Hacker News Reader

Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

I think the only way to really prevent that is strong and disruptive competition that will spook all the current slumbering monopolists. Google Fiber pretended to aim at that, but now it slowed to a crawl (it did cause some good ripple effects).

Will Starlink from SpaceX fix it? Who knows, but I have little expectation from the Congress to do anything of value about it. When was the last time they did something good about technology polices? DMCA-1201 and CFAA aren't repealed. There is no meaningful copyright reform on the horizon, and so on. Net Neutrality will be another victim of this dysfunction.

View on HN

What we really need is some hardcore trustbusting. The Media companies must be split off from advertisers, which must be split off from ISPs, which must be split off from the software companies, which must be split off from the hardware vendors.

Unless something changes, there is so much vertical integration and so many conflicts of interest at play that the Internet will soon become Cable TV 2.0. A walled garden, proprietary, pay to play network where the only innovation that takes place is in new ways to separate the subscribers from their money.

Investors won't like it, but they can eat shit. An economy which only serves large mega-corporations is an unhealthy one. If the masses get nothing out of it, they will eventually bring the whole thing to a screeching halt.

Yeah, google jumped in way over their head with fiber. They didn't know what they were getting into. And their cloud-based TV service is a tire fire.

> Yeah, google jumped in way over their head with fiber. They didn't know what they were getting into.

They should have known it's a very long term investment. Why were they surprised that it takes time to build up the network? I'm more upset about their reaction, than about the fact that they didn't plan it better. They can make it all successful, but it's long term. Looks like they are affected by short term investors more now.

That has been a problem for them for some time. How many projects have they killed they folks relied on? Some engineers inside create an app or service and then they must move on internally and the app or service suffers from neglect for years then they kill it. You can't count on them to finish anything.

They are bound to be replaced. They have nothing but ad revenue.

They tried is as a test balloon and, with the new data they got, saw that they can't get the numbers to where they would need to be to be profitable.

The alternative here isn't that they would run something of that size indefinitely, knowing that it will lose them money. It's Google behaving like every single other company currently in existence: deciding up front that it's too risky and not even trying.

At least it created some nice data showing how the legacy ISPs react to competition. Just in case anyone ever needs to prove that this market isn't working.

Legacy ISPs managed it somehow? So I don't see why Google can't. Especially since technology has improved (microtrenching and etc.). If anyone, Google has enough money to pull it off and seriously compete with incumbents.

These "legacy ISPs" have, since they first got started and became entrenched, purchased enough legislation to make it effectively impossible for any real competition to take root. Google Fiber's failure was not a technological failure, it was a political failure.

So, Google could spend the money to purge that political garbage. They kind of tried, with pushing "one touch make ready" policy. The stated goal of GF was to increase competition in ISP market. So far their service was while positive, far from sufficient.

I was going to write "the ISP market is a natural monopoly", but then I noticed that's missing the point in this case.

Because the fear of Non-Net-Neutrality goes far beyond the usual "there's only two ISPs where I life and they both offer the same deals".

It's something in completely its own category of nefariousness because they could be as anticompetitive as they want, and the market could not solve it. Even if SpaceX did its thing and broke the speed limit on light.

That's because the injured party isn't their customers, who could take their business elsewhere, or at least loudly complain on the internet (if they have any).

It's someone not part to the ISP<->customer contract, namely that unknown video startup in Nantucket, or the e2e-encrpyted messenger app your friend Lauren is working on. They're going to be forced into paying ISPs if they ever want to reach the ISPs' customers. And there's no risk to the ISP, because nobody is going to change ISPs for some startup they've never heard about.

Satellite internet sucks because it's in Geosyncranis orbit at ~26,200 miles and you need to make the trip 4 times. LEO satellites would add ~250 miles worth of ping x4 which is a massive difference. Still not low enough for pro gamer doing FPS games, but just about anything else should be fine.

The problem is need a lot more satellites and your receivers need to be able to track satellites.

This is the problem with every truly great crime -- once it's fait accompli, the harm becomes impossible to prove. Whether it's MS of the 1990s with anticompetitive OEM agreements, or ISPs of today, we simply never get to experience the richer, more vibrant world that never was.

> Will Starlink from SpaceX fix it?

If Starlink can drive costs into the ground, relatively speaking, we can talk about other factors. The capital outlay for a satellite internet setup is currently astronomical. This is the allure of the Facebook balloons - minimal expenditure per home.

Have they solved both the low-bandwidth and high-latency issues? I tried HughesNet "broadband" last year visiting family, and it was substantially more expensive than cable/fiber on a monthly basis, had more expensive equipment (satellite dish vs. cable modem), latency high enough to be obvious even on regular web browsing, low enough bandwidth for Netflix streaming to be an issue, and had a cap. It's a viable option only if you insist on living in a truly rural area.

I'm not sure about bandwidth; however, Starlink sats will be much lower than current internet sats. This equates to less lightmilliseconds. The fact that the light us travelling along a larger sphere than the ground (presumably resulting in larger international latencies) is less of a problem than you would think: there are fewer switching devices between devices - how that actually pans out is a big question.

I really think that it's simply a gamble beyond the enormous costs that you confirmed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com