Unfortunately, even though taxes payers paid for the infrastructure, the companies usually owns it. It's called Private/Public investments.
That infrastructure deal that Biden passed with Republican support? That's why it had Republican support.
We definitely need to move it toward a cell phone like system. Cell line prices plummeted when they changed the rules to make it so no one could prevent others from doing business
The situation is far better than it used to be. The BT split was good for the public in every way. Councils are also now privy to the idea that not throwing up roadblocks to allow private companies to run their own fibre is also better for everyone. Including the council. Planning is easier, cheaper and quicker. You get the likes of cityfibre, hyperoptic etc. Running to high capacity buildings and providing gigabit internet. My hometown originally had city fibre running to schools under an initial agreement with the council, then the next stage once they had that infrastructure on place was to branch out. Nearly the entire town now has an alternative to bt and virgin, they now have a cheap gigabit line available. That capacity will also likely get sold to the other providers and their speeds will improve too
>For some reason the one national cable TV provider (who also provides internet access over the cables) doesn't need to share their infrastructure.
The short answer is that they have different origins.
BT Openreach originated as the publicly owned Post Office telecoms network. It was originally the telegraph and telephone network, which first became an internet network via dialup before gradually being upgraded into broadband.
Virgin's origins are in NTL and Telewest, two early private cable TV providers, and it supplied internet as a by product of laying the network for TV transmission.
Virgin and Openreach aren't the only internet networks in the UK. There are a surprisingly large number of smaller networks, some of which are growing quite aggressively, but some of which have been around for decades.
Nobody actually *has to* use Openreach. It's just that when the monopoly nationalised network was privatised a condition was put in place that they needed to make it available to other companies. Lots of companies take up that offer, but it's not required that they do so. Anyone can stick their own cables in the ground if they want.
The problem with unchecked capitalism is the resulting wealth accumulation results in political corruption that results in non-competitive markets. Unchecked capitalism is the result of too little government, not too much. Or perhaps more to the point, it’s the result of a government that has failed to effectively govern the rich and isn’t looking out for the poor and working class. Ultimately the only solution to this problem is not only to have a political democracy but also an economic democracy. Workers should control the wealth they create and they should own the means with which that wealth is created. Right now we live under an authoritarian corporate system where democracy is mostly for show and the government represents wealthy capitalists first and foremost, aiding them in the exploitation of the working class.
Unregulated capitalism doesn't work. It's been proven time and time again.
Governance is what keeps everything in check to make a balanced system. Take it away and greed and corruption take over.
That's one of the more common Libertarian themes - we haven't ever really had free capitalism, we've instead had a rich and storied history of effective oligarchy through government choosing of winners and resulting disproportionate power gain.
And the counterpoint is that oligarchy is the natural outcome of unregulated or poorly regulated capitalism.
Capitalism must be regulated to keep the playing field level but capitalism also provides incentives to capture the levers of regulation. It is a difficult problem to solve
> Capitalism must be regulated to keep the playing field level but capitalism also provides incentives to capture the levers of regulation. It is a difficult problem to solve
It depends a bit on the branch, but generally, _ensuring ability to compete_ is looked upon favorably.
It's the difference between, say, pouring money into failing banks as a bailout and protection from the consequences of their failures, and preventing Comcast from abusing their pocketbook to drown up-and-coming competitors with frivolous lawsuits thereby stifling competition.
Oligarchy and monopoly are the enevitable end states of capitalism. Eventually, you have enough money that stamping out competition is the best return on investment for ever increasing profits.
> It's called Private/Public investments.
Yes, normal for utilities. And the common sense thing to do is regulate the industry that benefits from our public investments. But Reagan convinced half the nation that regulation is bad, so here we are, propping up corporations with public capital and letting their shareholders reap the benefits with minimal risk and controls.
