Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks
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It was just people had set up their own hubs and switches in their appartment buildings and strung cables between buildings.
This blew my mind. They just ran themselves ethernet and everyone got a drop from a switch in their building.
It wasn't clear how it got from a neighborgood level upstream.
But just the idea that they could all just decide to give themselves internet, and ethernet no less, string ethernet outside the walls of their own appartments to other appartments, and outside the building from one building to another? Unimaginable in the US. I was boggled and jealous.
With good reason. Building codes in the US prevent disasters like the one that happened at Grenfell Towers in the UK. Run plenum-rated wires through an appropriate space for safety's sake.
Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world)
The pattern is that complex regulations always have loopholes, when far better would be to wipe out all the regulations and simply put in prison people who don't take sufficient care of the environment or other peoples lives. Let courts decide what is insufficient care on a case by case basis.
I think the pattern is that regulations that prevent people who have money from making more money will always have loopholes lobbied into them, and thereby become complex. But the complexity is an effect, not a cause or really the problem. The problem is that they are going to make sure that a particular unsafe product or unsafe use of a product, that is known to be unsafe in other jurisdictions and banned, will not be stopped if subverting the legislation costs less than doing the unsafe thing will benefit.
I think specifically for Grenfell that the fact that the material was banned for that usage elsewhere created the pressure to lobby to maintain that unsafe usage in Britain. If they hadn't been able to sell it as cladding, they probably would have had to shut down production of it altogether.
And iirc it still would probably have been safe enough if it hadn't had a horrible corner cut installation that resulted in leaving flammable trash behind the cladding, and gaps.
This was not a design failure for difficult to devise regulation, this was a government failure, fueled by multiple layers of corruption. Putting it on the wording of the regulations, and implying that the problem is that regulations are inherently hard to write is just an apology for the guilty.
If anything, the difficulty of writing a lot of legislation is the difficulty of making it ineffective for the thing that it is purporting to regulate, but can't, because you've been bribed in some way. It's like the difficulty of writing RFPs that will only apply to a particular company that you've already agreed to award a contract to. It leads to complexity.
There's a reason why political jobs where you get to award contracts or write legislation cost more to get than they pay.
> Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world)
But this wasn't just a testing failure, this was people intentionally cheating on the test.
> wipe out all the regulations and simply put in prison people who don't take sufficient care of the environment or other peoples lives. Let courts decide what is insufficient care on a case by case basis.
The result of this would be extremely wealthy judges, prosecutors and judges and prosecutors families, you going to prison when you do something that was totally allowed, and rich men never even being indicted.
That is extraordinary. Not necessarily false. Surely we can do better?
US building codes are pretty good and well enforced, just as they are in the UK ... but even with that, you have a Surfside condominium collapse - so not perfect.
Also, building codes concern how to design and build a structure; they aren't going to help much with terrible maintenance.
Even Ghost Ship had no iron rings present. That’s what got them. You need those rings. One of my friends has one on each finger. A true 10x Professional Engineer. Nothing he has ever built has a single flaw.
They get fiery but mostly peaceful apartment building siding, we get spray foam and rotten roofs.
There are two inherently fire-safe, inexpensive insulation options, borated cellulose and mineral wool. You can even use them as fire-stops. Neither are good to use in an application where they receive rain.
Polystyrene and fiberglass get runner up status because they melt & retreat from a fire at sub-ignition temperature, which doesn't spread the flame but does open up the wall.
In my (admittedly minimal) experience as a volunteer firefighter, “minor repair and smoke damage rehab” isn’t a thing once a fire is progresses handheld fire extinguishers.
Water causes a massive amount of damage, and you often need to rip apart walls and floors - with water sometimes joining the party - in order to ensure the fire is fully extinguished.
The fact that all of the above is possible with only a single kind of cable and generic, 'dumb' switches is icing on the (seven-layer) cake.
I also dreamt of ISDN. Looking back, it seems such a paltry offering, but that tells you what an old man I've become.
Not at all.
Even in the US, rural folk have been beaming directional wifi to each other for a couple decades now (at least), and sharing utilities by personally running electrical, coax, telephone, or ethernet throughout a shared building or across houses stretches back for as long as those services have been available.
Sharing ("stealing") Cable TV by just running coax around was huge before those systems transitioned from simply using sometimes-encrypted broadcasts to a more authenticated/addressable scheme. For decades, party lines (for the telphone) were both official installations from the telephone company and de facto local networks run by one's handy neighbors. Countless people punched ethernet between walls in apartment units just the way you describe to share upstream connections. Same goes for power in squatted urban units or among trailers/shacks where they would be clustered tightly.
