Comment by justizin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justizin | Hacker News Reader

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I definitely agree, and this is one reason I advocate against overly harsh or vindictive rules that are unbalanced against ISPs because of our feelings about AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner - it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband. Sure, we can change the law, but we would have regulations in place that could interfere with the government entering the market, we might have gotten the big providers to agree to stricter rules if we promised never to try municipal broadband. This could be a perfect storm for conservatives, because they can wave their arms about how "liberals" are always asking for regulation and now that a "liberal industry" is regulated we don't like it and blah blah.

I far prefer to just obsolete the big providers and to implement internet as a real public utility. Even if private companies end up contracted to provide it in some cases, those would be regulated monopolies, not regulated free market businesses.

I far prefer that we build the case that even a city's own infrastructure would unlikely work without the internet, and that they should have at least some infrastructure that does not rely on commercial providers.

San Francisco's water power plant on the Russian River is a great example of this, it provides power for muni trains and electrified buses, maybe _some_ streetlights and a few other public things. If we have a full PG&E failure, we might still have running trains and lit streets. I'm not sure it doesn't all flow into the same grid, SF being one of the oldest power grids, but if that isn't fully the case now, there is enough power independence to ensure that such a thing would work.

> it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband.

Municipal broadband doesn't mean shutting out ISPs. If done right, it means that the municipalities own the last mile infrastructure and charge a per-customer rate to ISPs that serve residents. But what that does is significantly lower the bar for ISPs to offer service. It can cost millions of dollars to build out that infrastructure in a city/town and that's assuming you have right of way to actually lay the fiber. If the city does that itself, then ISPs only need to connect the city's infrastructure to the larger internet...something that's significantly cheaper.

The Comcasts of the world would still be free to offer service to customers. But they'd have to compete with the smaller ISPs on equal footing and without the giant markups they have today.

Thanks for explaining this important point. Competition outside of the last mile would be good for everyone, and the last mile infrastructure makes a lot of sense to run as a utility.

That's exactly what I was trying to get across, if I did so poorly, I apologize.

This is _precisely_ the discussion I want to have.

Transit is not the same as interconnect, we should have some private competition, but if an entire city is all AT&T and Comcast, I'd rather just have it be municipal fiber.

I have no problem with AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc.. running their businesses over a combination of private and municipal networks.

I feel that's ideal.

This is how UTOPIA in Utah is run. There are a myriad of ISPs to choose from, and the pricing is excellent ($70/mo for gigabit from Xmission, for example).

http://www.utopianet.org/pricelist/

Ohh how I wish we had that further north. Or that we could get logan city council to see the benefit of UTOPIA

That's kind of how it works in the UK, with BT being that last-mile provider for every UK ISP.

Let me tell you: BT sucks. They are technically a private company, but operating with all the ills that a large governmental monolith has accumulated over decades. With the system you're proposing, you're basically creating a BT. Hopefully it's a small, city-specific BT so at least if one city has a very shitty infrastructure you can move to another city to avoid it... but still. Caveat emptor...

BT is not the last-mile provider for every UK ISP. For starters there's Virgin (cable), but there are also a growing number of smaller providers that bypass BT/OpenReach to provide both fibre and wireless services (LTE in particular) without it.

And while I agree with about BT as a whole, OpenReach - the subsidiary of BT that handles the last-mile network - is very different from BT as a whole even though they certainly share a lot of history and baggage. For starters, OpenReach is vastly more tightly regulated (leading to, for example, all prices being publicly available on their website), but OpenReach is also subject to a lot of additional scrutiny and pressure from the 500+ companies that rely on their network to provide services, especially because many of said 500+ companies are directly competing with Virgin for business.

The baggage of BT is also less of an issue simply because while most ISPs uses OpenReach for their backhaul services (relying on OpenReach to provide an IP connection from the subscriber to the ISPs network), OpenReach also provide raw access where the ISP can put equipment in BTs exchanges and get a direct physical connection to the subscribers line, and a number of providers have and do make use of this to provide faster connections than what OpenReach offers for backhaul.

With LLU unbundling the only limitation provided by OpenReach is down to physical constraints of a network they inherited and was not endowed with enough cash to somehow instantly upgrade.

But most ISPs are not willing or able to cover the costs even of taking advantage of the LLU unbundling, which should illustrate that there really isn't a willingness for most to pay for much faster rollouts of higher speeds.

4 out of 5 of the places I've lived in London had DSL but no cable, so for 80% of my experience in London BT was the onyl last mile provider available.