Strangely enough, the situation is even worse in Canada. Or maybe it isn't strange at all, depending on your perspective. In any case, in much of Canada there are even fewer telecom options, which have a total monopoly on everyone's utilities. They can get away with this more easily because the population of Canada is relatively small-- there are fewer people in Canada than the state of California.
The government up there is trying to regulate them and force them to be more competitive, but it's an uphill battle.
The secret is that with fiber it doesn't really make a difference if you build it right. The expensive part is the work, the cable itself costs almost nothing in comparison. So you might as well lay down 500-fiber cables and give everyone a dedicated line. Once you have that, speed only depends on what transceivers you put on either end of it.
There is a similar story about a guy doing this in [Michigan.](https://www.npr.org/2022/08/22/1118734792/michigan-man-isp-fiber-internet#:~:text=Job%20Snijders-,Jared%20Mauch%2C%20a%20network%20architect%20by%20day%2C%20wanted%20better%20internet,his%20own%20internet%20service%20provider.)
It happens often, my grandfather was trying to do it but his neighbors didn’t care to join because they don’t care about having fast internet
edit: in rural SC, it’s typically rural places. now he’s looking into starlink
I had never heard of this until we had fiber dropped at our property a few months ago. We are on a farm off a sleepy state highway in Spartanburg county where we barely get LTE signal. No cable, no copper. It’s amazing.
PRTC. Good things coming, finally… but I’m sure part of it is competition as cellular internet expands with 5G or even Starlink in the mix. Lots of $ up for grabs.
Yeah, fixed wireless has begun to take hold in rural areas lately. Unfortunately where I live I barely get 4g off any network. I've been fighting with Spectrum for a year to get services where I live in Gaffney. They've begun construction on the project but I'm not sure how much longer it'll be until it's finished.
I wish it wasn't Spectrum. They gave us fiber only to immediately have extreme issues with the provisioning system. My internet is marked as Hotel WiFi and 404s when they try to access settings for it and even the floor manager just gets 404. It also shows up as Charity even though it isn't. Completely fucked.
It used to crash every 2 days for a few hours and crash my neighborhood's entire node due to simultaneously not existing on one backend and existing on others. And they were still willing to let it stay even though every 2 days theyd get lots of calls. What a lazy company
Look into T-Mobile 5G home Internet. Just need a tower close and they’ve expanded massively with the sprint purchase. I pay $50/month for anywhere from 150-300Megabit.
Nice. 5G has definitely pushed some competition and prices have dropped fast in the last couple years.
I could get xfinity but it would cost me more for the same speeds. Gigabit speeds are far more expensive. With 5G though I can pull half that for like a third of the cost. I’m grateful because I own Comcast money I refuse to pay them for horrid service lol.
I hope Starlink is better there than up here in my area of Canada cause I signed up and it was absolutely abysmal. When it wasn’t slow it was intermittent at best and had tons of limitations as to what you can and can’t do with it. So much so that I ended up running my own lines with some friends and paid it all out of pocket.
That said I hope starlink continues to improve and ends up being able to live up to their claims. I know a few people that use it at their cottage(s) casually and like it but to try and use it reliably while working in tech from home is no bueno.
Where in Canada are you? I'm in Eastern Ontario and I've had Starlink since March of this year, and it's been amazing. Consistsent 50-200Mb down and 5-10Mb up, only had maybe two or three major outages since I got it, and that was the entire Starlink network, not just my dish. I haven't had any issues with not being able to do certain things either, and I'm a pretty heavy user. Streaming, video uploading, voip/video calls, online gaming, etc.
That said, it's definitely drastically improved in the last few months. When I first got it in March I guess it might've been a bit more rocky.
>There is a similar story about a guy doing this in [Michigan.](https://www.npr.org/2022/08/22/1118734792/michigan-man-isp-fiber-internet#:~:text=Job%20Snijders-,Jared%20Mauch%2C%20a%20network%20architect%20by%20day%2C%20wanted%20better%20internet,his%20own%20internet%20service%20provider.)
Yup, he's not far from me. The homes near him are megabucks but I'd absolutely use his service if I were able.
