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Comment by dmritard96 | Hacker News Reader

For the most part agreed. In general, if there is a 'natural monopoly' AND the private sector is failing to provide better service or better pricing or both as a result of competition, I don't understand why we wouldn't simply treat it as a utility or fully make it public.

One counter here is that the reason they have a monopoly is the last mile lines and easements, but arguably there is enough spectral bandwidth in the wireless realm that perhaps whats really missing is competition for home internet from wireless operators. I'm not sure where I stand here but I do think its interesting to consider whether it would be better to help bring competition somehow from that side into the home broadband realm or whether the landline route should be made more public. I'm sure there are some capacity limitations on the wireless side also that may make this a pipedream.

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Wireless internet is not a solution – it's very obviously inferior to wired if you don't need the mobility. More expensive, lower bandwidth, higher latency, lower reliability.

"Fixed wireless" systems like microwave and other line-of-sight systems have negligible latency (and considerably less latency than DSL which never seems to go below 20ms for me) and you can theoretically get gigabit speeds, and because there's no last-mile infrastructure besides an antenna it's less expensive to set-up too. The only thing you mention that applies is limited bandwidth: such systems only work in low-population-density rural environments, it would not work in Manhattan.

There needs to be more consumer education to allow them to differentiate between high-performance things like fixed-wireless compared to running their home internet off their phone's LTE connection.

Funnily, my iPhone's LTE connection (according to SpeedTest) has very good latency and throughput: I get ~10ms to my nearest major city and ~30mbps downstream, sometimes my LTE upstream speed is faster than my home DOCSIS connection. Alas I can't use it as my home connection because I need a static IP address and more than a few gigabytes of data-transfer per month (more like a few terabytes...)

I have a grandfathered 'unlimited' data plan with tmobile. I get 75mbit down and 40-70mbit up where I live and the places I spend 99% of my time. I often use a vpn(to hide user agent) and tether to get those speeds on my laptop when I'm not at home. Haven't had a problem with data caps yet, often use 50ish gigs of data, and have tethered over 20gb recently with no issue. Edit: Nexus 6p on LTE 700mhz

That only works because you're 1 person. If everyone in your town decided to do this your phone would be unusable.

We have ~50 users on our unlicensed fixed wireless service and we've been running into numerous signal issues. Wireless isn't the answer.

Was just sharing my experience in downtown Detroit.

Actually. I have a legacy unlimited plan with Verizon (costs $170/mo). When I need to upload or download something large fast, I tether my laptop, since I get 7-9Mbps upload via my phone, versus 768Kbps via my phone DSL. I actually thought of getting rid of my $100/mo slow DSL. I wonder if permanent LTE tethering will be viable in the future.

Why haven't you done it already?

I believe what you're talking about is called a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP). Netlinx is one example of it (http://netlinx.net/)

I've read a bit about WISPs, because they seem like a happy solution to the whole monopoly problem but they haven't caught hold in the way that I've hoped. Latency seems to be a pretty significant issue. Consistency in signal strength is also a problem.

I also sort of think that this is kind of the way we get out of problems without ever getting at the root cause. We look to technology that may exist at a later point to fix problems caused by underlying political, organizational and infrastructure issues. Always looking for the next band aid for the bullet hole I suppose.

Latency is often better than Cable ISPs and DSL (even with VDSL2 or Fastpath) on a WISP, and can easily compete with Fiber in terms of latency (wireless has less latency than optical glass), but where it falls down is in suburbia, where there isn't enough customer density to justify small cells and pole attachment costs don't allow you to feasibly put up nodes to blanket the neighborhood.

Clearwire ran into many of these same issues, but they were able to operate at two orders of magnitude more power than most WISPs can (1 watt vs 150 watts) and had way more bandwidth around 2Ghz to work with, all of which was pristine.

The fundamental problem with wireless is that in an area with even moderate density, you end up needing a wireless antenna within a mile of the customer's location, which itself needs a wired connection. And once you get that close you might as well bring the wire the rest of the way and not consume billions of dollars of wireless spectrum.