And yes, there are some new developments, there is some hope in the horizon.

Meanwhile, I regularly see tweets from people in, say, Norway, with gigabit internet access.

Yes. But the way the system in the UK works is the worst of both worlds. Openreach is a private company (a subsidiary of BT I believe), which has been granted a monopoly and as a result has to be constantly audited by the government at great expense to ensure that they are not making too much profit or favouring some ISP's over others. As a result, the way they make a profit for their shareholders is by being as tight as possible about everything that has no regulated minimum requirement.

For example, the broadband service in my town suffers from random slowdowns where everyone's speed drops from 8mb/s down to 0.1mb/s for days at a time. As a town we have been complaining about it for years but nothing ever happens as we have no power over Openreach because they are a private company and are not answerable to us and they also have a de facto monopoly on the infrastructure so we can't take our business elsewhere.

At least if broadband was provided by the local council, we could complain to our local councillor when it's not working. This system works fine for other infrastructure, e.g. if the council haven't gritted the roads we phone our councillor and she gets on to the right department, gives them a row and they sort it out.

As it is, most broadband infrastructure improvement projects in the UK are government driven any way. I don't see the point of Openreach existing as a private company, seems like extra unnecessary bureaucracy which exists purely for the dogmatic reason that private companies are supposedly always more efficient, a claim which I have never seen any serious peer reviewed research to support.

If anyone can explain why this is not a stupid system, then I'm all ears.

> If done right

That's a pretty big if. There's a very real possibility that the same municipal governments that granted the cable monopolies in the first place, will either license the network to an ISP that will either become Comcast-like (monopoly lazyness does that), be bought by Comcast or actually just simply is Comcast (remember, the municipalities have a "good working relationship" with Comcast) or they will setup their own ISP, which might get off to a decent start, but will either make money, and then go on to be milked hard, or it will lose money, and will have to fight with the fire service and the water utility over every last penny for infrastructure upgrades ("What do you mean you need a $5000 router? I have a $30 router at home and it works just fine! In fact, I'll go to Best Buy myself and get you a few of those tomorrow. What the next item on the agenda?").

But IF they do it right, it would be a great solution.

You're right, it is a pretty big if.

Here's what I foresee actually happening: these networks will work great for 10 years or so. But eventually the maintenance costs will catch up, and you'll have service outages that take days to fix because it's run by lazy government workers with a guaranteed pension. Customers will complain, but nothing will happen until the city goes broke (as happens to nearly every city every decade or so). So the city auctions off the telecom infrastructure to private buyers for pennies on the dollar or spin it off as a new private entity. The net result is the same: the taxpayers will have subsidized the construction of yet another redundant telecommunications network owned by private money.

The reason I'm pretty sure that this is what will happen is because this is exactly what's happened to most of the municipally-owned utilities across the nation. Chances are that your gas company or electric company are privately owned (water/sewage tends to remain municipally owned because it's simply not profitable under any scenario that preserves basic sanitation). The city hits a budget crisis and starts looking for assets to sell, and utilities are huge capital assets that can bring in a lot of cash relatively quickly.

The useful life of fiber installs can be even shorter than 10 years in specific cases [1].

What if the municipality owned, laid, and maintained the physical conduit/poles/enclosures but not the actual network physical plant itself, which is then deliberately designed to be replaceable so commercial providers fish through the cabling they want to municipally-owned physical hubs that are equipped and operated by the providers? The municipalities already have the resources and staff to do so relatively competently from water, wastewater and electrical grid deployment and maintenance. Most of the cost of last-mile deployment is the physical laying, but if that is shifted to a public utility while fishing cables (at most) is left to the providers, then might the providers see dramatic increased incentives to compete on quality of service and price?

[1] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-lifespan-of-fiber-optic-cab...

When you are dealing with a city of millions does it really seem right to fish one wire at a time? That means terminating the wire at the home too. With multiple ISP's how many of them would need access to the "Main St" section at a time? The cost of booking a time, sending a worker out to fish and terminate possibly kilometers of wire per customer as each customer signs up would be a logistical nightmare. Then what happens when the customer leaves you for the other guy? Never mind the cost differential of running one wire vs bundle of wire.

Except you almost never want to pull fiber when you can help it (fiber is far more fragile than copper). In the scenario you describe, instead of burying a conduit, you would just bury a jacketed fiber bundle containing hundreds of fiber threads, even if you only need a couple dozen right now. This is where the term "dark fiber" comes from. Also, in this scenario, if a fiber cable "goes bad", you can just swap out another, unused cable.

