And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why net neutrality is important.
My experience from working at fiber ISPs is that the infrastructure is the hard part. Google Fiber got a good deal in its partner cities to run the fiber next to existing power lines (which not every city has, they're all underground here). When they ran out of easy install opportunities, expansion stopped. My experience was the same at a NYC-based ISP. If your building was on a street that already had open access tunnels, then we could serve you. If not, you were out of luck.
If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I've seen proposal after proposal for trenching, microtrenching, nanotrenching, picotrenching, attotrenching... and none of these worked in the real world. (I might have made some of those up; I think "attotrenching" is what I called just running cables into people's windows and not burying them. Didn't try it, but I imagine it would irritate people with its intrinsic flakiness and ugliness.)
The rest is simple, you can set up a full fledged fiber ISP for under $1000 in equipment! Figure out how to dig up the street profitably and you unlock a ton of wealth. (This, incidentally, is why people keep trying to sell wireless solutions. No streets to dig up. WiFi with pringles can antennas! 5G! A huge constellation of satellites! And honestly, it kind of works. But not so well that people are switching from their fiber connection to Starlink or whatever.)
The same way we got power to the homes which was government assistance and the private companies not expecting them to be totally profitable in a few years.
Same as they did with electricity a century ago. If you want to provide service to the profitable urban area then you must run wires to the non-urban areas too.
Their business model seems to be using sales volume to make up for marginal losses.
I've had mixed experiences with them. The wireless link itself tends to be 100% uptime with no bandwidth contention. The quality of the network between the tower and the internet backbone varies wildly depending on the ISP.
Anyway, last mile of 10's to 100's MBit symmetric over multiple miles is a solved problem these days.
The remaining problems are mostly political. Sadly, that's been true since dial up modems became obsolete.
Behold, MSU dorm LAN in early 2000s. https://medium.com/@pv.safronov/moscow-state-university-netw...
Partial “topology” shot: https://chronicles.igmsu.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/topo...
Home LANs and early ISPs were built with the same equipment by the same kind of enthusiasts. Typical commieblocks have enough place for cable shafts inside, though. Then the building roofs would get connected (with any kind of cable having any properties you could find) in the same grassroot manner. All that free libertarian enterprise, and now, after a number of tech upgrades, mergers, and so on, you can get gigabit for ten bucks.
I get it's not that suitable for suburbian installations, but the idea is that it all starts small and ugly. That's why your cable corporations are never ever going to allow even a tiny bit of alternative to happen, heh.
That's the double edged sword in the US of having executive level departments with wide latitude to set regulations with the weight of law behind them but not the same high barrier of changing them as it takes to change a law. Technically this allows agencies to be more nimble, or as much as possible in any lumbering bureaucracy. On the other hand it means that very important pieces of public policy are even further removed from election accountability and subject to the whims of different administrations.
Whether you're for or against it, the Keystone pipeline is a prime example of the insanity that results from this. It was approve & construction begun on one administration, a final portion for it put on hold by another, then opened again by a third, a fourth stopped it again resulting in its backers cancelling it (seemingly) once and for all. Forget about the difficulties of generation-long projects, this makes anything longer than 4 years highly uncertain.
This seems like a feature not a bug.
Popular policies around the issue created by legislative statute instead of agency rules would have been a lot harder to repeal.
Anywhere in the world there are local and global popular services that generate high volumes of traffic. Providers naturally care about getting shortest paths to them, plan in advance, join local exchanges, and so on, even if they don't have any direct agreements. For starters, it might lower your traffic costs. In some locations there are mid-tier ISPs offering just good connectivity with all locally popular networks; they offer the solution for low-tier ISPs for some extra coins. However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would try to make the big source of traffic pay for what has already been paid by customers.
Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination.
> However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would try to make the big source of traffic pay for what has already been paid by customers.
I think you need to work on your imagination. ISPs in the USA have already tried this (not sure if it is still happening).
Categorically false. There’s no “net neutrality” legislation enacted or proposed that doesn’t have giant and vague QoS and general network operations carve-outs.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/huge-win-open-internet...
In 2018 Markey and others proposed simply overturning Pai/Trump's overtuning of Title II.
I don't know precisely what you're referring to ... the closest I could find was the EFF's objections to the FCC proposals from 2011 which had things like "vague QoS and general network operation carve outs":
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/pt-ii-eff-evaluates-fc...
The EFF seemed much happier with the FCC proposals 4 years later.
What am I missing?
Which is utter nonsense for any large service provider that requires traffic engineering to handle elephant flows.
This is the problem with blanket slogans, they constrain the network in ways that impact user experience dramatically, and is why a LOT of internet pioneers oppose net neutrality.
Encouraging open access networks seems more striking at the heart of the matter.
https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/net_neutrality_customers/
https://blog.apnic.net/2020/01/22/bufferbloat-may-be-solved-...
