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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

In some states (including NY and CA) electricity is partially deregulated so you can choose from different providers, even though it all goes through the same grid. There are actually sales people who go door to door or set up booths to encourage people to switch, usually pitching it as cleaner energy and/or cost-saving.

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Except most of the time they end up being massive scams with the said "cheaper utility" charging you out the ass with horrible termination terms.

These guys are a big part of why I rarely answer my door anymore.

Had one yelling at me through the home office window the other day. Took me 5 minutes of blowing off his various pitches to get rid of him. So annoying.

I never open the door unless it is for someone I am expecting, no exceptions whatsoever. It is a textbook case of something that has marginal upside and unlimited downside.

I mean, having someone die on your doorstep because you didn’t help them seems like a large downside to me.

Multiply that by the probability of it happening to get the risk, though.

You could make the same argument about helping someone change their tire on the side of the road. Or helping a blind person cross the road. Life is full of risks but constantly worrying about them isn’t worth it, especially if it comes at the expense of actually helping someone who is in danger.

If you see someone getting abused or needs help, I think you should do the right thing and try and help them, because everyone helping each other reduces risk for everyone and makes a better society.

Ok, also factor in the probability that the person at your door isn’t dying or in desperate need of help, but is actually out to take advantage of you (or, at least waste your time).

Well, fortunately, doors have peepholes.

Thanks for the reply. I only have PG&E. No alternative that I know of, so that sounded off kilter. But glad to know what that is all about.

It's a bit more complicated. The door-to-door thing is retail choice, typically when people talk about "deregulated" electricity markets they're often referring to stuff at the generation/transmission level (wholesale markets), where a regional transmission operator is the balancing authority and offers a variety of market products that utilities and merchant generators participate in. Generally this has been perceived as more efficient than the traditional integrated utility and lowered costs for consumers in general. Since you're on PG&E, you're probably in California ISO's territory[1].

"Retail choice" is the ability of individual households to buy directly from retail suppliers[2], and the history there is a bit spottier and less conclusive. It's not as widespread and participation has actually declined[3].

[1] http://www.caiso.com/Pages/default.aspx

[2] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy18osti/68993.pdf

[3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37452

US really need to deregulate (btw I find this word an oxymoron, but english is not my first language) their ISP's and most countries really need to deregulate their wireless providers.

Imagine single shared spectrum easy to setup eSIM, easy to terminate contracts. Unfortunately most countries want your ID nowadays when you sign up for internet...

The problem is its not so easy to share spectrum. In reality you can only have a single transmitter/receiver on a given frequency band in a given area.

The problem is its not so easy to share spectrum. In reality you can only have a single transmitter/receiver on a given frequency band in a given area

In reality that hasn't been true for decades, beginning with the initial work on spread-spectrum communications in the WWII timeframe. But the regulatory system has yet to catch up fully with the technology's potential.

Spread spectrum still has limitations. The more codes you add just brings up the noise floor for everyone else.

What is this "noise floor" you speak of?

https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/49yuwx/til_gp...

The whole idea behind SS and UWB techniques is that the noise floor is under your control, rather than Boltzmann's.

You would need PRN codes with zero cross-correlation; no such thing. So when you add more users, they appear as noise in your de-spread bandwidth. Add more users, your noise floor goes up, degrading your SNR.

There are optimum codes to use, such and Gold (GPS) and Walsh (IS-95 CDMA), but they still have non-zero cross-correlation, so your users are limited. Still no free lunch.

I didn't say it was a free lunch. ~99% of a free lunch, which is what proper spreading codes buy you, is good enough.

Point being, the obstacles are regulatory, not technical.

They are still technical. The spreading doesn’t buy you anything in terms of channel capacity, just processing gain over narrow band interference, and the downside is now you need precise power control to keep all those codes at the same noise level.

4G & 5G uses OFDM, essentially distributing the data over slow, narrow band channels to get around the multi-path issues with trying to use even wider band CDMA. Then MIMO to actually increase the capacity, which only works when you have multi path.

This gives a good summary, specifically page 32, but CDMA is essentially dead soon.

http://www.pitt.edu/~dtipper/2720/2720_Slides9.pdf

Dude, your entire post history calls to mind the question, "What am I doing on a site called 'Hacker News'?"

Channel capacity is not the problem. Do you own a radio capable of VHF/UHF reception? Turn it on. Tune it to a randomly-chosen frequency between, say, 600 and 1000 MHz. What do you hear? Now, repeat this exercise 5,000 times, and let me know how many of those iterations yield anything but white noise from your receiver's own front end and IF strip.

There's your "channel capacity."

This problem is purely regulatory. Everything should be frequency-agile at this point in time, but it's not. Never mind CDMA or TDMA, we haven't even picked the lowest of the low-hanging FDMA fruit yet.

You don't share per-se, you operate network same way many MVNO's do.

There's one network (ran by one gov agency) and rest of the players are basically MVNO's, doing customer support, marketing and negotiating peering. Just like traditional ISPs work in many western countries.

in case your curious, "deregulate" is not really an oxymoron. the "de-" prefix usually means something like "remove" or "undo". it just means to remove or relax some existing rules.

don't feel bad though, English vocab can be tricky for native speakers too. for example, "in-" usually means "not", like "indestructible" means "can't be destroyed", but "inflammable" and "flammable" mean the same thing...

But in this case it actually sounds like more regulation, rather than less.

ah, I see what you mean.

net neutrality certainly implies more regulation, but at a local level the monopolies/duopolies are often propped up by regulations.

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