Regardless, the architecture you propose would be incredibly expensive for ISPs to implement on any large scale - so much so that it would create significant barriers to entry for any new entrant, and a big incentive for horizontal consolidation. Ideally, the utility ISP would provide route tunneling from a specific port on their demarc switch representing a home to a specific provider at a NOC at the edge of their network. This does create some bottlenecks, but it's better than having 5 ISPs have to put 1,000 switches all over a city just to cover all the homes. Coverage is the entire problem that causes a monopolistic situation - so let the shared service provider worry about coverage.

Even still, I'm not sure of the value that ISPs provide in such a scenario. It seems like a commoditized service with very little in the way of competitive advantage - which means that advertising dollars will be the biggest differentiator (similar to how it is today).

Good points, thanks for contributing your domain knowledge. So the issue seems to remain: fiber can be made in different ways to accommodate different signaling technologies, and what we lay down into the ground and run through buildings today might not be what we want to use 5/10/15 years from now. Is there a potential way to economically mitigate that, and at the same time turn Internet access into a public utility so the bulk of the initial capital costs are somehow only paid once by the utility?

> Even if private companies end up contracted to provide it in some cases, those would be regulated monopolies, not regulated free market businesses.

I guess you meant those would be regulated monopolies and not unregulated monopolies ;) ISP scene is quite far from free market at the moment.

I don't understand why people are using monopoly to describe ISPs. Looking at http://www.broadbandmap.gov, can anyone find one city without multiple broadband providers?

For wired connections my zip code shows 4 providers. This was exciting since there is only 1 right now that is equipped for high speed internet.

The other 3 are dedicated business telecom companies and do not offer residential service.

It appears broadbandmap.gov doesn't differentiate between residential and business.

Looking at the wireless I was excited to see Wimax offered in my zip code according to the site. When I go the provider's map of coverage I only see a small section of the metro area covered and it doesn't include my zip code.

It appears broadbandmap.gov doesn't include the actual wireless coverage provided.

This is one of the real issues with the FCC's collection of this data. Broadband providers don't report where they have customers they are providing service, they report areas that they "cover", where "cover" may just mean an intention to provide service. It may also mean that broadband (>3Mbps) is available, for the low low price of your first born.

There's also a potentially anti-competitive slant to this: There are government subsidies available to provide coverage to unserved areas, which might help a small ISP or competitor move into the area. But if we say we cover it...

If you give me your zip code or a surrounding zip code, I can assure you that I'll find more than 1 residential broadband provider in your area.

And of course, if one person in a zip code can get it, everyone can.

I could give you my old Zip code, it would include a small city that had DSL providers and Cable. Where I lived there was one provider, 3mb DSL. That finally showed up about 4 years ago.

Even with 3Mbps, that's still sufficient for vast majority of Americans. Netflix, like the guy said, recommends only 3Mbs. Heck it requires only 0.5MBps[1]

[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306

That wasn't the point. The user is saying everywhere has multiple providers to choose from, and it is just not true.

Ooh, that's funny. I guess you've never lived in apartments where your choice is between up-to-100mbit Comcast or 768K DSL from ATT. I guess LTE is also a choice for high speed if you want to use less than 5GB per month.

That site has... Interesting data. It seems to be granulated based on zip code. It shows, for mine:

1 cable provider

2 ADSL providers

It shows FiOS also, but I can almost guarantee that there is no residence within this zip code that can get it. So, the real question is, how much do you consider ADSL "broadband"?

What is your zip code? I am quite certain there's just not one residential broadband provider in your area.

Considering most urban ADSL runs at 15/1Mbps standard it very much is broadband. I guess American providers just like having larger distances and thus lower speed on their wires, but there's nothing wrong with ADSL.

No. A lot of it can't go above 3 Mbps download. 15 is available only if you are very close to the box. So it's definitely not most.

Something like DSL or satellite service is not comparable with others (it's too inferior). As well as a capped service is not comparable. Discarding all that you get something that is clearly a monopoly. Plus several companies which do offer something substantial but operate in collusion are essentially a monopoly anyway.

Real competition is for example Google Fiber or some other small ISP on the scene. That's when you starting getting 1 Gbps for less than $100. But such cases are quite rare still.

Going by your definition, does Apple have a monopoly on phones since every other phone is inferior? Just because one broadband provider has greater speeds than the others, it doesn't mean it has a 'broadband monopoly'. Again most Americans don't need 100Mbps+. They are fine with 25Mbps. Netflix only requires 3Mbps.

