All that said, I'm hoping wireless solutions change this scenario. Effectively, if I can run a 5G (or w/e) hotspot connected to my router, the latency/throughput is good enough, I'm pretty much cool ditching my wired options. A monopoly on the wireless side is still possible (spectrum can be a limiting reagent), but I think it's much less likely to devolve into our current ISP dynamic. I'm certain there are plenty of technical issues with going all wireless but it doesn't seem insurmountable.
In the case of regular cellular service, is the IP publically accessible, or is it behind a NAT of some sort? I always assumed that it was behind a NAT for some reason, but I don’t know for sure.
I like to be able to host my own services for personal use.
This is not the case for 4g since the much lower frequencies (with much lower data rates) go much further meaning that the given last mile monopoly in an area has less of an effect on the 4g service.
If a cell phone carrier builds all of its own infrastructure to supply bandwidth to 5g towers, they are subject to all the same difficulties and delays as existing ISPs. This means that build out of 5g as fast as home internet will take decades and many areas will have only one or two options (same as the situation is with home internet).
The waters are muddied by the fact that carriers use “5g” to refer to what will be a wide range of service levels, but right now are only hyping the fastest possible imagined deployments.
It’s more than that, but even there you’re talking about covering 9 houses for the cost of wiring up one. The fan-out math kills you for FTTH.
Maybe in rural areas it is easier, but within any suburban area, you probably have to spend a few hundred thousand simply to draft and get an agreement signed...before building a single thing.
I'm sure there was a reason to do this, but it effectively stops all but the big corporations from entering into agreements.
Google has counsel in house to cover a that more or less for free, and still essientially failed. There's deeper issues at play.
Google refused to build Fiber in places that imposed most of those conditions. It demanded the opposite—free use of municipal resources for fiber huts, etc. and it absolutely rejected any attempt to impose one of the most common franchise stipulations: build-out requirements that require universal coverage of neighborhoods.
Google failed because even with all that special treatment, building fiber is not profitable compared to selling ads.
The secondary issue is that all of the broadband providers have a bad habit of "accidentally" cutting the other provider's wires. It happens enough by real accident that it is impossible to prove in any particular case. But it also happens enough that providers have a pretty legitimate reason to ask that the next provider not be allowed to install wires.
It seems like this is a common-sense solution to that problem. The cost of digging, drilling, and laying building materials is centralized with the municipality that owns the land, who can coordinate maintenance and future drilling with street maintenance that they need to do anyway. It's future proof - if someone invents a great new communication/energy/electromagnetic technology in the future, the last-mile infrastructure to deliver it to residences is already there. New telecom providers need only run wires, a task they already have to do. They don't do digging or have the opportunity to clip each others' wires. It encourages competition.
You couldn’t replicate that in say San Francisco just by separating the infrastructure, while still requiring everything to be buried and look pretty, and requiring unprofitable neighborhoods to be served at the ISP’s expense, etc., and all of the roadblocks places like San Francisco throw up to development. All with San Francisco municipal government types overseeing everything and San Francisco NIMBYs protesting and filing lawsuits over the color of the fiber distribution hubs. It wouldn’t work.
This argument strays into racism, or a circular argument. Either the Japanese are uniquely genetically capable of building public goods cheaply, or their continued success is a result of how they have structured their society.
If it isn’t genetic (how could it be?), this is an argument for emulating the uniquely Japanese cultural aspects that led to the success.
The Japanese take pride in infrastructure and development. Americans try to figure out how to abuse environmental laws to keep it from being built. We turn every development project into a civil rights battle or a rural/urban battle. We hate paying for development with visible taxes, but love creating invisible taxes by attaching mandates as riders to projects. “You can build that apartment building, but only if you widen that public road and build a school. You can build fiber there, but only if you also build fiber in this place where it makes no economic sense.” That often makes development unattractive altogether, but that’s okay because we hate development anyway.
Complicated to say the least. NTT doesn't just offer its own Internet service, it has three different subsidiaries all competing to offer their own Internet services
construction project
lane closure
fiber vault with a manhole you get to test your shocks on
trench, with its somehow always shitty pavement repair
ugly pole
even-uglier tower
etc.
This means more to people in some jurisdictions than others.
It's the internet, it drives innovation. Let's stifle it by making a bazillion rules that everyone needs to follow and pay to play. Let's make sure that like most utilities, change and improvements happen at the slowest possible pace, because I like T1 and isdn, ever since they rolled back net neutrality I been stuck on these dial up lines.. Plus, making it a utility, we can ensure that none of these 5G providers can enter the marketplace.. I guess it's cool for everyone to be a socialist now, count me all in..
(In general, I perceive that many of our cities are run better than the states they are in.)
0. https://consumerist.com/2014/08/28/how-isps-compete-with-mun...
1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al...
2. https://www.cio.com/article/2447188/more-cities-and-towns-wa...
3. https://www.govtech.com/network/Comcast-Time-Warner-Merger-W...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90268592/elon-musks-spacex-just-...
Most streaming services can also degrade gracefully. Granted, we don’t have actual hardware to examine for these internet services, but many satellite uplinks already work fine in bad weather with at worst some loss of bandwidth.
1. Latency. 600-700 ms RTT is typical on satellite, and it's bounded by the speed of light. This makes a lot of real-time services, like voice chat and video games, essentially unusable.
2. Bandwidth. The satellites you're communicating with have a limited capacity, and provisioning more capacity is nontrivial. As a result, most satellite services have very low data caps, typically 10 - 100 GB/month.
3. Physical concerns. Satellite connectivity requires an antenna with a clear view of the equatorial sky (e.g. south for northern hemisphere). This is often unavailable in cities, apartments, or hilly areas -- if there's a tall building or a mountain between you and the satellite, you can't use their service.
This should fix all three of your problems, except maybe total bandwidth.
I think that's a slight mis-wording - you can't beat the great circle distance over the surface unless you go underground, but you can definitely beat a packet-switched, zig-zagging network running through the ground with a more or less direct point-to-point mesh running 100km above it.