Hacker News Reader

Comment by zacharycohn | Hacker News Reader

Most people do not have another reasonable option to switch to.

It surprises me that most people in the US wouldn't have at least one cable and one DSL option. After all, cable TV is available most places, and everyone has a phone line (or is at least wired for one).

Or is the issue rural locations which were never wired for cable because they all just got satellite dishes?

I live in a large US city and have one cable provider as my only viable high speed option. The dsl provider which I would have preferred hasn't upgraded the last 50 meters of lines going to my house, and said they had no plans to. The top speed they could offer me was 3Mbps.

EDIT: In comparison, the same dsl provider on streets that have had their lines upgraded offers 100Mbps plans for about $30 less per month than the cable provider. So some homes actually do enjoy a little healthy competition, but it hasn't been enough to cause any changes in the cable plan pricing yet :(

You'd think there might be a business opportunity in this kind of situation for an ultra low cost, short range WISP. Like, if you could identify a bunch of scenarios like this where last mile issues have left behind neighbourhoods where there might be a few dozen potential customers (identify using speedtest.net data or something?), it would be possible to plug in a box on a utility pole at the edge of the existing coverage and then supply the participating households with modems. I don't know what the cost of that kind of infrastructure is or how much of an issue it would be to plug into what's already there, but hopefully it's not terrible assuming the existing provider would agree to let you in.

I guess the main risk is that doing this might wake up the provider who would then finish their rollout to get those customers back, and undercut you on price. So it would need to be quick and easy to grab your box and move it to some other neighbourhood in that scenario.

https://starry.com/internet

These guys are doing that around the Boston area. They aren't in my area yet but I have friends who have signed up and had good experiences.

...plug in a box on a utility pole at the edge of the existing coverage and then supply the participating households with modems. I don't know what the cost of that kind of infrastructure is...

It's very expensive.

...or how much of an issue it would be to plug into what's already there, but hopefully it's not terrible assuming the existing provider would agree to let you in.

They won't let you in.

I guess the main risk is that doing this might wake up the provider who would then finish their rollout to get those customers back, and undercut you on price.

And they also do that. National ISPs can afford to lose money in one city in the short term but you can't.

The pole rentals are extremely expensive and the existing players aren’t required to play with you.

A few players like this tried to use streetlights for this sort of thing with WiFi. Hanging a WiFi point on a pole is outrageous unless the city owns the pole and plays ball.

I live 3 miles from downtown Austin, which has numerous internet options (Google Fiber, Spectrum, AT&T, and Grande), but the options in my apartment complex are:

* Spectrum (up to 400mbps)

* AT&T (5mbps dsl)

I technically do have some choice, but given that one of these is close to 100x faster than the other, and the pricing is fairly similar...

I think wireless isps and 5g are our best chance at disrupting this.

I used to live 8 miles from Madison, WI (technically, one exit south of their beltline interchange on I-90). My ONLY two choices were 2mb WISP for $65/month, or 4g hotspot, and all of them were VERY expensive for over 15GB a month. (I used about 20GB per month on the 2mb wisp because I had little kids who loved netflix cartoons, faster speed would also cause higher quality video)

There was NO cable or dsl. ATT always said DSL was available in our area, and that they would schedule the install, then 3 days later, the local guy would call, and say "oh, hell no, lol" and cancel it

I don't know if this was viable at the time, but nowadays I expect you could use an OpenWRT router to do per-domain/mac traffic shaping on the device displaying the cartoons. That would force it down to 480p (or whatever) and reduce your overall usage.

Another option that might not have been available at the time would be taking the Netflix device to a different connection (work, the library, whatever) and then pre-downloading a bunch of the cartoons for offline viewing.

Oh gross, yeah, multi-unit buildings are a funny case where the choices are severely reduced due to factors outside your control. And it's not like a condo building where your HOA can demand better options— as a renter, you really do have no say in the matter.

I wonder why the cable option is so bad? Is it just because it's a single coax entering the building shared by all residents? Where I am (Kitchener ON), I can get 200mbps cable.