Now the "cable monopoly" is a separate issue entirely. Comcast has superior speed in some areas because the municipalities create bottlenecks that keep new wires from being laid (like charging exorbitant fees to do so). See, http://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-jus...

Apple has a lot of monopolistic (anti competitive) problems, not just in attitude but in practice. A perfect example is their ban on alternative browsers on iOS. So bringing Apple doesn't help your cause.

> Again most Americans don't need 100Mbps+.

That's a pile of trash and song that monopolists like to sing to justify their unwillingness to upgrade their networks (since if there is nowhere else to turn, their inferior networks will be used for crazy prices anyway - users simply will have no choice). They start singing a very different song when they face actual competition. They quickly forget their previous claims that no one needs more bandwidth and start offering it. Which just demonstrates how sick the current ISP market is.

I.e. imagine you are trying to find a transport service, and local transportation company tells you that their horse and buggy service is just fine, because no one needs anything better (didn't everyone use it for hundreds of years already?). And then their competitor actually builds a railroad... You get the idea - that's exactly what's going on with ISPs now.

Ehhh...

For my home, 2.5mi from the Capital Building in Washington State, I'm offered four wired broadband providers:

1. Comcast, "advertised 100mbps to 1gbps" (true enough, although you can only get 150mbps, so I'm not sure if that's bracketing)

2. CenturyLink, "25-50mbps" (CenturyLink's own website says "Our systems indicate that our High Speed Internet is not currently available at your service address." I tried several other streets in the area that indicated that none of them had availability either.)

3. Platinum Equity LLC, "10-25mbps" (err, Platinum Equity is an investment firm - oh, one of their portfolio offers "T1 and Bonded T1" lines to businesses)

4. Integra Telecom Holdings, "3-6mbps" (a Vancouver telco that does business fiber).

So there's one - Olympia, WA.

For Olympia, WA,

http://www.broadbandmap.gov/internet-service-providers/olymp...

There's Comcast, Verizon, ATT, T-Mobile and a host of others.

EDIT: Facts deserve downvotes?

Select "wired" and you're back to what FireBeyond said. One provider. As I replied to you earlier in another thread, cellular internet isn't equivalent, nor is it priced comparably.

http://www.broadbandmap.gov/internet-service-providers/olymp...

re: EDIT: I didn't DV you but you shouldn't be surprised. There probably isn't a single HN'er without direct experience shopping for an ISP, and thus few without the knowledge that the many promises of "broadband" service are often mere pie in the sky.

But the argument here is "broadband monopoly" not "wired broadband monopoly", which municipalities have direct control over on who gets to lay cables. The "broadband monopoly" argument should stop since American consumers aren't limited to one broadband provider.

Anyway, one of the wired ones that's listed (CenturyLink) does residential internet from what I can tell[1]. Another wired one that's also listed for residential in Olympia is MegaPath (owned by Platinum Equity, another wired one)[2].

[1] http://www.centurylink.com/home/internet/

[2] http://www.megapath.com/services-residential/

>But the argument here is "broadband monopoly" not "wired broadband monopoly"

No, to repeat myself, cellular wireless ISP service is neither functionally equivalent to other wired nor even to other wireless ISP service offerings. Cellular offers include low data throughput limits, and are not priced comparably. If there were two DSL offerings and one was priced higher for a lower level of service that would also not be reasonably considered a competitive market situation.

As for CenturyLink in Olympia, Wa. the poster already replied that Century Link do not offer service to his/her residence.

I'm not going to audit the claim about Megapath, but instead just assume that FireBeyond was truthful and correct when they said that Megapath did not offer residential services to their address.

Are you going to claim that AT&T offering (typically) a 10GB cap / month (without huge overages) is a realistic broadband offering?

Also - yes, I'm aware CenturyLink does home internet. Not at any of four addresses, including mine and major streets in 98501 where it says they are available according to the original site.

Megapath (the one I found) does residential - in theory. After inputting my service address (and I'm in the heart of the residential area, in a division less than ten years old), here are my options:

1. "Symmetric Ethernet: 6.0M to 45.0M (* Requires Business Account)"

2. "SDSL: 192k" (fairly sure that doesn't meet any current definition of "broadband")

3. "T1: 384k to 3.0M (* Requires Business Account)"

I wouldn't call that a realistic residential broadband offering.

Apropos of anything else, it's as much as you can't just blindly point at broadband.gov and say "look, healthy marketplace!".

I don't think anyone on HN is fooled into thinking there is much real competition between ISPs in the US because we've lived it and we know better.

