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Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

Just because the internet infrastructure right now can handle some consumers without data caps does not mean that it’s a good idea to permanently embed that as a principle. What happens when we have 4 people per home, all streaming uncompressed 8k VR video streams, and 200 homes in a subdivision?

Sorry, Comcast, make your pipes bigger? Government says so? Sorry, Level3, hip-new-startup is pushing 400PBps, you can’t drop it!

I don’t know what the demands of the internet are going to be in 10 years, and neither does anyone in Washington DC.

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> Sorry, Comcast, make your pipes bigger? Government says so?

The government has never dictated when network upgrades happen. States incentivize businesses with subsidies where they otherwise might not build. The businesses now operating on those networks are profitable and arguably anti-competitive, which is why subsidies are being reconsidered.

We should also remember that for a new Netflix to enter the market, they will then need to compete. And now that broadband zero-rating and data caps are coming into practice for the first time, it's an open question whether or not there is still room for competition.

On top of that, broadband ISPs already hold regional monopolies, compounding the above issues.

Is that a realistic scenario that cannot be solved by just building out capacity? I don't see this discussion in South Korea or whatever where everyone and their grandmother stream like crazy since forever.

It sounds like completely invented scarcity. If necessary have the state chip in if the infrastructure is too expensive but do we really need to ration internet access?

> do we really need to ration internet access?

No, we don't, it's a ploy for major ISPs to rake in more money without needing to invest in anything.

Yes, of course ISPs need to make money in order to upgrade, and they already do that. The point of net neutrality is to ensure that ISPs and content providers are not stifling competition.

If these businesses don't reconsider their zero-rating & data capping practices I wholly expect a future FTC's Antitrust to look closely at the ISP and digital content landscape.

> Is that a realistic scenario that cannot be solved by just building out capacity?

Have you ever wondered why most home internet speeds top out at 35Mbps? It goes back to legacy spectrum stuff, they never needed upload to get cable to you, so the reserved spectrum was small, on docsis 3.x it tops out at 35Mbps.

The internet backend isn’t some wonder of engineering, it’s tubes held together with duct tape and bubble gum. A lot of old ways of doing things.

There is a very real practical limit to “just building out capacity”. Because of exisitint equipment, legacy standards, etc.

Running fiber to everyone directly, wouldn’t fix things. Beyond specs and standards, it would become a space, power, and heat limitation at these isps, and this is all totally ignoring cost.

This whole argument ignores the massive shifts in infrastructure that happened between dial up, adsl and fibre (and all the things in between). If you will pay for it, someone will build it.

I agree there is a practical limitation but

1. We're nowhere close to it, but it turns out a few large entities running the show is not efficient and slows it all down.

2. Information Technology is one of (if not the) the most rapidly changing fields

3. The cost of bandwidth will abide by Moore's Law, which means the price of producing it should as well. Couple that with the fact we're referring to an immensely wealthy sector and the cost argument loses merit pretty quickly

I don’t ignore the “massive shift” to new tech because I know for a fact how much legacy hardware still exists.

New tech changes, ISPs and telcos aren’t actually built on new tech, they add new tech, but there is a lot of 25 year old hardware around that only gets phased out when the people that know how to run it start retiring.

>What happens when we have 4 people per home, all streaming uncompressed 8k VR video streams, and 200 homes in a subdivision?

So you're arguing the correct approach is to give everyone pipes that are capable of doing that, but limit the amount of time they're allowed to really work them. None of that makes sense to me, am I missing something here?

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