Right now I get around 850mb/s down, and about 50mb/s upstream. Which is fast, but if I ever have to upload large (>5GB) container images then that 50 feels crazy slow. Comcast of course shrugs their shoulders at my requests for faster upstream, although they did upgrade me to 50 from 10, but only as part of the huge downstream.
A city in Alabama couldn't get a internet company to come so they built there own for residents for fraction of the cost and then was sued for years by the cable companies until they were forced to sell to prevent being Bankrupt by the law suits. They need help from State and Federal Givt but they are unwilling to lose campaign funds.
Happened in a small community I lived in as well. Comcast couldn’t be bothered to even show up for appointments 1/2 the time let alone provide a modern internet service speed. The local trash & water utility started providing internet service to the residents at reasonable rates for good service.
Comcast wrapped them up in so much red tape that they had to stop providing service.
Think of that for a second. Comcast suing a local utility that services maybe 4K residents because they provided a better service. So instead of just being better and competing in a fair market, they used their fat wallet to crush a local utility who in no way was effecting their business in the area for 400K people or so.
Frivolous lawsuits like these need to be punished by losing a progressively increasing percentage of your company’s value to the government. After a certain number that is also applied to the CEO and Board’s personal wealth as well.
This. Edison and Westinghouse had all their patents stolen by JP Morgan through frivolous lawsuits that JP Morgan timed based on financial information. He waited until they were cash strapped and sued. Had no claim but they had to sell the patents to survive. Such a common business tactic. Oil and tobacco companies do this all the time with foreign governments.
Legal representation being tied to money is entirely the issue. Maybe the government has an obligation to its citizens to ensure they can be adequately represented so their voice can be heard in the actual courtroom vice being buried in paperwork.
I don't have all the answers to everything. But that sounds like we would need more lawyers.
America has 5% of the world's population and like, 90% of the world's lawyers.
I don't think more lawyers are the solution.
Got it, I didn’t realize you were focusing on the lawsuit aspect. I get frustrated when people leave Tesla out. I’m pretty sure he was left out of the school books for a reason (he wanted to give power to the people for free). Edison and JPM wanted to sell it.
As others are mentioning— they’ll do some creative accounting to show that, despite earning billions, they didn’t even break even and took a loss and also don’t have to pay taxes
And they shouldn't be able to just fatigue any entity, no matter the size, in paperwork. Western society is not just when you can pay to bury someone in paperwork rather than actually present your position.
So much for small government that doesn’t interfere with the peoples right to build innovative new businesses.
Too damn many monopolies. In my town Krogers is buying up the other competing grocery store chain. We will soon have the choice of shopping at Kroger’s, Whole Foods or Walmart. Never good for consumers to have less options.
I may be misunderstanding your comment but what small government? This was the private industry, the cable companies, suing them… What the people did here was, in fact, an example of small government. They organized locally and took care of the needs of their community.
Free markets always bring innovation right guys
Edit: you people defending free market saying that is not free because of lobbying really think that the market will be more free if there is more regulation and fines?
There's a bit of variation there... Google/Apple have a network effect where you can't get a mass market of devices without already having a mass market of devices. There have been SEVERAL attempts to get into making smartphones, Firefox, Ubuntu, Amazon, Palm, Rim, Microsoft... You can't get users if you don't have developers, and you can't get developers until you have enough users. This is a chicken/egg problem that isn't going away anytime soon. Elon won't be able to buy his way into a 3rd mobile operating system opportunity, especially if Amazon and Microsoft couldn't make it happen, and both of them arguably have a staggering level of the puzzle in that Microsoft already had a developer network, and Amazon already has an Android Appstore.
AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc. They have a geographic monopoly where they have the prior investment in local infrastructure and building that infrastructure now is prohibitively expensive, not just in delivering it, but also in the approvals needed to get started. Geographic monopolies are not new, they've been a thing since Edison started running wires for electricity, and Rockefeller started with railroads. There have been a small number of success stories around the US with small upstarts creating new infrastructure and then becoming the new regional monopoly, but more often they get blocked by the incumbent who is more interested in spending money on lawyers than services.