What made it unfamiliar to you (and perhaps many here) was probably just the class and finances of your family and the people they mingled with.
Something I've always been curious about: how much stolen electricity / water can a modern utility detect? And how well can they localize the source?
Asking for friend.
I wired up 1/2 of our building by just throwing cables between rooms via the windows. We got our upstream via a commercial DSL connection, which when split 11 ways, was about the same price as dialup, but way faster.
But even then it was still very anarchic. For example, one common perk of such setups for their customers was that traffic inside the LAN would be free. And they'd run searchable file sharing servers and P2P hubs (Direct Connect, usually) inside the net, which members would use to share their file collections.
Some of those actually evolved into "proper" ISPs eventually.
Initially they had only said something off hand that was normal for them, but the whole room was fascinated and asked them questions and they ended up describing as much as they could.
They didn't actually know that much about how it worked or was set up, they were just a regular user.
He might have been a student at Moscow State
https://scribe.rip/p/moscow-state-university-network-built-b...
I don't think it is community owned, but the distinction doesn't seem that important from a customer experience standpoint. The scale and locality of the business is what makes it great. They can care a lot about the network quality because there isn't so much of it that they need to outsource everything. All elements of their infrastructure are not only on battery backup but also standby natural gas generators. My power and water go out before my fiber does. I've never had an outage outside of scheduled maintenance windows.
Then the "efficiency" becomes how much can be extracted from the business and customers
Yes, non-profits can be fucked up too (as we saw with "Open"AI recently) and cooperative-ownerships can be bought out if one is willing to spend enough money, but it at least raises the bar a significant amount.
It takes continued good leadership to maintain this status. And once such a company is sold to a public company, it's gone forever.
Maybe it's ok that small companies have lifetimes and get replaced, but the problem is that today, there is always a capital pool collecting and the large pools live forever, so maybe they won't collect today, but if they are systematically there at the transition points, then we get big entrenched interests with enough accumulated mass to bend the market rules.
Community-owned _physical infrastructure_ (especially last-mile — fiber & copper going to everybody's house) … that needs to be the default.
And if it's not community-owned, it needs to be regulated with open access requirements.
Yes you can theoretically build a second fiber network and hook up people's houses. Yes it has happened in actual practice. But it is commercially questionable and just completely silly.
Around here we have had THREE separate companies drop fiber in the last year (technically not to everyone's house as they only do that last connection when you subscribe) - so my yard now has five fiber lines through it. That's a bit overkill.
They could have had the municipal electric utility run fiber to everyone, and then designate a single building as a POP/exchange and let any company that wanted to run a fat pipe to that and start reselling.
(Edit: eh, I'm too tired, I guess you're arguing there is a monopoly on last-mile infrastructure then, which theoretically doesn't need to be a monopoly. Okay. In most cases it's a monopoly anyway because "over-building" existing last-mile connectivity won't be used by everyone and is thus less profitable.)
There's always less profit potential where there is more competition, which is one reason why people suggest that monopolies are capable of providing higher-quality products (and services).
Interestingly, some local governments are known (or at least have historically) to use their permitting powers to extract significant amounts of money from telecoms and others. I am not really sure what to do about this, but in the early days of power poles, few/no permits were required to use them, and there were many power providers sharing the same poles; it was messy, and contributed to unreliability, but it worked and allowed for competition.
What kind of communist, socialistic talk is this? It's frankly anti-American and hurts the linchpin of the best country on earth, out job creators /s
Despite this ban, many communities in these states have pushed forward.
I have centurylink - ok not a community plan, but it competes directly with T-mobile, Xfinity (comcast), and other cell-based providers, and provides an excellent product for much cheaper.
And I know for a fact that colorado has been fighting the good fight. https://communitynets.org/content/colorado-passes-new-broadb...
It's literally the incumbent Bell provider - back in the day being AT&T and then USWest after the antitrust breakup.
Times certainly have changed for someone to even have this thought, much less write it down!
What are they doing down there? Their governor is literally the Democratic VP nominee.
Then there are regulations like these which are aimed at protecting the investment companies have made into infrastructure, effectively granting them a monopoly.
When people debate this, they often are thinking of the first class of protective regulations that are too onerous on companies, but I think most people like clean drinking water and rivers that no longer catch fire.
