Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

Most broadband providers work with overbooking / contention ratios, so if you sell 100/100mbit you buy 20:1 to 50:1 less from the upstream provider. Overbooking ratios for consumer internet can be between for example 20:1 to 50:1. That means for 20mbit of bandwith to consumers you buy 1 mbit of bandwidth from a upstream provider.

Buying one megabit of uplink at current market rate is typically less than a dollar from upstream providers.

Contention ratio of Uk broadband. https://web.archive.org/web/20070930041720/http://www.ofcom....

You can buy commercial Internet uplink and link up your neighbours for cheaper than broadband ratios. Digging fibre in the ground is fairly expensive but gives more stable connection and most bandwidth. A cheaper route is to go Wifi mesh networking but on normal wifi access points one radio per access point you get halving of bandwidth for each mesh hop. If you go open source mesh with 3 radios per AP you can get better bandwidth.

Nasa study of Mesh networks. Mesh hops vs bandwith https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201400...

I think you’re mis-interpreting the overbooking ratios. My understanding is that a 20:1 ratio means that for 1 mbit you can serve 20 customers 1 mbit.

Your point still stands though. That means if 1 mbit cost $1 then it costs $0.04/customer.

The real cost is in deploying the wires and countless studies have shown the ROI on that, especially given the exorbitant rates, is typically 5 years or less per hookup. Can you imagine how much Comcast etc have made per house they’ve run coax to? The ROI must be mind boggling.

That ignores that the USO does require some mind blowingly expensive links I doubt that laying new local plant is a positive roi in 5 years.

According to NRTC [1] fiber deployments to the premises cost approximately $800/deployment. Ignoring uptake, operational expenses etc that’s $13/mo per deployment to recover cost in 5 years.

I have no idea what the average consumer pays their residential provider but I would estimate it’s over $100/mo on average. It seems like it would be fairly easy to get return in 5 years. These are numbers for fiber.

[1] https://www.nrtc.coop/rural-connect/cost-of-rural-ftth-deplo...

Less of that three digit cable bill goes to the company than you might expect. Content providers don't give it away for free. ESPN is notorious for eating a huge % of the bill.

In San Francisco Sonic charges $50 + taxes for 100Mb/s fiber service, and they're profitable. IIRC, the CEO of Sonic has hinted their connection cost per house is closer to $400 (at least during a roll-out in an SF suburb), though I can't find any references.

They forced AT&T's hand, which began rolling out their service in the city about a year later. AT&T charges $70 or more, I think.

It's cheaper to do this stuff than the big companies let on. The problem is that they can make even _more_ money investing in other services and products, like cellular and cable TV. Worse, fiber eats into their cable TV profits and jeopardizes their wet dreams about 5G cellular data plans.

[1] It's $40 + $10 router rental, or $50 if you have your own router. But $50 for the service alone isn't promotional, whereas the $40 + rental is technically promotional and might become $50 + rental down the road.

But we taxpayers already paid $400 billion to have fiber ran throughout the US, just never happened. ISPs took payment but didn't deliver.

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c5e97/e...

Right. So what can be done about telcos taking that money, and giving it to shareholders instead of delivering the infrastructure they committed to? Very little. That money is gone.

It can be observed that they are a hostile party who have no place in our local communities and are not welcome. They can have their exclusive contracts to pole access and provision of telecom services revoked by municipalities who then construct an ISP as a regulated public utility like water or power. A private company runs the utility, one legally required to base their fees upon the actual cost of providing the service (which guarantees it drops as fast as tech costs drop - fast), has to appeal to a utilities commission if they wish to raise rates, while providing legitimate justification based upon an increase in the cost of providing the service, etc.

Overnight government would be able to mandate universal service availability, and count on citizens having Internet access. That would mean being able to close physical government offices and let the clerks work from home. Billions saved right off the bat. It would mean less spying, as municipal people are not going to just bend over when the feds show up, they will actually demand to see a warrant - unlike any large American company who derives large amounts of their own income from being granted government contracts. It would mean no ridiculous upcharging for "business" connections (just like we don't charge restaurants more for tap water because they make soup out of it and sell it). It would also mean no more asynchronous connections which only exist to prop up the expensive business connections. It would mean an ISP that serves as infrastructure that improves society in a multitude of ways rather than a luxury good fed off of by a greedy tick that was lucky enough to hold exclusive sway over pole access rights and telecom rights when their single biggest competitor, the Internet, appeared on the scene.

Letting companies like Comcast, Time Warner, etc run ISPs is sheer madness. They are media distribution companies. Their empires were built on that. And the Internet makes media distribution worthless. Any clever kid can run circles around them and provide a better service. And we let them have their hands on its throat?

The very government you expect to mandate universal service availability is the government that approves exclusive franchise agreements with predatory cable/internet providers.

Unless you're ready to run for local office and champion municipal/coop internet, or find incumbents who support your cause, you will not succeed.

> Any clever kid can run circles around them and provide a better service. And we let them have their hands on its throat?

A bit of an exaggeration of course; running an ISP is hard, and the margins are razor thin unless you have regulatory capture. It can be done, but that's a governing issue. See what I said above.

TL;DR Run for office. Fix the problem.

>A bit of an exaggeration of course; running an ISP is har

I think you misunderstood me. I did not mean to say that being an ISP was something a clever kid could pull off. I meant to say that a clever kid can run circles around the established players when it comes to media distribution. That clever kid can upload whatever media needs to be distributed to a CDN and it's done. The entrenched players have to manage maintaining a byzantine maze of distribution agreement contracts that they entered into long ago, invent ways in which they will prevent becoming a "simple dumb pipe" (as they call it), manage how the availability of the content will affect the success of their other media properties, etc.

