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Comment by Panino | Hacker News Reader

> The funding is going to a mix of cable, fiber, and fixed wireless providers, plus SpaceX's Starlink satellite network.

I think cable providers should be left out. They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. They can just use the free money they've already been given. Instead, the funding should go to existing munipical fiber ISPs to expand their coverage. Give money to people with a proven track record of doing what you want, not people with a proven track record of keeping the money for themselves.

I'm on municipal fiber and it's amazing.

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If the issue is link speed symmetry, then cable should be out of the running entirely. Even my phone offers better upload speed than cable in my neighborhood. Same for my parents' place across the country. New money should go to fiber, satellite, wireless, or nothing at all.

DOCSIS 3 (from 2006) can do 100/100 over cable - it's the decision of the provider not the technology.

It's at least somewhat inherent to the technology. DOCSIS download channels are shared among subscribers; upload channels are allocated exclusively per-subscriber. This architecture provides economic incentives for the provider to provision asymmetric circuits rather than symmetric ones.

100 Mbps up requires expanding the uplink band from 5-42MHz to 85MHz. That requires changing outdoor components like amplifier and filters, and upgrading millions of cable TV boxes, splitters and modems inside customers' homes. The combined cost of hiring more technicians and buying boxes might approach the cost of upgrading to fiber. Altice USA decided to skip DOCSIS 3.1 and start dragging fiber.

Which is all stuff they are doing anyway. Cable modems, even when not integrated with wifi don't last more than a couple years before someone adds a couple more channels, or tweaks the spec. Etc, Docsis 3.1 modems were available in the local best buy for probably 5+ years before my cable company would even provision them in docsis 3.0 modes.

They might have some excuses with the amps, but again, those can be upgraded as they age out/die too. This was the excuse 20 years ago when the amps didn't allow any upstream signals through in many areas. If a cable company hasn't been preparing/slowly rolling out new equipment as soon as the specs are available that is their own fault. Like any other technology you either get on the train, or you get left behind.

Beyond that it's pulling from a finite pot. Every Hz you allocate to upstream is one less Hz you can allocate to downstream.

Fiber doesn't have this constraint. It's trivial (and common) to deploy a pair to each premise, but, even if you don't want to do that you can shine light in both directions on the same piece of glass and reasonably* run a terabit across a single fiber (not a pair).

This is partly incorrect. Near the beginning of using data over coax cables the network architecture design dedicated more frequencies to getting data to your house as opposed to you sending data out. This was done because the initial network design was that they would send massive amounts of data to you as images and you would only send small amounts of data requesting paper view or other channel/media options.

All components through out the network rely on what came before.

I believe it's a model to segregate pricing. business costs more, gets good upload. Residential costs less, gets good download.

That said, fiber is really really efficient and can put 100 customers utilizing the entire 100m on one strand.

Business costs more because it’s less oversubscribed than resi, also is intended to be more robust in terms of change windows, and depending on your provider may have some best effort SLAs.

Doesn't mean it's not segregated pricing.

Business class in airlines -- goes the same place as coach, but "the service is better". Actually what they've done ist o mindfully take away from coach to stimulate upgrades to business class.

I signed up for business internet just so I could get a static ip address. Other internet services like sonic will give you a static address if you ask.

With Starlink I think the competition will get more real for them.

In the rare markets with actual competition the shitty cable companies provide at least okay service. In Palo Alto I can get 1gbps down/35mbps up on Comcast for $89 (with 1TB data cap I have to pay $50 extra to remove).

That's not too bad.

They also offer a 2gbps down and up service called gigabit pro, but it requires installation and it's pretty expensive: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comc.... It's also hard to get because the reps on the phone are not well trained and don't know about it.

This is only because there are a few internet options here. Where I grew up there is one provider (Spectrum, was Time Warner, and Adelphia before that), the service is bad and the price is at least double.

I recently moved to SF and I'm in a newer building with Google Fiber Webpass, it's 1gbps down and up with no cap for $57/month - it's awesome.

The worst part about Comcast (ignoring the 35mbps up which is pretty bad) is everything around the service. Their website is extremely hostile. It's impossible to do anything online. Their pricing is heavily obscured. They push shitty TV packages I don't want or care about. It's hard to cancel without going through retention.

Google Webpass? I signed up online in 5min, connected my own equipment and was good to go.

Hopefully with real competition the old services will either get competitive or die. I don't really care which.

This. I think the really confusing thing is why so few new entrants have joined the US telecom market. There is masses of cheap capital to build these networks out.

Most of Europe seems to be moving to this kind of model:

A cable TV provider using DOCSIS or FTTH (and expanding their footprint)

Existing incumbent telco providing service via VDSL/FTTH (rapidly rolling out FTTH)

New "altnets" (as they are called here) doing new build FTTH (like webpass in the US, but they are not just aimed at apartment buildings).