Whereas the second class of protection is really harmful to the consumer, and the powers-that-be have effectively been given a monopoly, and with that the money and power to protect their place in the market through continued influence on elections and other things to maintain these rent seeking businesses. We all hate the latter, but these companies have a lot of sway over politicians.
Not sure if that made sense! I pay company B but my fibre connection is provided by Company A. If I want to change to Company C I start a contract with C and the only thing I change is the cable modem.
Laws already regulate that space; what's your point?
> For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges...
Thank you for confirming my point.
The FCC determines what broadband is, and which companies get federal government subsidies for it. Federal subsidies > state subsidies.
I lived in a city of about 20k, not near any big city. There were two different fiber companies(one utility, one private) and Spectrum offering service. Cookeville, Crossville, McMinnville, Manchester, Tullahoma, etc...cities most probably haven't even heard of, all have generally great FTTH coverage.
The exact opposite is very likely to happen in the next four years, a federal ban on community networks, lobby paid for by the same big telecom that was previously doing it piecemeal at the local level, they'll just buy 100 rooms at that special hotel in DC and the bill will get signed in sharpie like a 5-year-old.
Sure, it will end up at the supreme court in a lawsuit but of course that's a lock too now.
IIRC, North Dakota, despite its Republican voting record, is actually pretty socialist (including a few legitimately state-owned companies).
The real good call out is the coop attitude that has been very strong in ND for decades. Sadly I have seen some of those coops start to spend a lot of money on creating talk shows with extreme political personalities who have little actual knowledge on things.
I would love to see the state go back to being more neighborly & community building. Either way the history of the coop attitude is a great one for building strong communities. Every community should take notice of this.
For rural communities, especially in the early 90s & 00s, having internet access was equivalent to access to an elite private school.
Minnesota had the DFL. North Dakota had the NPL.
Yeah, I think the intrusion of national political culture has been pretty toxic everywhere. IIRC, Heitkamp, the last ND Democrat, lost (or at least had some trouble), because she had to hem and haw on abortion to appease her out-of-state donors and could not adapt to local circumstances. Didn't really follow that election too closely, so I don't really know what else was going on.
You are right. I blame my recollection of it being very "farmer based".
I believe Heitkamp lost to Cramer who was an early Trump backer, in a state that was/(still possibly is) in love with Trump - possibly due to him being 1 of few candidates to ever stop in the state due to lack of electoral votes.
The polarization of the state also gave her no chances of winning. She had won the seat from Sen Conrad (of the Democrat party & in-law of former Republican governor Ed Schafer). Conrad was senator for roughly 26 years. It'll be interesting to see if/when the Dakotas ever goes back to being purple.
IMHO, that'll be when the national political apparatus once allows politicians to be heterodox again. I wouldn't be surprised if Democrats the Dakotas used to reliably send to the federal government were of the "blue dog" variety that's practically extinct (i.e. relatively conservative, especially socially). But with the withering of local media and its replacement with stuff made far away for a national audience (cable news, New York Times, etc.), I think it's more likely things will just polarize more along national lines, since people will know less about their community and pay less attention to it, and instead know a lot more about the dumb national controversy of the day and pay attention to that.
Honestly, I'd kind of like to see some kind of regulation that limits the reach of a media organizations beyond their home regions, to preserve local culture and attitudes. Sort of like Canada's Canadian content requirements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content).
All capitalism does is try and create enclosures and then use that monopoly to jack up prices for people who absolutely do not have to see the negative externalities of those endeavours. It is the most parasitic form of intermediation.
National ISPs are terrible. They shouldn't exist. The best Internet in the US by a mile (and it's not even close) is municipal broadband (eg [1]).
Surely your local neighborhood isn't going to deploy its own dedicated satellite constellation.
If/when satelite broadband becomes widespread, it will likely be consolidated and provided by 1 provider (maybe 2?) which might end up resulting in higher costs for everyone all around.
IMHO, it's a question of capacity and acceptable service levels.
Starlink monthly pricing is higher than my DSL and nearby cable as well as my local muni fiber. But it's not so much higher as to rule it out. And the install fee is a lot lower than muni fiber. It's going to take a long time to get ROI on my installation cost for the muni fiber if I compare monthly cost to Starlink. Muni fiber service level should be much better, but Starlink service would probably have been good enough.
I can’t fathom how many satellites it would take to support all the internet users as a monopoly.
