Hacker News Reader

Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

My parents have no access to high speed internet, except over 4G. Which I find unacceptable. Even DSL would be fine...but ISPs have discontinued that and are expanding fiber. So that basically adds maybe 5-10 more years before they'd ever get it?

I generally don't agree with Bernie's whole premise here, but I do think he has the right idea. We should up high speed requirements, but also OTA should not count. The reason wireless (5G, 4G, Satellite) shouldn't count is...well the data caps are so limiting that you can't possibly do anything with the service. Or the equipment and setup is so expensive you'd have to be a company to afford it. I don't agree that high speed is a "human right," I really think such statements add nothing of value and make such proposals easy to mock. The argument should simply be to treat high speed land lines as a public utility and requirement, like electricity.

View on HN

The part I don't agree with is paying for universal access, again. Those of us fortunate enough to have an ISP have been paying into the Federal Universal Service Fund for decades. Of course, that money went into the pockets and broadband is still not fully deployed in this century.

I think every ISP which got FUSF money should deploy, now, as promised, with the money they've already been given, before we talk about giving them more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund#Controv...

I can remember back when telecommunications industry profit margins were strictly regulated by public service commissions.

In return for the deregulation of the industry in the 90's, we were told that we were going to get upgraded to broadband access in everybody's home.

It seems like we have already paid for universal broadband more than once.

> I can remember back when telecommunications industry profit margins were strictly regulated by public service commissions.

Yes, and the industry stagnated for decades.

And it has stagnated again.

Stagnated what alternate reality? https://www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafband-f...

> U.S. internet speeds rose nearly 40 percent this year

https://nypost.com/2018/07/11/the-average-internet-speed-has...

> News was particularly good for the United States, which moved up from the 21st-fastest country in 2017 to the 20th-fastest country in 2018. That might not sound like much of an improvement, but it was achieved by increasing speeds from an average 20 Mbps to nearly 26 Mbps, a bigger increase than the average.

(In 2019, the US jumped from 20th to 15th in the M-lab data, ahead of Germany, France, the UK, and Italy.)

Over the decade or so Akamai published its results on broadband speeds (the last one being in 2017) the US moved from the 20s into the top 10.

The idea that US broadband is slow or stagnant is just totally false, to the point where you have to wonder where it comes from.

Statistics about download bandwidth are garbage. Quality of the connection is what matters. Latency and upload are all severely lacking in US residential connections (and even business for the most part).

And who knows what bullshit the ISPs use to advertise their speeds. I assume they’re taking a 1GB download line to 100 homes and then selling each one 100Mb or more, so in the evenings, it’s really somewhere above 10Mbps down continuous. And the upload is negligible, so negligible that you won’t even find Comcast or their ilk advertise its amount.

Who gives a fuck about faster speeds when you're data capped? I'm capped at 1TB of data a month on a 250mbit/sec connection. I've actually gone over and even considered SLOWING down my connection. I definitely have no reason to upgrade to 1GBPS. My mom, who lives a kilometer away and has broadband choice is on 1TB with no caps and pays almost half of what I do. I have no choice whatsoever despite having 3 providers within 1km because only fucking Comcast has service here. Yeah, that's fucking stagnation: when people are considering LOWERING their broadband speeds because of the monopolies we've put in place just so Comcast can rake in even more money for their shitty, overpriced service. So what if the speeds exist if they're unusable?

You’re imagining a decades-long broadband deployment effort that never happened. The FUSF didn’t give money for broadband until 2012. Even today, CAF funding is small compared to the cost of deployment broadband.

Instead of saying OTA doesn't count, why don't you just set the requirements as both speed and data cap requirements? So that an OTA solution that has high enough speed and high enough data caps would count.

I don't think encoding a current limitation into law is a good idea. If they can provide a wireless internet that meets the requirements, that is good enough for me.

I’d add a latency maximum too, which would be low enough to disqualify wireless connections. A fiber circuit to each home is the minimum I would accept.

While I agree access to the wealth of information on the internet should be a right, I don't think it's necessary to require every household to have gaming level latency. OTA latency is generally good enough for doing what really matters on the internet.

It really helps with communications, and there’s just no reason not to since a symmetric connection is going to be fiber anyway, might as well beef it up for low marginal cost and make it a little future proof.

I think we can all agree on a maximum of say 300ms, right?

What latency? 100ms is fine for pretty much every internet use there is.