This has led to really significant competition. In portugal I have access to at least 1 FTTH and DOCSIS3.1. In London the same, my last flat actually had the option of 2 seperate FTTH providers (not sharing infrastructure) plus DOCSIS based cable.

I think the altnets are the key to forcing investment by the otherwise duopolistic incumbent telcos and cable companies.

I think what the FCC should be looking at is how to allow altnets to roll out service quicker. There is so much state/municipal legislation that I imagine that is the main blocker of doing this at scale.

> With Starlink I think the competition will get more real for them.

It's entirely possible for them to just ignore starlink. Due to the nature of satellite internet there's only so high a density of customers that they can have. At maximum theoretical efficiency and distribution this is maybe 1% of US households. In cities it will be irrelevant (starlink will either raise prices or turn away customers), in rural areas it may serve as some competition, but infrastruture investment in those areas is naturally lower return than in cities, so they're not likely to have a strong incentive to improve their service there. Elon Musk has specifically said Starlink is not competition for the big telcos.

>They also offer a 2gbps down and up service called gigabit pro, but it requires installation and it's pretty expensive: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comc.... It's also hard to get because the reps on the phone are not well trained and don't know about it.

This is how you know they arent really concerned about competition. This level of service is probably not quite a profitable because they likely cant oversubscribe their GPON nodes as aggressively with customers on that tier. The only other explanation is they dont care they are leaving money on the table.

In my area comcast is $89 for 200/10. And I live in an area with a significantly lower COL than Palo Alto.

I have to monitor my network for bandwidth usage and recently had to revert back to sneakernet for offsite backups because i was routinely approaching the data cap.

The only other option is CenturyLink DSL at like 5Mbps/768Kbps...

Starlink is available and frankly im considering it out of spite. I canceled cable and have the rare unbundled comcast plan. I could easily run dual ISP's for a while and be around what I was paying for cable TV and if starlink pan's out....i can just axe comcast.

But a 40ms first hop may not be tenable. Not sure.

I definitely dont live in a large city. But its not really the boonies either.

Yeah - even regular 1gbps down/35mbps up gigabit was hard to get when I first signed up.

I called and asked the guy if it was available, he said not in my area and they'd contact me when it was. This seemed wrong since I'd read it was available (and I guess he was just lying about contacting me?).

I called back and got a new guy, he said it was available but 'installation' was $300. This seemed wrong.

I tried a third time, this guy said I was confused and the word 'gigabit' didn't exist - I must be talking about the 'gigabyte data cap'. I begged him to click around his screen and look for gigabit service. He did and finally found it, "first I've seen this". I asked this guy about gigabit pro and he said it didn't exist.

I'd since switched to using comcast twitter to get someone at least moderately competent when I want something (they know about gigabit pro). Thankfully now I don't have to use them at all.

They are insanely difficult to buy stuff from.

During all those calls they keep pushing TV packages and get upset when I say no thank you. When I called to cancel they kept pushing promotional rates and asking me not to cancel. Even though my new service is less than half price, uncapped and has 30x more upload.

All that said, when the service itself is running it at least works pretty much all the time without issue.

That’s my experience as well. Uptime is decent. Just hope an outage is widespread and not at your ground block.

Because god help you if you need to reach out. It will be frustrating and painful and there is no escalation option.

Honestly I get better results just going through the Better Business Bureau. It literally solved my last line down issue faster that way that the empty promises from their call center robots

The only option I have is Spectrum with an absolutely crappy upload speed (currently 6MB). Sadly this neighborhood never got any other option. Starlink might finally provide some competition.

I’m in the same boat with spectrum, 9Mbps up, which works out to 1.44MB up in real world example. It takes me upwards of a full day to upload a 30 minute 4K YouTube video! It’s shockingly bad. I called to upgrade and the only option is business class for $200 per month offering 35Mbps up.

StarLink beta welcome email just arrived and I’m counting the days till I cancel Spectrum completely

Including cable providers is fine. The issue is how this money is structured. It needs to be a loan where the debt is forgiven once you reach certain milestones. The issue with the money earlier was there wasn't any teeth when it came to enforcing what was to be done with the funds.

Make the loan be equally competitive - any company can apply for any amount of money, and a small amount of the loan is forgiven per user they bring above the 100/100 mark (with possibly a bonus to rural users). Any backbone infrastructure created with these loans needs to be peerable as well.

>They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. They can just use the free money they've already been given.

I mean they could but they wont, and there was no reason to with Ajit Pai running the place. I daresay they'll have to be sued into compliance to do it now. Not that I object to that: they need to refund the taxpayers' money or do what they promised with it.

They’ll just claim something something 5G and will be back in the feds good graces. Honestly the cable industry is a monopoly and has grown beyond government oversight. This needs to change but we don’t have any other option than nullifying anti-municipal fiber laws and start laying down new lines.