Space-based internet makes total sense for very remote areas or as a bridge technology, as well as a technology to compete with incumbent terrestrial monopolies, but I'd hate to see fiber and terrestrial 5G rollouts stopping entirely in favor of it.
It's the characteristic of the 21th century, trading resiliency and robustness for performance. As long as the world is stable, it's nice.
Comcast is generally in the 20-30 neighborhood, unless you are using their gigabit service, then it is more like 10-15 milliseconds.
So it is higher, but not debilitatingly so (unless your application is very sensitive to latency). I would imagine there is a lot more jitter in Starlink, but that is more a feel than real numbers.
Mainly on a terrestrial system you wind up bouncing through more substations on the way to the general Internet, whereas with Starlink you are generally bouncing straight from your dish to the satellite to the base station. So less bounces, but farther to go. The physics favors the wire, but not as much as it used to.
But in your corner:
It's true that right now space-based deployment of broadband will provide broadband in locations where it's not currently available - perhaps spurring competition.
It's also probably true that space-based broadband will be able to compete directly with urban / dense areas where Comcast & company have an effective monopoly - also a good thing!
But there's no reason to think it will put comcast/company out of business at all. Has cell-tower based intenet service at all displaced comcast? Verizon and T-Mobile canvas my neighborhood claiming to offer the best internet, but as far as I can tell, everyone still uses Xfinity, even if Centurylink is much, much better.
There's no phone company that made all other phone companies irrelevant.
There's no tv channel that made all other tv channels irrelevant.
And there's no radio station that .. you get it.
And so it's hard for me to concolude that there's some ISP that will make all other ISPs irrelevant. Honestly most people will probably have about a 50/50 split between home wifi and phone internet. And that home wifi might have significant intrusion from space-based ISP, but not completely. (I realize spacex is also hoping to provide some phone service from satellites, but I digress)
I've heard it argued that podcasts make radio obsolete. That is more plausible.
This is much like saying satellite TV made cable TV irrelevant. Or magazines made newspapers irrelevant.
It was supposed to be for recording and playing back images. That was pretty much it. His original aspiration was for it to be employed in educational contexts to help make tge spread of visual information possible.
Now if you're talking TV Broadcasting as an industry, then you're absolutely correct. That was the business model settled on, but not without some foundational hmmm'ing, haww'ing and experimentation in coming up with business models in the radio broadcasting space. The history is in itself an interesting piece of work to dive into.
Now, anything that smells of BFT consensus, open decentralized protocols, smart contracts, distributed computing, gets lumped with “Web3” and downvoted to oblivion. I was surprised Freenet got through the other day without being associated with it, despite having WASM smart contracts and all of it.
Shouldn’t “hackers” welcome building new, disruptive things, especially if they are open source and disrupt entrenched centralized solutions of the entseeking “establishment” cartels? I feel like an old grandpa on HN today, still embracing the “old” “Hacker Ethos” that was being promoted by YC when HN was in its early days.
Has hacker ethos really today shifted to unironically supporting closed, centralized solutions, and attacking most disruptive technology by deriding it, downvoting people who speak about it in any terms other than dismissive, and trying to make sure it doesn’t take off?
It feels a bit like the story of the political left and liberalism — once upon a time the goal of liberals was to make race a non-issue, for instance, but now that same attitude is considered racist by many on the left. Once hackers were anti-establishment in an “information wants to be free” way. To liberate “systems” from “the man” and bust them open. I remember it. It was still the case a mere 10-15 years ago. On today’s “Hacker” News, if you’d look across a large swath of reactions to projects which aim to do just that, you’d never know it…
Why is this bad:
This sub-thread seems to be about using StarLink, which I don't see as any sort of "decentralized" given it is literally global and in effect controlled by one billionaire so hence my question.
Can you prove that?
Is that a reasonable thing to ask, or are we supposed to simply nod along and say “yes, your dogma is correct in 100% of cases”?
For example tell us how these are a grift: FileCoin. UniSwap. Aave. DID and Sidetree protocol (used by bluesky sky).
And decentralized systems go way past blockchains. Email. Heck even the Web itself. If anything I’d say they tend to centralize because of the “grift” which is capturing open protocols and doing rent extraction (eg GMail) or surveillance capitalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
That centralization and control over millioms and billions of people is worse than a grift. Why can’t we talk about disrupting THAT?
It's like there's a swimming pool full of sewage, and sure there might be a new PS5 Pro floating in there, but I'm sure as hell not wading in to find out.
Initially assume everyone is spread out uniformly, and that we need a broadband connection for every three people, and that 100 Mbps counts as broadband.