Using the internet with connections that have 5ms latency is a far better experience than 100ms, especially with real time communications. Also, everyone should have symmetric connections, none of this 250mbps down and 3mbps up BS.

I wonder what the cost would be to run low latency fiber to every single home in the entire country, regardless of geographic remoteness (it is a human right after all, per Bernie).

What are the benefits of wiring up every home with a connection capable of high quality video calls and data transfers? Remote work, teaching, medical exams, etc.

This country built an interstate system 70 years ago involving tons and tons of labor, asphalt, concrete, and continuous repairs. I find it hard to believe running fiber cables to be a challenge.

The biggest cost is Comcast’s share price going down as they lose the ability to rent seek on customers for being a useless middleman peddling “TV” and substandard internet.

Cheaper than running electricity, which was already done 60+ years ago.

I have friends without electric up here in Alaska, so it's not everywhere. Might be lower 48 privilege

It gets more expensive over time, as there is more infrastructure to displace now than before.

Sure, and living in a mansion is a far better experience than living in public housing. We're talking about service as a "right", right?

On the other end of the spectrum, why does the federal government spend money on the "interstate" highway in Hawaii? Why does every state (even Wyoming) have two senators?

I think we should have use common sense here. Fiber deployment is expensive but it is probably worth pulling fiber at least to every post office in these United States.

Do you literally mean internet access in the post office building, or are you using that as a metonym for population centers?

> Do you literally mean internet access in the post office building, or are you using that as a metonym for population centers?

I didn't even know the word metonym but you said it better than I could have. Yes, I mean population centers. I mean we have to be reasonable. If someone moves to the South Pole and demands we run fiber there, we might have to say no. I don't know where we exactly draw the line though. My understanding is that there is a lot of "dark fiber" criss crossing the country that can be "lit up" so the "long haul" isn't so much of a problem as the "last mile". I could be wrong though. I don't know much about these things.

Makes sense, thanks for expanding!

We’re talking about equipping fellow citizens with the ability to work from home and have equal opportunity to create and distribute intellectual property, as well as possibly facilitating things such as video appointments with doctors and teachers and whatnot.

The productivity improvements of high bandwidth low latency connections are numerous. Just like building the interstate highway and a network of roads did, or water, or gas, or sewage.

Not sure what that has to do with mansions.

Latency to where? Latency is not a metric that applies to a single connection, it can only be measure when you have two systems that communicate to each other. 5ms to your router doesn't matter if everything you are connecting to is 500ms away from that.

The best internet in the world, located in a major city, will have around 15ms latency to the closest datacenter. Wireless solutions can easily achieve that.

I have a fiber circuit for one of my businesses that has sub 10ms and sub 5ms latency to most large websites. I understand that certain latencies are not possible for every point to every point, but I’m using it as a proxy for the quality of the connection. Easiest way for me to discern the quality of my internet connection is to check the latency. All of my good fiber circuits are extremely low latency, and all of the terrible residential cable company connections split between 1,000 homes have terrible high latency (and upload bandwidth).

You must be very close to a large datacenter that houses the CDNs used by those large websites if you are seeing sub 5ms latency.

For any of the users we are talking about (underserved populations in areas without fiber internet), they will never see those latencies even with the same fiber you have.

If you live in rural Wyoming, there are going to be practically zero services hosted within 500 miles of you. You are not going to get 5ms latency no matter what you do.

Yes, I’m in a major population center. But whatever the case, a symmetric fiber connection would be a solid improvement over the nonsense coaxial situation we have now.

I guess, but my point is that for many people in rural and underserved locations, they won't notice any performance difference between fiber and a coaxial connection, for example.

Insisting that EVERYONE has to get fiber, even when that won't change their performance experience, only slows down the actual service of their needs.

This is like any sort of performance engineering problem; focusing on an area that is no where close to becoming the bottleneck is not an efficient use of resources.

As far as I know, the only way to get decent upload bandwidth is via fiber.

VoIP on 100ms is not enjoyable.

I talk transatlantic and further a lot on t'phone, no real issue

So you can never talk to someone across the country? We are limited by the speed of light, you are never going to get sub 100ms latency across the globe.

>So you can never talk to someone across the country?

You mean across the globe, not country. 100ms ping in domestic call sounds bad.

>you are never going to get sub 100ms latency across the globe.

Latency adds up, bandwidth is calculated by the width of narrowest path, but latency is accumulated.

If you have 100ms ping to local gateway, you still need to add another 100ms for the packet to reach the other side of the globe.