This is why starlink is so important. I can not wait to stop paying Comcast.

Why don’t you move to 5G now?

Most of America doesn't have true (mm wave) 5g. About 1/3 of America lacks "5g" entirely. Assuming one does have access it's not financially prudent for most households to buy into 5g when the caps are as low as 100gb/mo.

https://www.androidauthority.com/where-is-5g-available-in-th...

Nitpick: mm-wave is just one of the dozen things that are in the 5G cornucopia of random technologies, it's not more or less "true 5G" than eg 5G edge computing.

I specified mm wave because regular 5g is about as good as 4g making the distinction worthless in practice. To actually benefit from 5g and justify the costs you'll need to be in one of the few cities with mm wave and have reasonable data usage agreements, which virtually no America can say they have both AFAIK.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Speed

In America 4>5 so we’ve appropriated “5G” to mean the mm-wave wireless transmission.

There are still large pockets of the US on data caps as low as 10gb. Throttled connections. Asymmetric networks. All so we can be nickel and dimed to death on fees, privilege, bundles, and in some cases double paying for content.

It's funny to me, reading "as low as 10gb". I used 45MB of data last month, and 9 of that was the Android OS. (And, yes, 4.33GB on wifi, of which 186MB was the OS). I know other people use their phones way more than I do, it's just a different world to me, where data limits are a thing to think about.

I use at least 50gb of cellular and a few tb cable internet every month.

You dont need mm wave to get decent speeds on 5G. Sub6 5G can give you a gigabit with much better coverage.

My neighborhood the Verizon 5G is pathetic, its slower than 4G and that is still slower than my terrible Spectrum wired internet. I only live in the middle of a 5M metro area.

> Honestly the cable industry is a monopoly and has grown beyond government oversight

I think you mean an oligopoly.

>they need to refund the taxpayers' money or do what they promised with it.

plus interest.

> there was no reason to with Ajit Pai running the place

This problem goes back WAY farther than Ajit Pai.

How much does it cost? Here Spectrum keeps upping the cost during the pandemic, now at $75/m for decent bandwidth.

In my area there was good competition with the new fiber infrastructure, so Spectrum offered $30/mo for two years with 400/25

We have either DSL or Comcast. 300/10mbps costs $100. Total rip-off but that’s the price of our county signing a 10 year exclusive deal with them. Now it’s expired but nobody is going to bring business in.

for-profit corporations should not own our communications infrastructure.

can they own our food production infrastructure? how about our clothing industry? home construction?

those all represent far more fundamental human needs than communication.

What "infrastructure" means needs to be nailed down before this can be discussed.

Internet service is seen as something in the same league as roads, power, water, and other utilities. Things that require public rights of way, extensive digging, cooperations among many jurisdictions or land owners, and special rules to make it all possible.

Clothing, food, and construction are all businesses that don't require that level of centralized coordination. Anyone can open their own bakery, or buy a farm. Anyone can set up sewing machines and purchase fabric, or get a contractors' license and start nailing sticks of wood together. Government still sets standards, of course. But these businesses don't have inherent monopolies the same way infrastructure businesses do.

Those things all have much more redundancy than comms. The US has three mobile internet providers (there's also MVNO's, but they use the same physical infrastructure as the big three), and any given home will usually only have access to two or three landline ISP's in terms of infra (e.g. cable, DSL, fiber).

In contrast, food can be shipped in to a city from innumerable farms, ditto for clothing. Home construction, there's lot of different home builders around, it's not a natural monopoly like communication.

For food production, I don't really have to trust any particular two or three farming companies -- if they fuck up, food can be shipped in from elsewhere. Whereas if my local ISP's are exploitative or simply incompetent, what's my recourse?

No one has monopoly control of the infrastructure in those industries. Anyone can buy and farm land, textile plants, etc. Its not possible to simply lay more conduit and compete.

I don't see an inherent problem with for-profit companies owning infrastructure, but it needs to not be monopolized and it needs to not be owned by a bunch of public market shareholders and hedge funds who don't even use the product. Utility monopolies and public companies rarely put customers first.

Cable isn't the only problem, companies like AT&T are too.

I don't think the money has to go to municipal fiber though. I'm currently in a rural city running 1Gbps/1Gbps with no data caps because of a small company got extra funding.

Or always pay them after they complete a part of the network instead of upfront?

> They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money.

Very little government money has been spent on broadband. Federal funding for broadband dates back only to the Obama administration. And cable companies have largely not received this money. You’re thinking of something else.

I think the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was supposed to help improve Internet access through its Universal Service provision. Of course all the telecoms pocketed the money and didn't do shit.

https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service

In my state there was USAC funding that went unawarded year over year, and for all I know still is. Carriers just don’t find it worth their while in many cases especially if they don’t need to worry about any threats to the captive markets they already serve.