If all connected were in use at the same time downloading at 100 Mbps we need an aggregate bandwidth of 11000 Tbps. Actual usage would be more bursty, so let's assume we can oversell by a factor of 100. That reduced the aggregate bandwidth need to 110 Tbps.
Wikipedia tells me the satellite with the most bandwidth currently are those in the ViaSat-3 constellation of geosynchronous satellites, each with a bandwidth of 1 Tbps. Let's assume we can get LEO satellites with that bandwidth.
We would need 110 to get the required aggregate bandwidth. However, since each satellite only spends roughly 1/8 of its time over the US we need to multiply the number of satellites by 8.
That brings is to 880 satellites, but remember, we were assuming a uniformly spread out population. We need to take into account the non-uniformity of the actual population.
To do that we need to know the ground area that a satellite can serve simultaneously. That depends on the height of the satellite.
Google is telling me Starlink's around around 350 miles up, so let's assume that is what we use too. A naive distance to horizon calculation says that a satellite at that height would have an horizon around 2500 miles away.
I'm not sure if that means it could actually broadcast to people 2500 miles away from whatever its spot is over or if there would be problems due to the shallow angle the signal would have to travel to the receiver.
If each satellite can effectively broadcast to such a large circle then most of the 110 visible at a given time from the US would be visible over a wide enough area that how the population is distributed might not matter much.
This is assuming that the satellites do not interfere with each other. My guess is that there would be interference and they would have to operate more like cellular networks operate, with each satellite having a limited ground area that it broadcasts into using some kind of spot beam.
Feasibility now depends on the size of those spot beams and how accurately they can be aimed. If they can adjust the beams to cover large areas when they are serving a rural area and small areas when serving a dense area, and if they can aim that spot anywhere in that 2000+ mile radius circle where the satellite is visible then 880 satellites may be enough.
If, on the other hand, their beams are pretty much fixed in size and direction, then we would probably need a lot more satellites. Given the area of the US, for everyplace to have coverage the 110 satellites that would be over the US on average would have to each be responsible for a circle of around 200 miles in diameter, and could handle the needs of 3 million people.
If you've got more than 3 million people in a 200 mile circle you'll need more satellites over that circle.
Suppose we have an area that needs several satellites. It might be possible to arrange orbits so particular places always have a lot of satellites so that you could cover that area without having to simply make your constellation bigger.
I have no idea if that is possible. If not you may have to increase you constellation size so that you every place has the number of satellites that your highest density 200 mile diameter circle needs.
I don't think that there is any 200 mile diameter circle in the US that would need more that 20 satellites, which would mean we'd need 17600 satellites in the constellation.
Note that this is quite dependent on the circle size so could be way off from reality. Also I've not considered communications from the ground to the satellite which might also impose constraints.
Conclusion: it doesn't seem obviously impossible to provide 100 Mbps broadband via satellite to everyone in the US. A more detailed analysis is needed.
When Verizon laid down fiber optic cable in my (former) neighborhood, it was so much better than Xfinity’s service, and everyone I knew switched.
Not to say that the type of physical cable matters as much, DOCSIS 4.0 is in the cards, but latency and bandwidth will always be better on a (good) wired connection.
One quirk worth mentioning, though, is that WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband (which isn’t everywhere). Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi, the fastest wireless speeds I saw were on ultra-wideband connections to my phone.
> Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi
So after you upgraded your WLAN it was faster than your WAN until you bothered upgrading your WLAN.
That's a personal deployment decision not necessarily a matter of what was or wasn't' available at the time. >1G WiFi existed years before ultra-wideband was a thing.
Calling WiFi 6 >1G is a pretty far stretch. I don't think I've seen a real world test that breaks that barrier in favorable conditions, even with today's routers:
https://evanmccann.net/blog/2022/5/u6-pro-and-u6-mesh-review
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-wi-fi-router...
Whereas ultra-wideband was capable of pulling 2Gbps in 2020, something I have not even seen Wi-Fi 7 able to do. Ultra-wideband still has quite an edge:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ATT/comments/gbr335/this_might_be_a...
So yeah, when the author limits the tests to <1Gb none of the results were >1Gb. Who would have expected those results.
I've had >1G WiFi 5 networks in operation since 2018. It didn't require 6Ghz.
Your equipment or your environment may not have enabled it, but it was around.
Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, N Carolina, Pennsylvania, S Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
FL, LA, and NE are called out as having the worst prohibitions