The speed of light through optical fiber is slower than the speed of electromagnetic waves through air, so good wireless could be lower latency than good fiber.

Yes, but for whatever reason, no wireless connection is as good as a wired connection today, and as far as I know, wired will still be superior to wireless for a long time.

With 5G, the 'air latency' will be about 8-12ms. That is about the same as a wired connection (from your house to the ISP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G

That will be nice, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Tech claims are usually exaggerated, or ignore overhead in the real world.

I guess it would depend, I do understand that they could build a 4G tower near everyone that serves well and has no datacaps...but what happens when people clog up the tower? Wireless has a lot of problems landlines (generally) don't have. I guess OTA would be fine, if the telecom could prove that it could handle over a certain amount of traffic without throttling (this is generally why throttling exists.)

What happens when your 1G FTTP is plugged into a 48 port switch with a 10G uplink and you're throttled to 200M?

The same thing that happens when wired ISPs oversubscribe their infrastructure. Users get less than than theoretical maximum speed. Wireless infrastructure doesn’t inherently have this problem and wired infrastructure doesn’t inherently solve it. The bigger problem with wireless internet access is probably geographical constraints where neighboring sites can have drastically different quality depending on what is between them and the closest tower.

Wired ISP over subscription is easy to solve.

Because wireless spectrum is a finite resource. We literally can't use more of it than is available.

We are nowhere near the theoretical limits of the wireless bandwidth.

> I don't agree that high speed is a "human right"

What makes access to high-speed internet a privilege as opposed to a right? Why shouldn't everyone be guaranteed access to high-speed internet?

I fundamentally don't agree with an ever expanding list of "human rights", because it requires an every expanding government to fulfill them.

That’s not very nuanced.

A big Finnish government is different than, say, a big Russian government.

To me it seems like saying: I fundamentally disagree with dining out because it requires restaurant, and restaurant is always bad.

Restaurants didn't kill 100 million people over the previous century.

^This. Over the course of the 20th century, the vast majority of killings occurred at the hands of governments. Furthermore, it was typically governments killing their own people, not the people of other countries.

Say what will about big greedy corporations, they're boy scouts when compared to the carnage brought about by governments in the last century.

Whenever there was profit in the killing, corporations willfully helped. The distinction is meaningless.

You're probably correct. Corporations almost never reach an enormous scale without government to provide the regulatory moats necessary to inhibit competition and disruption. And that doesn't even take the issue of subsidies into account. Smaller government would likely lead to more small enterprises and fewer enormous ones.

Again this is not so clearly cut. With small govt, corporations take over its responsibilities, both social and repressive. There is plenty of historical precedent for that and AFAIK it is not considered a good thing.

I honestly think there’s a higher chance of Comcast killing 100 million people over the next century than “broadband for everyone”

And governments can change over time. I agree that there should always be room for nuance. But people should think carefully about what declaring something a human right really entails, and what kind of authority that gives the government regarding it. Most of our legislature talk about technology like they still login to the web with AOL.

Maybe in time we'll decide this one should be, but Sanders seems ready to expand that list a great deal.

Advanced technology infrastructure can't be sustained without extensive network of enforced relationships between humans. It's either government oversight or private monopoly, there's no third option.

Government exists solely to provide wellbeing to the citizens of a sovereignty. If a sovereignty has zero citizens, a government has zero utility.

People forcing governments to take care of them is really the only rational thing for governed people to do.

> What makes access to high-speed internet a privilege as opposed to a right?

What makes it a privilege is that it's a consumer service, like cable television or satellite radio. Sure it's good to have, but hardly on the same page as "human rights".

There seems to be a trivializing of human rights by the left, who have a tendency to throw everything under the sun in as a human right so they can justify expanding the government to provide said right.

Access to the court system and a fair trial? Human Right Freedom from slavery? Human Right Broadband internet to watch streaming videos? Not a Human Right.

Your argument starts with a false premise, which is that because the providers code the delivery of high-speed internet as a "consumer service" that it is thus not a right.

By your same logic, if I began charging people to have access to the court system and a fair trial (which is arguably the case in the US today anyway) and treat the judicial system as a "consumer service," then it would cease to be a right.

That is hardly an argument, I'm sorry to say.

You don't need internet to live, you don't need internet to earn a living, the internet does not cure cancer, the internet does not treat any disease. Yes the internet will grant you access to knowledge you wouldn't otherwise have, yes it will allow you to telecommute, yes it will allow you to type to strangers in 17 countries at once.