All valid critiques, which is why I'm eagerly anticipating the new ISP that would hopefully come out of SpaceX's Low-Earth Orbit Internet Satellites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12982418

I don't think that actually replaces wired connections in urban or suburban areas, because it's susceptible to the same problem of needing shared wireless spectrum proportional to the number of regional users even though wireless spectrum is inherently limited by physical laws.

What that would solve is high speed low latency access for rural areas.

That's debatable; one of the biggest challenges facing a consumer ISP business is literally called the "last mile" problem because that last mile is surprisingly difficult! (Not that the "other" miles are easy, mind you.)

It isn't literally the last mile, in practice it's really the last five or ten miles. And if you have to go 4.5 out of 5 miles, it isn't worth not going the whole way.

There is currently an idea floating around that you could put a wireless access point on every block and then provide gigabit wireless over millimetre wave spectrum. So a way of skipping the hard bit of fibre to the premises.

Now all we need to do is actually make it work...

Like he said, you still need to spend an insane amount of money to acquire spectrum. Furthermore, High freq spectrum doesn't go through trees or buildings so any obstruction then makes dozens of properties unserviceable. Unless you put AP's every 500m, it doesn't work out the way you'd think it would, and at that point, you might as well just run a physical drop cable to the premise for a few hundred dollars.

Not really up on it, but I am pretty sure the idea with mm wave stuff is to use the signal that reflects and refracts, not the direct path. The fact that it doesn't penetrate objects is a feature. It allows really intense frequency reuse in a relatively small area.

I know, that's also what makes it so difficult to deploy. You need to have dozens of them within a very small area. That essentially defeats the purpose of going wireless at all, since you'll need some kind of backhaul to those devices. Going from curb to premise is cheap relative to bringing the fiber to the curb.

Two points of contention I have with your point that wireless has less latency than optical glass:

1) You don't operate wireless in a vacuum. There's all kinds of potential obstructions to the signal, including any physical objects 2) Even if wireless as a medium itself has less latency, it requires far more relay points to travel comparable distances to fiber, which introduces far more latency than the medium itself

On 2, it is true, but often wireless operators have their relays connected to fiber. (Except for very remote area coverage, but that's another matter than replacing the cable company monopoly)

Maybe we should ask why so few cities provide free wifi in public spaces.

As an example we can see what happened when New Orleans did that after Hurricane Katrina. Not only did Bell South take back donated resources to the rescue efforts, but they and several large telephone companies stepped up an aggressive lobby actions against the city during a time where focus should have been to save human lives and restore the infrastructure.

Wireless is so so much harder and more expensive. I live in an average size apartment built from reinforced concrete panels and it is hell to setup wifi. Basically 2.4 GHz signal halves after each wall. 5 GHz is worse. I have two APs for 3 room 60 sq.m. apart and there are still dead zones everywhere.

Same for GSM - if you are too high, too low, too far or in shadow from tower it just doesn't work properly. Holiday overload on the cell - goodbye internet.

Wireless is barely functioning as it is and more customers will just make it worse.

PS: also when something in the last mile is not working it is insane to debug it. Phone disconnects for some reason and that's it. Router is working but devices can't connect or auth. Some APs work and some aren't. My devices from same vendor and same model lineup can't even properly restart by themselves after power outage. I need to go and reboot them in order one by one each time. I hate wireless... :)

I think the fundamental problem is capacity. I haven't run a WISP, but my understanding is that a highly directional rooftop antenna solves most signal strength problems for individual subscribers. However, there's a practical requirement for the tower to have antennas with broader coverage (I think WISPs conventionally use sector antennas), because otherwise you'd just have too many antennas that need to continually be adjusted as subscribers come and go. Half-duplex medium and protocol overhead means that you're not going to get very many stations on a given combination of antenna and channel before performance starts taking a major hit. I've seen general guidelines that recommend no more than 20 stations per AP; I assume a WISP tower setup can optimize for more stations per channel, but I'd expect that to be on the order of a 2-5x multiplier, not 100x.

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