighboring villages all have their service, but there is a risk they will pull out since the build cost is 3x what they forecast (narrow country roads where the only option is to dig up the road, rather than run cable under verges or sidewalks).
FWIW, the build cost is a measly £600,000 - or $929,670, which in my estimate works out at between £600 and £1200 per resident.
I remember back when we had DSL we could saturate it, even with just some casual youtubing.
Funny thing is, we never asked for or paid for symmetric connections, our phone company just did it one day as part of a system upgrade and sent everybody new routers. And they've done at least one bandwidth upgrade since then.
I grew up pretty rural so I can definitely sympathize with your pain. The first world will arrive soon!
The trouble is that Virgin Media have much cut out for them if they want to match the availability of VDSL in the UK. Therefore, I can imagine they will be targeting large towns on the commuter belt long before they consider more rural villages.
Well your HD streams are very compressed and possibly downsized resolution.
People DO want 4K 60 fps uncompressed streams, but there is just no way to support them all at once.