The internet however also:

- allows for persistent, extended bullying

- can lead to all sorts of negative mental health events by exposing you to all sorts of highly-curated content giving the perception that someone always has it better than you or by exposing you to incredibly graphic imagery and news

- encourages sedentary beahvior such as wathcing 12 hours of tv on a Saturday, sitting on HN/reddit for 3-5 hours a day, playing MMORPGs for 5, 10, 24 hours in a day.

It's no more a human right than diet coke or owning a vehicle is. It's a tool.

One could easily argue the internet, and recreational computation in general, is a detriment to society. A few years ago I did a little research and some maths and was quite surprised with how much time we collectively waste on just video games

>I got to thinking, 'how much time do we waste annually on video games' and I quickly found answers. The average U.S. gamer age 13 or older spent 6.3 hours a week playing video games during 2013. Wow, but what about globally? Could I find an estimate? Well, I did, on TED no less. We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames.

[1] Additional sources referenced on the page https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2016/8/2/humanitys-...

> It's no more a human right than diet coke or owning a vehicle is. It's a tool.

Access to essential tools (judicial system, healthcare, shelter, nourishment, etc.) is a human right, broadly speaking. The internet is quickly becoming an essential tool for carrying out nontrivial activities in our modern society.

> the internet will grant you access to knowledge you wouldn't otherwise have

Then I am forced to conclude that you also believe that education is not a human right on the same grounds.

By definition human rights are intrinsic and universal. Everyone has them and everyone is responsible for not violating others'. Right off the bat we can see that claiming high-speed internet as a human right is asinine, because high-speed internet didn't even exist a couple of decades ago, thus access to it can't be claimed as an intrinsic right of the human soul.

It also fails universality. If even one person lacks broadband internet, then we would all be obligated to provide it or we are failing to uphold their rights. So if a person in Montana doesn't have broadband, everyone in e.g. Uganda and Malaysia is complicit in a human rights violation. It really is this silly, because human rights are not limited to any government or institution. They are a universal responsibility and mutual obligation between individuals as well, so defining them positively implies absurd moral conclusions.

Venturing into meta-level ideological territory, I can't help but perceive the theory of positive rights as a cynical tool for expanding government powers. It mandates utopian promises, it sucks the air away from reality-based alternatives that look anemic or even cruel by comparison, it requires nuance to argue against, and it functionally cements the government as the source and provider of human rights. It could not be better propaganda for the state.

Positive rights are a tool for expanding government services. This hardly grants power to the government except when citizens become dependent on it. Which is the case a priori, since the government acts as protector for the citizenry. So the relationship between government and citizen becomes at least no more exploitative than it was when introducing the service of positive rights.

No, it goes deeper than providing services. If the goal is only to provide services then that can simply be done for the sake of it. We can run welfare programs because it makes society run better or even just because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy.

But when we elevate those services to the status of faux "human rights" then it weakens actual rights. If your right to association is on the same playing field as my "right" to public housing, then disbanding right-leaning political parties is on the table because they threaten my human rights.

This may seem like an absurd example but we already have absurd arguments like the "right" to feel safe outweighs the right to bear arms, or the "right" to not hear hate speech outweighs the right to free expression. Balancing positive "rights" that must be supplied by the government against actual freedom-from-coercion negative rights is a monumental expansion of state power. Enshrining positive rights, as desirable as the ends are in themselves, is a serious and fundamental distortion to the ideological foundations of liberalism.

High speed most certainly is a human right. The internet is now a necessary feature of everyone’s personal and professional life.

It should be a human right and if governments were smart they would blanket their countries with free high speed for the masses.

Instead we contend with the likes of Verizon and ATT whose profit motives are at odds with the core principles of a free and open internet.

> The internet is now a necessary feature of everyone’s personal and professional life

You clearly don't know a very diverse group of people. Not everyone works in an office sitting behind a MacBook Pro. A lot of people still make things with their hands.

Your parents almost certainly have access to satellite broadband

Line of sight to the Clark Belt, correct?

Satellite broadband is incredibly expensive and has data caps that are no different than 4G at around 5 - 15GB/month. Some setup costs are up near $500 and require a 1-2 year contract.

So they get broadband, you just don’t like the price

> So that basically adds maybe 5-10 more years before they'd ever get it?

They'll have access to Starlink within the next few years. Proper broadband access at prices competitive to fast cable and fiber in the rest of the country.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com