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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.)

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.

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

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.

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