Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks | Hacker News Reader

Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks

washingtonpost.com

55 pointswallflower10 comments

This FCC proposal to deploy nationwide FREE public wifi networks if successful will be a huge boon to all citizens as well as entrepreneurs/startups. As you would expect the cable and telco monopolies are fighting it hard consequently it is critical that as many people as possible contact the White House, the FCC and their reps in Congress to voice strong support for this proposal. Not only will it help break the cellphone and broadband monopolies cable and telcos have that completely eliminates competition and choice in these markets but it will generate significant economic growth, jobs and overall wealth creation across the country.

I explained Super Wifi about a year ago.

http://everythingsysadmin.com/2011/12/superwifi-better-than-...

Warning: it is kind of a rant, but I think I got all the tech stuff right.

Political musing aside I think it may be disingenuous to compare modern collision-free Ethernet vs shared-medium solutions.

Modern Ethernet over twisted-pair connect directly to a switch, a quite intelligent piece of technology. During this transfer you will not get a collision because it is your wire. When all the various clients packets converge at the switch the software there will sort and buffer the traffic in a hopefully 'fair' way and then send all that traffic out a collision-free link. Repeat. (Note: old Ethernet did at one time transmit on a shared medium but most people thing of Ethernet as our modern twisted-pair-switch-n-router architecture).

ATM and other channel access methods[1] are solutions dealing with a different problem. A shared medium can quite easily become overwhelmed even if everyone is playing fair. If the link just has too many clients the network collapses. One might liken this to the "hotel wifi" or "stadium wifi" problem.

While I think more open wifi is good, the technical challenges are not trivial. Many hotels and stadiums are moving to WLAN Controller architectures coupled with highly directional APs. Just a bit ago we saw an article on how the Super Bowl will be RF Spectrum policed this time around - just to try and keep the shared medium working. There would be many policy questions around deploy, management, policing, etc. and many technical questions about channel access, network health, buffering, etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_access_methods

I support this idea, but i'm guessing any company that makes eighty bucks per house per month for internet access may disagree. i am looking forward to hearing the proferred arguments against free internet for anyone who wants it as it would have to be a rather clever argument to succeed at contravening common sense.

This article talks about spectrum allocation but lacks any details about which frequencies. The closest it gets is "television guard bands". Is this the state of technical governance reporting in a modern, digital society?

I explained Super Wifi about a year ago. http://everythingsysadmin.com/2011/12/superwifi-better-than-... Warning: it is kind of a rant, but I think I got all the tech stuff right.

Ever since I watched Kevin Slavin's "How algorithms shape our world" on TED, I have been wondering whether we really need everything in the world to be monitored and decided by software.

Why would two cars a mile away from each other need to communicate? Perhaps, to warn that an accident has happened. But what happens when all cars within in a mile radius are trying to communicate with each other to alogrithmically develop traffic patterns? Would there be "flash crashes" like there are in the stock market from time to time?

This seems really awesome for the people but I have a feeling a few companies/lobbies would not allow this to happen.

it's not that simple... at least it hasn't been that simple in the last few years. consider these examples:

  * Obamacare vs health insurance industry
  * Wall Street reform vs Wall Street
  * The tech industry vs SOPA/PIPA

This would be much better than existing mobile data infrastructure for consumers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com