Hacker News Reader

Comment by grayhatter | Hacker News Reader

You cannot live a successful modern life without a number of things, power, clean running water, reasonable options for transportation, and I'll happily add high speed internet access. Comparing luxury things Versace to necessities of life is incredibly dishonest. There's plenty of space for a rational discussion about if LA County is behaving badly, but preventing people with power from taking advantage of, and abusive people without is the responsibility of a just society. High speed internet access is no longer a luxury. And ISP which have a much worse reputation for taking advantage, acting abusively to extract more profit, shouldn't get a pass on their generalized asshattery.

PG&E's asshattery has led to fires, deaths, and entire towns being burned from the map. For profit utilities have proven that they indeed require assistance in acquiring alignment on their responsibilities to the communities they serve.

View on HN

>You cannot live a successful modern life without a number of things,[...] and I'll happily add high speed internet access

Define "high speed". I understand that you need internet access to bank, interact with government, and receive education, but all these use cases don't require exceptionally fast internet. You can get 12Mb/s down with ADSL2 tech from the 2000s[1], which should be more than enough for essential use cases. True, it's probably not fast enough for multiple concurrent netflix/youtube streams, and updating steam games is going to be a slog, but those are arguably luxuries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADSL#ADSL_standards

Why bring up ADSL2? It's not a long-distance protocol at all, you need to be within 2 miles of the exchange hub to reach that 12Mb/s that you quoted. That's probably fine for subscribers within the city limits, but for more rural areas it's hardly relevant. DOCSIS techniques (cable rather than telephone modems) had quoted distances of 20-50 miles IIRC (although I can't seem to find any authoritative figures on that, probably due to search engine deterioration).

Plenty of CAF, RDOF, BEAD and similar program funding went to forklifting ADSL2 cabinets into rural locales to provide the service OP mentioned.

These were often back hauled by bonded SHDSL or similar Ethernet over Copper technologies, so you end up with a bunch of people on 12Mbps connections sharing a small pool of bandwidth, resulting in congestion, jitter & packet loss for everyone.

Deploying fiber would have not been as inexpensive to implement though, and for many years getting any connectivity was more important than delivering future proof connectivity.

I agree with the sentiment of your post but also want to make the case for outliers. I work from home and have to frequently need to make very large data transfers (hundreds of GB in many cases)

interacting with your peer group isn't a luxury. If you're the only one with an unstable or weak connection, it makes it harder to participate fairly. If you're already not member of a privileged socioeconomic group, why are we making it harder?

what about the new huge pre-trained AI model my highschool kid wants to play with. She only has a few hours a day, but you're right, having it downloaded within a week would be a luxury. she's lives in a poor neighborhood so she should have to wait while everyone else gets to explore, experiment, and contribute commits back to the repo it came from.

But instead of attempting to enumerate a large set of things made more difficult. would you say that also applies to electricity? Having a washers and dryer is a luxury right? shouldn't $ELECTRIC company be able to charge more before they install the lines for you? Oh sorry your neighborhood isn't zoned for ovens. This is unavailable, check back in a few years.

Sure I agree with your premis. We could totally allow people to get away with being shit, and unfair to people without money. But we shouldn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com