In my ZIP, four of the entries are cell phone providers (don't count), AT&T DSL which is listed as 10Mbps+ (I had it; it was only 900kbps), one that is business only (dedicated lines), and a "fixed wireless" provider that is pretty slow and expensive ...and Comcast, which is what I have because it's the only >5Mbps solution available to customers in my neighborhood. I live 15 minutes away from Google's main campus, so it's not like I'm in the sticks or something.

I'm looking at the telephone pole near my house and there are only two wires coming off it: one from Comcast and one from the phone company. And the phone lines can't do more than 1mbps.

Why don't they count? AT&T and Verizon are also broadband providers. They're not dial up services. Isn't that the definition of broadband? The cell providers are listed under "Advertised Speeds Above 3 Mbps Data" or above. Just because Comcast has the fastest service doesn't mean it has a monopoly on broadband services. The vast majority of the American population don't need 100Mbps+ anyway. If they did, there would be more competition in that market.

The expense and severe limitations of cellular data service rule it out as an equivalent or practical home ISP. It is superior to satellite based service, but that's not saying much.

>"Why don't they count?" 900kbps from ADSL is not a choice against 30-100+ from DOCSIS

Technically, I have four, maybe five choices, only one of which is practical.

Wireless - Poor reception, technicians unable to connect to uplink/head-end equipment

Cellular - Too expensive, data caps, and poor reception (really).

DSL - I used this for four years at my home and was generally satisfied with my private DSL reseller's service. I only left because their service only allowed 1.5Mb, which was no longer satisfactory. Ironically, AT&T now offers 6Mb/s service in my area but DSL resellers apparently aren't permitted to resell "U-verse" even though it is provided via an industry standard protocol, ITU G.992.3

Cable - I have cable now 15Mb, the highest speed they offer. They keep promising to roll out higher speeds, but have yet to do so.

Satellite - Does that count as broadband? Not for me. High latency and low uplink speed rules it out, and expense.

This is an especially crazy situation for me considering that I live near a major internet backbone corridor (0.5mi from my home).

So, strictly speaking there is no monopoly, but the result is hard to distinguish from that of a monopoly/cartel situation.

There are loop holes to getting in the database. The wireless providers aren't selling w data rate at every location, they sell a package that can reach that rate in the right locations.

Likewise, why are speeds so low still if there is all that competition? Once the wiring is done, it should be fairly inexpensive to upgrade performance and that should be a pretty clear competitive edge. Are they colluding? Or is it really somehow a noncompetitive market?

I've been in Comcast country a couple times, as soon as there were even whispers of not renewing their franchise, comcast just magically upgraded everyone's performance, I saw that twice. No fee increase.

If the government was your ISP, what are the privacy implications?

This is a very valid concern, but what if a private small business provides me an encrypted broadband connection over municipal fiber, which saddles the city / county with the _physical_ problems, and sacrifices a little bit of latency and total bandwidth to keep my relationship with my transit provider separate from my municipal interconnect provider.

Obviously there are continued risks with the crypto arms race, but if Google is being beam-split by the NSA, why would we choose a solution that uses more power, provides less overall individual freedom, costs more, and is slower, to guard against a bogeyman that's getting in anyway.

We must always assume we are being wiretapped.

Let's get a discount on being wiretapped, eh? ;)

Good point! Terrible, but probably not worse than what we have today.

This is my concern, in the Snowden/NSA age. While few ISPs are willing to go to the mat defending their customers' privacy, I am absolutely certain that when it comes to governmental providers, it will never happen.

I was under the impression that SF's electricity came from Hetch Hetchy and that PG&E was just a backup. Is that not the case?

If you live or have an office in SF, my understanding is that you have PG&E. At least once per decade for several decades, there have been impassioned efforts to implement municipal power in SF, to transfer all of the PG&E assets and staff to SFPUC - not easy to implement perfectly, but an equitable goal.

Now that I've left SF after living there most of a decade, and I live in the east bay, I think it's also a concern that SF gets to own a power source so far away, because of the historical timing of when it was implemented.

The SF Bay Area's intertwining municipalities are a major impedance to certain types of progress, but I also think they are a valuable alternative to a region like NYC where you have a massive city with areas that aren't really like one another.

Anyway, my understanding is that the water power plant supplies muni and other SF public purposes, such as possibly some street lights. I know, though, when I lived in the TL, and we had a power outage, the street lights would go out, so this may all flow together and be metered, rather than be separate, redundant systems.

My point was, we could probably change that. :)

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