I have family living in a motor home, and they deal with something similar at RV resorts; they're stuck with the wifi available to them there, and little ability to use an alternative (short of cellular).

Wireless is already getting too congested for this to be a viable alternative

Even that spectrum connection is garbage because the upload will only be 2 or 3 mbps, barely enough for one FaceTime call. Anything short of symmetric fiber is a sham in this day and age.

At least in my area Spectrum/TWC service has 400 mbps down and 20 mbps up. Still not great but far better than the old days.

It's probably 20mbps shared between the whole neighborhood with high latency.

At this point, we should have symmetric fiber with at sub 50ms latency and 100mbps down and up everywhere like we work to have water, sewage, electricity, and gas. Right now, all of our money goes towards maintaining an antiquated system for providing commercial laden garbage media.

A 20mbps shared limit for an entire neighborhood for a major cableco might have been the case 20 years ago when cable internet deployment was in its infancy.

While I agree that symmetric fiber would be better, my speeds are always consistently close to what I'm paying for and I'm one of those types of people that:

  1) utilizes my upstream because of things like DR backups
  2) treats cabelco with suspicion and thus records speeds, latency, packet loss stats continously
  3) will pick up the phone and complain when I see problems until they are resolved to my satisfaction

For example, this is representative of what I typically see: https://pastebin.com/wSt8fdee

I count myself as one of the lucky ones and YMMV.

> at disrupting this.

Or, you know, democratic policy changes a majority of us all agree are sensible.

You shouldn't be too surprised. I live inside the Dallas/Ft Worth area and my options are for wired internet access are:

  1) 6mbit AT&T/SBC DSL internet
  2) 400mbit cableco internet

Not really much of a choice there.

In downtown Portland, OR my options are: Comcast with a monthly data cap and irregular throttling, Centurylink with a monthly data cap and irregular throttling at about the same price as Comcast, or a variety of minor providers with even stricter monthly data caps and/or other limitations inherent in service (eg. satellite internet).

...rural locations which were never wired for cable because they all just got satellite dishes

This has reversed the actual cause and effect. Zero rural customers are served by cable. Some rural customers have satellite dishes.

There are numerous reasons why cablecos don't serve rural areas. The obvious reason is the expense that would be required to run a mile of copper for each customer. Less obvious reasons include the fact that if there is no municipal apparatus to target for corruption, the cableco business model sort of falls apart...

You don't even have to visit a rural area to see this. There are lots of satellite customers in cities and that fact hasn't chased off the cablecos.

Maybe 10-15 years ago. Today, the traditional telcos are just letting the cooper service rot.

In my city the copper service had a significant 3 week outage that when a CO switch failed. They would rather attrit the CWA people and pay a fine than maintain it. Verizon’s position is to wait for direct subsidy or 5G in urban areas.

DSL is a joke. What are you going to do with 5 Mbps down in the modern world or 30MB+ websites?

DSL (VDSL2) can and does go over 100 Mbps.

Not available anywhere I've lived (Bay area, Chicago, SF). In fact I've only heard about it from Wikipedia. Never heard of anyone who knows anyone who claims to have even seen this in person.

Oh. Sorry. It's quite prevalent in Europe...

https://i.imgur.com/zGSklKi.png - The local loop length is 2 km in this case.

It's not quite 100, but I get 75 Mbps on VDSL in Dallas.

If someone’s selling a non-symmetric ‘fibre’ service <= 100Mbit/sec, it’s probably VDSL2.

Downvoter... Care to elaborate? VDSL2 does very often get speeds of over 100 Mbps. It is a fact and a well known one.

I live in a smallish suburb (~5,000) of a small city (~150,000). I have access to Comcast. That's it. AT&T won't even sell us a DSL line, just satellite. There are no WISPs within range. LTE is far too expensive for our usage patterns.

for wired internet I suspect this is right in some places -- I read a thing about fiber providers slicing up cities by block or zip code

but for wireless most providers have dense coverage maps. I use ting which operates on sprint or t-mobile I think so there's even more variety if you include resellers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com