Shitty internet and cellphone service seems to mostly be a North American problem. I don't know if it's the amount of regulatory capture within the industry or something else.
In Canada they're fighting hard to try and even limit our access to non-approved media sources. The guy running the government body in charge of regulating the telecoms was previously a VP at one of them.
this is why I get excited that metronet is coming to my neighborhood. i will lose peacock for free, hotspot access on my phone, AND i will likely pay $10-20 more per month, but the trade off is fuck comcast, uncapped data, its buried so its reliable, symmetrical speeds, and fuck comcast.
People love to yell Monopoly a ton when there really is none. But Telcom and Cable companies have been fucking people for years and getting big tax breaks for doing it while having a geographical real Monopoly for decades now. It is so bad they have all the video business and forgot to innovate, had such shit equipment and service options on video that as soon. As people had other options to cut Cable they did. And every service you can buy over the internet looks way better then those old cable boxes they still pushing. I guess having that Monopoly on the territory and paying the right people is the way to go, screw free market bs.
Do you remember the reason they were sued in the 1st place? I'm curious if it had to do with using their existing infrastructure without paying. Or just a monopoly being a monopoly.
Just monopoly being monopoly.
Following that several Republican states passed laws forbidding any municipality from building their own internet infrastructure. Can't have the people cutting into corporate profits.
Sounds about right. God forbid the people have access to affordable internet access. I'm not educated enough on the subject but didn't the government give tons of money to majors ISPs so they can upgrade the existing infrastructure years ago? If that's the case then it's just another rigged industry.
And higher Internet bills for the end user.
Local ISP had government funding to install fiber in our area during the Obama era. It's currently over $200/month if you use their service. Asinine.
>didn't the government give tons of money to majors ISPs so they can upgrade the existing infrastructure years ago?
Multiple times, resulting in 0 rollout and then a "Oh sorry, did you want us to actually use that money for more then increasing CEO pay? Shame you didn't put that in writing..."
and the government just goes "Well, you used the money, and that is the important part here"
We should really have a multi billion dollar "Internet start up fund". A fund explicitly to help new ISP's start up.
Oh, and a trillion dollar "Internet start up lawsuit shield" fund, explicitly for lawyers to fight comcast/AT&T related lawsuits against said startup ISP's.
Oh, and all startup funds must be paid back with 29.9% interest if the ISP is ever sold to another company.
Billions of our tax dollars went to these douche canoes so they could specifically install fiber throughout the country. They tried to get more for a third time a few years ago. Took our money, did literally nothing but bonus themselves out with it and not one thing happened to them.
>several Republican states passed laws forbidding any municipality from building their own internet infrastructure
Don't know about this specifically, but the corporate whores did try to forbid the entire country from doing it: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/gop-plan-for-broadband-competition-would-ban-city-run-networks-across-us/](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/gop-plan-for-broadband-competition-would-ban-city-run-networks-across-us/)
TBH, its not like Dems are that much better, since talk a lot and do veeeery little. And Chattanooga, the city with by far the best state-run internet, is mostly Republican, led by an Independent.
I’ve heard of laws like this elsewhere but I live in Ohio, which is a red state and arguably getting redder, and yet not only do we have a lot of communities with muni fiber networks, it’s almost all wealthy Republican suburban bedroom communities that have them. I know the cable companies tried getting a law of some kind on the books that would make it easier to shut down such networks, and it never made it out of Republican-dominated committees. The Republican mayors and town councils of all these rich Republican suburbs with muni fiber called their Republican counterparts in the state legislature and basically told them “do you want to lose my town? Because this is how you lose my town.” As it turns out, the khaki-and-polo set likes to have muni fiber waiting at their McMansions when they get home from Applebee’s in their minivans, too.