The 1996 telecom act had an unfunded statement of policy to that end. But the universal service fund wasn’t used for broadband until 2013: https://connectednation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/caf_p.... Larger carriers weren’t covered until 2015. And it has not been a lot of money: https://www.telecompetitor.com/ahead-of-rdof-caf-lives-on-as...

> AT&T and CenturyLink accepted all funding for all states for which they accepted CAF funding. For AT&T, seventh year CAF funding totals approximately $427 million for 18 states. For CenturyLink, the total seventh year funding totals approximately $503 million for 33 states.

Over 7 years, AT&T has received half a billion dollars from the feds. That’s not a lot of money for building fiber. In rural high cost areas, where that money is supposed to be targeted, that might be like 20,000 homes. AT&T spends over $10 billion per year on wireline upgrades and maintenance: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/at-t-dedicates-40-40b-... ($16 billion in 2017). Over that 7 year period you’re talking $100+ billion in investment from AT&T versus $0.5 billion from the feds. Do you see why that money hasn’t moved the needle at all?

To my knowledge, Comcast has never received universal service fund (now called the connect America fund) money.

We can argue about whether universal service money has been used efficiently. But the idea that companies like Comcast received billions of dollars from the feds to build fiber everywhere is a very Trumpian misrepresentation (taking something with a tiny grain of truth and spinning it into a tall tale).

Your numbers are misleading.

“On October 27, 2011, the FCC approved a six-year transfer process that would transition the money from the Universal Service Fund High-Cost Program into the new $4.5 billion a year Connect America Fund, effectively putting an end to the USF High-Cost Fund by 2018.“

“In March 2014, the FCC approved "Phase II" of the transition to the Connect America Fund, adding $1.8 billion a year in funding.”

What’s important to realize is these subsides ends up providing paying customers to these companies. As such they don’t need to cover 100% of the cost of connections only the subset of that cost that wouldn’t be covered by monthly fees.

What's misleading about the numbers? I cited actual distributed money over 7 years for one carrier (AT&T). You're citing proposed amounts to be distributed for the whole program. The program has hit numerous delays, and most of that money has not been distributed. Regarding Phase II, for example: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/02/fcc-gets-ready-to-kick-off... ("The fund was proposed back in 2013, but for various reasons never saw the light of day.").

For the most part the money never materialized. The Phase II support, for example, ended up being just $1.49 billion over 10 years, not $1.8 billion per year as in your quote: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/connect-america-fund-ph...

It doesn't matter if the subsidies cover 100% of the costs or not--the point is that the funding is a tiny fraction of what the industry already spends, and isn't enough to move the needle outside a small number of very high-cost rural places. The replacement for the connect America Fund, the Rural Broadband Opportunity Fund, plans to distribute $20 billion over a decade: https://thecounter.org/fcc-20-billion-dollar-rural-broadband.... (Again, plans.) Wireline providers invest about $40 billion annually--or around $400 billion over the next decade.

The notion that subsidies are more than a drop in the bucket (and should be expected to significantly move the needle on broadband deployment) is just false.

The fact you’re talking about a subset of total subsidies to all infrastructure spending by these companies. This wasn’t supposed to be new money, it was renaming an existing telecom subsidies as something else.

In the associated April 2014 Connect America Report and Order, the Commission decided that a competitive ETC that is awarded “support through the competitive bidding process will cease to receive legacy phase-down support for those specific areas upon commencement of Connect America Phase II support.”12 As of July 1, 2014, consistent with the USF/ICC Transformation Order, the Commission froze fixed competitive ETCs’ legacy support at 60%...

Also, wireline providers don’t invest $40 billion per year in extending their networks to new customers. The majority of that money is spent on maintaining and upgrading existing equipment as part of their normal operating costs. It’s like complaining they can’t simply get money without doing anything.

To avoid another repeated thread, just read this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556

I just realized that you were posting on that thread as well.

Whatever conclusions you reach from the points made in that thread, there is an important additional point here. That thread is talking about telephone companies. OP is talking about cable.

We tend to think of both of them as just “broadband” today, but the regulatory structure is totally different. The central premise of the notion that telephone companies received “billions of dollars from the government” is that the government lifted rate regulation on telephone companies in the 1990s. Rate regulation told the companies what they could charge for local phone service. The argument is that phone companies made $200 billion more than they would have had had those regulations remained in place.

I disagree with that assertion for phone companies, as addressed in the thread above. But even on its own merits that argument is not applicable to cable companies. Cable companies weren’t rate regulated (except that in some places there is a regulated minimum television service they must provide at a government-specified price). There was no government action in the 1990s that contemplated subsidies to create incentives for cable companies to build fiber.

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