And you are correct about the municipalities being the ones who granted those exclusive contracts originally, and that is where change needs to happen. And it has in a few places! A friend of mine works for a municipal ISP in Florida. But.... each and every single municipality that has ever tried to go that route faces years and years of protracted litigation. Comcast and their compatriots litigate vigorously in their attempt to prevent the establishment of municipal ISPs. Many municipalities simply can't afford to spend 10 years and $100 million just to get out of a contract they foolishly agreed to that gave exclusive rights to providing telecom services to a company for 99 years (a common arrangement).

I misunderstood, thanks for clarifying. Agree that anyone can be Netflix/do media distribution these days with transcoding + storage + CDN all commodities now.

Why was there no class-action lawsuit to come out of this?

The author of the book that makes that claim has a tendency to exaggerate. Here is some discussion of his earlier book, when it was just $200 billion he was claiming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556

Right, 20:1 ratio means for 20mbit of bandwith to consumers you buy 1 mbit of bandwidth from a upstream provider. I don't think you're disagreeing.

The marginal cost of a new 20Mbit customer when you have 500+ customers is 1 Mbit upstream bandwidth. However, you can't really get just 1 Mbit at those scales so it's closer to 100 extra customers cost 100Mbit.

> You can buy commercial Internet uplink and link up your neighbours...

Thanks for this. I've been wondering about this for the last few years now. Guess the idea isn't completely nuts and will have to research further.

Alternatively go get a pile of money and prepare to set fire to it.

Source: did this for 10 years.

I would be very interested to hear more about your experience dboreham! I'm assuming you mean you ran a small/local ISP and it was an overall loss?

What do you think of something like Hyperboria (https://hyperboria.net/) which is based on CJDNS, so there's no "ISP" really, but each peer sort of is a very small very local service provider to whoever they decide to peer with.

I was imagining some peers will charge other peers money to act as their gateway to the public network. Or maybe a bunch of people will pool their money and buy commercial network access

Mesh networking is completely useless for providing anything other than last-ditch service. It originated in a) academia where it's a nice thing to tinker with and write PhD theses and b) in the military where having a network connection no matter how crappy can make the difference between life and death. It has no place imho in delivering any kind of service that someone would use day-to-day and certainly not one that anyone would pay for.

WISP networks are built with point-to-point links: the appropriate technology for delivering good QoS. Since radios and antennas are extremely cheap this is the way to go.

The rock you'll flounder upon is that you need to buy a pretty beefy connection to serve any number of customers (even 1). The cost of said connection in most places is quite high. This places a lower bound on the number of paying customers you need to break even. That number is somewhere around 100. This is before you factor in the cost of customer support, schlepping around on people's roofs, finding and negotiating leases on repeater locations, etc. The number of places where there is not a better competitive offering available to customers (or a high likelihood one will show up before you recoup your investment) is low.

Current wireless technology (and according to Shannon, any wireless technology we can imagine) has quite a low upper bound to throughput -- much lower than is achievable with coax for example. So you can't complete on speed with anyone except DSL and Satellite.

Be careful... in many places, it is illegal to offer a telecom service that competes. In many places, Comcast and similar have exclusivity contracts with the municipalities. And of course if you're going to be digging trenches and running lines, you need legal right-of-ways through properties or pole access rights to run lines on poles. In most places, they don't want any more cables run than are already present, so the only way to get those rights is through heavy political manipulation.

Also, if you live in a nice permissive place and you get all set up, don't be surprised if Comcast techs cut all of your lines and claim they didn't realize they shouldn't have done that. It wouldn't be the first time.

See, THIS is what we should be fighting. NN is unnecessary if we have actual competition. Those exclusivity contracts, to me seem like Sherman Antitrust Act violations, since they are effectively creating cartel-like conditions to limit interstate commerce (i.e. commerce over "the wire.")

Digging trenches and laying out cables over entire neighborhoods is probably natural monopoly territory... i.e. it's not easily achievable without proper regulation / governemnt involvement. Therefore, another way to look at this is:

Proliferating internet access has been a big public/private partnership, and therefore we need NN to ensure that it continues to serve the public good. We shuld be fighting for the "public" part of the public/private partnership to not get fleeced.

Exactly. This is why Internet access is a public utility. No municipality wants 50 lines going pole to pole. I was curious about the idea of Internet as a public utility, so I did some research. I wanted to know what made people declare electricity, water, natural gas, etc to be regulated public utilities instead of just a free market setup. After reading some beautiful quotes from people opposing the establishment of such things (including many quotes from people certain that no reasonable person could ever want, much less need, a telephone in their own home when they could walk to a local store (because businesses were the only ones with legitimate need) and use theirs), I found that it comes down to one single question:

Does the benefit gained by society by having the service be ubiquitous amount to something greater than the damage done by the elimination of competition? If the answer is yes, then it should be made a public utility. I don't know how anyone could honestly argue that the private oligopoly setup we have now is so valuable to preserve that it provides more value to society than would ubiquitous Internet access. Just the fact that we could actually write laws on the assumption that people have Internet access would provide such tremendous benefit and enable us to get rid of some much duplicated junk as to be monumental.

Who cares what the "local government" wants, what do the people want? The people could probably care less about huge lines being run if they can get their internet faster and cheaper.

Our condo building in Seattle is one of the first to land a landmark experience... we have 3x coax cable providers in our building; per unit, we can select and move between the providers.

They are all playing in this space because they want the customers and revenue, but it took a long time for the gentlemen's agreements between the firms to start.

The installers for Comcast (the most recent to enter our building) were super professional, friendly and did a great job.

Hope other cities are able to fight down the exclusive contracts etc.

I've been building https://startyourownisp.com - it's a (free) guide to starting a small ISP in your garage. I've been working with companies doing that for almost 15 years in the US.

Many many 'thank you(s)' for that.

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