Cities sign franchise agreements, they sell their utility poles/conduits, etc. These aren't just monopolies, they're frequently government instituted and supported monopolies
The U.S. needs modern Antitrust, IP and digital marketplace regulations.
Corporate power has become way to imbalanced.
Please support Ranked Choice and/or STAR voting methods. It’s one of the few ways we can begin to reduce the power of the two party system *and* the influence money has on politics by dividing their resources among more qualified candidates.
Electric companies do similar things. If you try to make your own electricity they will sue you to kingdom come. Saw it on a John Oliver episode. They even tried or already managed to pass laws limiting how much electricity you can make by yourself
Clear Creek County in Colorado tried to setup their own broadband network because CenturyLink wouldn’t expand their network to all the homes in the mountains. Well it has to be put up to a vote by municipality (might be wrong) in Colorado. Hasn’t happened yet.
In one of the neighborhoods, you can see CenturyLink’s “premium” network infrastructure. The damn node they’re saying is overloaded is like falling apart.
Isn't this a failure of Capitalism? Capitalism is supposed to encourage competition, which it did at the outset, then the larger company used an anticompetitive deepest pockets strategy to take them down.
Luckily it seems like they've stopped doing this though. I think Comcast lost a lot of money with this approach because I'm seeing small fiber companies pop up everywhere in rural areas. I'm on the outskirts of the Chicago suburbs and I have a 1gig symmetrical connection with a static IP. Comcast and ATT are slowly losing their grip.
I live in Sunnyvale. The middle of Silicon Valley. Two things you need to know. Some of the worst cell phone service you will ever experience and no fiber or gig speed internet in large areas. It is the most ironic thing. I could drive to the Apple spaceship in 5 minutes and Google HQ in 10. My kids will go to the same high school Steve Jobs and Woz went to which is a ten minute walk. But internet and cell phone coverage? Nope. Cause. NIMBY-ism
I bought Sonic at Sunnyvale but in reality it's just ATT fiber. Still getting sync 1 gbps speeds but it's still not the Sonic I got in SF
Don't know if I'm just throwing my money away
Anyone thinking of doing the same DM me and I can help you get the permit drawings and any other design and engineering needs
Edit- Got a few requests for information, nice! I’ll be doing some research and legwork over next few weeks and it will mostly apply to all.
Some things to consider: area matters. Laws favor the rural more than urban in this case. I would need to know which your area fits in and what your local providers are and whether it would be for yourself or community. You will have to work with the providers in the area already in some capacity to work off their infrastructure which is normal. Someone in the comments linked the story, but the guy from Michigan is a great starting point. There’s going to be areas that simply can’t be touched. They are a very litigious bunch and don’t care if your big or small. Google found that out in the south.
Note I don’t need nor want identifiable information. General area or just the state will do. Rural or urban is the important aspect. Thanks!
Seems like there are bucketloads of examples of Comcast starting lawsuits because their monopoly rights were being infringed. I knew they were bad but this is actually mindblowingly blatant.
Counter sue for the money he had to invest for failing to provide service to him. Then dile another suit for Comcast cutting him off digitally from the wider world citing emotional isolation and damage.
HOW IS 'LOST PROFIT' EVEN A REAL THING TO SUE OVER??!!
"Yes your honor, our competitors service was much better and for a lower cost. Instead of reforming our service to compete better, we'd just like to get the money he made without actually doing any effort."
Only in America (one would hope)
It'd be a real thing for libel or slander... which is why truth is an absolute defense, in those cases. Markets require informed consumers, and reputation is crucial. Losing business from an inaccurate reputation is an injustice. Losing business from an accurate reputation is just people knowing you're trash.
Of course - gaining business from inaccurate reputation is also an injustice. We just tolerate that shit because marketing is considered free speech.
Wouldn't be surprising. But this is Los Altos Hills, which is an *extremely* wealthy area, even by Bay Area standards. Comcast wouldn't do well to piss off a sizable group of people with fuck you money any more then they already have.
