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Comment by emcrazyone | Hacker News Reader

seemingly good point but I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic. To make more clear what I mean, I wonder how your electric company would deal with a set of problems like when a torrent shows up on one of your customer's computers? Not to mention that IT support is probably more expensive than having your gas line checked for a leak.

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To check for that leak they had to have customer service reps, city vehicles, fleet insurance, technicians qualified to work on a live, potentially leaking gas line, gasoline for the vehicle, and they arrived at my home in less time than a phone-call to TWC generally takes. I really doubt some IT staff costs more.

As for the Torrent: Give the customer what they pay for, and no more. If my internet issues are because of Torrents, I have to ask: Why does the lack of competency ISPs have never seem to work in my favor?

edit: Also "not very difficult compared to":

I have an amateur's idea of the utility side (mostly from DIY and having relatives in the trades) and I think you're sorely underestimating the skill and care involved in making sure this stuff actually works. Large scale projects for anyone can be challenging, but it'd be amazing if anything ever worked at all if utilities put the same (lack of) planning care into their projects that most tech companies do.

Most people probably don't even know what a P-trap is for. Or ever noticed that their gutters are actually sloped for drainage. What material their plumbing is made from. How many receptacles can be placed on a circuit. That the brick on your house isn't actually load-bearing. What weeping holes are for.

This stuff has to last decades.

>> "Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic."

There is no question that each of these things is difficult at scale. Furthermore I have never done either of them.

However, power systems EE is perhaps the most widely-known example of Big Boy Engineering except building rockets. In the power business, they have an distribution/cabling problem which is at best isomorphic to that found in the ISP business (though probably greater, because ISP's don't have millions of volts to worry about) wedded to far greater stationing/substationing/production problems, and they still have (as noted by someone else in this thread) far more 9's of uptime than Time Warner. As compensation for this, ISP's have a greater Signals and Systems flavored problem, but it doesn't seem like it balances out.

So basically I'm trying to say that "... not very difficult..." seems inaccurate.

Here's my favorite story of said "Big Boy Engineering": http://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/

It's about fixing a short in a power transmission line. Sounds simple, right? It involves liquid nitrogen and hundreds of people with possibility of explosions or huge oil spills. That's right, the line is suspended in pressurized oil! It goes on…

I tried to find a good pull quote, and it's basically all mind-blowing pull quotes. But here:

"Every vault also has a nipple which allows sampling of the pipe oil. They said you withdraw the oil through a thick membrane with a syringe (?). This happens monthly on all feeders in the LA area. The samples are analyzed downtown by a staff of chemists who can relate the presence of things like acetylene, butane, and benzene in the oil to arcing, coronas, and so forth. Apparently the oil chemistry is a very good indicator of the health of the segments."

I think you are seriously underestimating the modern electrical grid. This is a control room that controls high voltage lines in the Midwest:

http://www.chronicletimes.com/photos/17/86/19/1786193-H.jpg

Ok you don't have to worry about torrents but people expect pretty much 100% uptime on electrical service and you are dealing with transmitting an insane amount of energy which is technically non-trivial and can be extremely dangerous. You have to worry about power plant failure, maintenance, load balancing renewable and fossil fuels, meeting peak demands(rather than just slowing down everyone) and so on.

Why is some customer torrenting movies supposed to be the ISP's problem any more than some customer powering grow lamps to grow marijuana supposed to be the power company's problem?

> Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic.

That was true in the 1990s, when I got my first job as a techie at an ISP. Things have changed since then.

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