As for the latter, my point was exactly that in “normal country” it's hard to imagine, but giant corporate clashes managed to turn this into some big argument about “freedom”.
You can also look up "name of area / state" and search for electrical tariffs.
The reason I am asking: unless there are such subsidies, it would mean that people pay proportional to their usage, so OP's joke about "electricity neutrality" would not only be wrong, it would be against net neutrality as well.
Such things are complicated to figure out fully, the subsidized power might not be subsidized directly by the power generators / power distributors. In some cases two bills are generated for the duration of the power subsidy so the subsidized part only sees the subsidized rate.
Probably not, as it has nothing to do with where the electricity is coming from or how it's being used. Having different rates for different times of the day which still apply to all users and all services is not generally perceived as a violation of neutrality.
The point of net neutrality is that ISPs should ignore the content, source, and destination of the packets they carry when it comes to prioritization and pricing. QoS is fine as long as it's under the subscriber's control (for example, via DSCP tags), but it can be an issue if it leads to the ISP one subscriber's traffic over another's based on the services being accessed. Tiered services (paying for higher bandwidth, lower latency, etc.) are also fine so long as the tiers assigned to each class of traffic are chosen by the subscriber and not tied to specific protocols or peers.
Consider the USPS as a model of neutrality: they offer various grades of service from bulk package deliveries to Priority Mail but everyone paying for the same service gets (more or less) equal treatment.
I'm honestly surprised at the backlash against net neutrality on here.
They changed the definition of local after crypto miners flooded in to limit exploitatiom and boom/bust speculation.
On mobile most plans are already "limited", but that hasn't given us net neutrality on mobile.
Electricity prices are dominated by supply vs. demand. There are many sources of electricity available, some of them being very cheap (hydro) some of them expensive (currently gas).
When demand for electricity goes up, the cheap power sources are going to be running at capacity, and utilities will need to buy more expensive power. This increases the marginal cost of electricity for everyone.
So just because Bitcoin miners pay for electricity, doesn't mean we aren't subsidising them. We are subsidising them by paying more for imported power even though our needs could easily be covered by cheap, local power sources.
The way to fix this would be to charge progressive prices depending on usage, ie. every person gets to use 1000kWh at the cheap local hydro power price, then the price increases gradually, and any electricity usage beyond 10000kWh/person/year you need to pay the full market price of electricity.
Internet access is typically billed as "unlimited" so those who use it very little pay a high rate per bit transferred, while those who use it a lot pay a low rate. Some of this is due to the base cost of providing service (fixed last-mile connection costs incurred whether the line is used or not) but the rest is a subsidy from low users to high users. How much of each is debatable; the costs of home internet are largely concentrated in the last-mile connection costs rather than bandwidth and data centers, yet the bandwidth still isn't free.
It's really the same thing as in the flat rate case. It's a bit less unfair since the cost rises linearly, but it's not enough to leave small consumers unaffected. People who consume small amounts of a utility still pay more because of people who consume a lot.
No, they really don't. People consuming small amounts and large amounts both pay more due to higher aggregate demand. If it weren't for the many small users the aggregate demand would be lower and the large users would also be paying less—do you consider that a subsidy in the opposite direction? No, of course not—because a price being bid up by competing consumers is not what is meant by the term "subsidy".
Now, if you banned large users from the system, or imposed discriminatory pricing as you previously suggested for the purpose of keeping prices low for the small users, that would be a subsidy: interference in the market to benefit one group at the expense of another.
It also costs more money to support higher bandwidth of network travel. But unlike with electricity, there is no cost (to network providers) to generate the data, since the data is usually paid for by the source. This means the average consumer doesn't get any of the benefit of the increased pricing -- it has not changed how the internet providers charge to consumers at all, only how they charge content makers. And customers who like the content get increased costs on top of that.
Therefore, I don't see any benefit by removing net neutrality -- it can only hurt consumers. If it only benefits network providers, why should I support it?
With internet, where the data comes from and goes to is the whole point.
Disagree with the premise though, Netflix has fast.com to make it transparent to customers that their NETFLIX volume is being throttled, and hence providers naturally do not throttle Netflix
No, I remember the opposite.
Netflix argues for net neutrality because that forces last-mile internet providers to absorb the bandwidth costs of Netflix's business model.
https://www.theregreview.org/2021/11/10/kim-can-netflix-win-...
' In the original claim, Netflix v. SK Broadband, Netflix invoked a net neutrality argument—based on the idea that internet service providers should treat all content equally—and argued that SK Broadband would discriminate against Netflix by imposing high network usage fees. Netflix also argued that SK Broadband should cover the increased costs of network traffic since it has an obligation to provide internet services to its customers. '
This is a problem of their own making. They can't have their cake and eat it too. Comcast has a monopoly in my area for high speed internet. Every other option is 25mbps(on a good day) or below. Comcast has shut down all potential competition.
So yea if they want to be a regional monopoly they might have some regulations placed on them they don't like.