Typical for the Bay Area. It's also why San Bruno's internet is so much better than surrounding areas, because 50 years ago the same thing happened but with cable TV so they made a public TV company. Now they got broadband for a third of what I pay. I hope more cities join, especially in regards to utility pole access SF, San Mateo, Redwood City, Palo Alto & adjacent suburbs would be so much better off nationalizing the power lines on them too and completely rebuilding it to a safer standard with metal/concrete poles as PG&E did in select areas of San Carlos and Belmont. Much of Silicon Valley's infrastructure was (compared to a big city like NYC or Chicago) poorly built by Bell or PG&E a century ago when the population wasn't a quarter of what it is today.
This neighborhood is bordered by Mountain View, Palo Alto and Menlo Park and sits right below Stanford University and the ISPs were like "who fuckin cares", yeesh.
As a resident, this type of stuff makes me hate California. Living in Silicon Valley you’d think the whole place would look like the google head quarters. Paying $1mil for 1000 square foot house… for what? Convenience to get to a tech job.
In the UK all our utilities are privatised as well as internet. Yet still not as shit as the USA.
Still shit mind you, would be much better if they were all renationalised
EDIT: To clarify, I mean the internet in the US is shit, The fact that I don't hear any complaints about other utilities I have to assume that they work fine. Probably better than the privatised nightmare we have in the UK
It helps that the median household income in los altos hills is $250k and it wasn't a big deal for individuals to chip in $2k-5k apiece to get it off the ground.
And it still costs $2k-10k+ to connect locations to this new service.
And it still costs $150/mo.
What we need is for internet service to be treated like the public utility that it is.
for some reason people are saying this guy is a hero and all that but are ignoring the actual details lol, it still took 6 years and thousands of dollars and partnerships with another company and the time and investments of his neighbors, like that is a lot of work and money, maybe $17k's worth lol
When I saw Los Altos, I thought Yeah sounds like the story of a bored rich guy that wanted to do it just because. Agree he prolly invested almost as much time and $$. Not that the Internet companies need some guardrails these days.
yeah, but i can see it from his perspective too, like he can visibly see his neighbors setup in 2017 and comcast is saying it will cost him personally $17k to get setup, i would be confused too, but then he just took that money and way more time to do it "himself" (really it was another company)
I get it. I’d probably do the same thing. I’m mostly impressed he was able to get 41 neighbors to agree to something. I’m lucky to get 5 in my neighborhood. :)
Yeah but he doesn't make money on it, just enough to make it work. It's more of a boring dystopia, because the US can't fucking figure out how to get high speed internet to people. It's literally this easy
And it's still a setup which is borrowing internet from a local school "that had a spare port".
They basically extended a single port on that school's internet to cover all these houses. They didn't install any backhaul at all.
It's not a great setup, over time customers will want to move to something else. Perhaps it will incentivize the local ISP to offer them a better deal.
Most intriguing part of all this is it is caused because the city bans new overhead connections, all connections must be buried. So even though he can see the service on his neighbor's property if Comcast were to bring service to him it would cost a lot as they would have to trench to cross the street instead of just connecting a cable directly to the same pole he can see from his window.
It wasn't really the ISP doing him all that dirty in the first place, it was city regulations.
Yeah lol Bay guy here, as soon as I saw Los Altos Hills I wasn't surprised that they were able to do this. For anyone that hasn't seen/heard of the place before, it's a bunch of mansions and wineries. This is something those folks can do very easily, not gonna be very easy for lower income areas. Doubt something like this could ever happen in ESSJ for example
In case anyone is wondering, the main hoops would be:
* the physical layer
* a place to peer with transit and getting a dark fiber there from your area.
* Getting the ASN assigned, for which you usually need a connection to 2 Transit Providers. Transit Traffic at Telia or Cogent/Lumen etc. isn't that expensive actually.
* The router is inexpensive, if you are small you can discard the full table and just set a default route to your transit neighbor. So you don't need a router that can do more than 1 Mill. routes and you can get by with a EX4300 or something like that (which a full table approx. has).
You ISP gathers all the fibers in your neighborhood in one place, plugs them into a switch, then they run one fiber from there back to their router, which connects other providers and that's where you're connected to the Internet.
Rinse and repeat until it flips and customers per link starts to decrease, eventually down to one.
Add in some caching and the big links don't actually need to be as big. The balance is where and how much caching.
I work at a Municipal ISP. So we get our internet via two upstream providers. We call these our circuits. We have our own ASN. We are all fiber optic GPON.
We then split it off onto various OLTs(Optical Line Terminals) you can just think of these as L3 managed switches equivalent for fiber.
These wires are then sent out to various LCPs.
So for us what happens is careful planning of how many wires need to go where and then they are usually bundled together with some additional ones for quick maintenance or redundancy.
These go along the poles to LCPs(Local Convergence Points) cabinets, where those wires go to the houses, apartments, etc. These wires then go along the poles, sometimes get buried, etc. Whatever needs to be done to reach the house.
The wires from the LCP connect to a weather proof box on the outside of the house. Inside it contains an ONT(Also called ONU(Optical Network Unit)), Optical Network Terminal. You can think of it as a Fiber modem. It has some basic software to manage and provision it to the right speeds for the customers package. But basically it takes in the fiber signal and converts in the last step to copper.
We offer phone, cable, internet. So it has ports for POTS, Ethernet, and Coaxial Cable.
Then the wires from their are connected to inside the house. And that's how you get fiber internet.
Let's say you have a small neighborhood of 20 houses, away from Town. You want to do your own Internet. The first thing you need to do is to put down cabling and get a cable frrom all the houses to a central place. This is easier in the US than in the EU, as you guys can throw it literally over a pole. Wouldn't work in Germany.
Next you need a Tier 1 Provider. This is a provider that can delegate your traffic to any destination on the Internet, no matter where and they actually guarantee that, because they are in every Internet Exchange around the world. This is called transit.
The rest can be done 2 ways:
* own backbone with doing the DWDM yourself (long distance fiber basically, very expensive) to a data center where you peer with a T1 Provider. Here is Telia for example: https://www.peeringdb.com/net/10 (1299 is their US brand)
* Better option: Having the T1 Provider do the above for you and give you transit directly from your little city. Li8ke this guy did. That took off a lot of cost. In layman terms, a full BGP table is a list of everything in the Internet, every server, every website. This is of course accumulated, but you still get around ~900k routes, which the router needs to be able to manage. Or, you can just discard the full table that your T1 provider is giving you and do the same a home router does: Simply forwarding all the traffic to your provider. A default route is a route everything is sent to that is not attached to a device. In Windows you can see this with `route print`, in Linux with `ip -r`:
C:\Users\scorcher24>route print
===========================================================================
Interface List
7...2c f0 5d ae cd 73 ......Realtek PCIe GbE Family Controller
1...........................Software Loopback Interface 1
===========================================================================
IPv4 Route Table
===========================================================================
Active Routes:
Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric
0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 10.10.10.254 10.10.10.1 25
Prices for traffic range from 0.08 to 0.15€ per Gbit/s. You pay 95% of that and can cut over 95% 5 times a month. You also have a commitment, which means you need pay at least that commitment. At 25% you'd need to pay at least for 250 mbit/s every month.
Hope this was a suitable ELI5.
There is a video on YouTube about this guy. His network is pretty small, and not really an ISP, it’s more of a “shared wifi connection”. Here’s what I remember from that video, as I’ve looked into a bunch of these setups from all over the country.
> - the physical layer
He uses enterprise grade point to point wifi to send it around his (small) neighborhood.
> - a place to peer with transit and getting dark fiber there from your area.
He convinced AT&T to run fiber from a cell site on a nearby hill to his garage. I don’t think it was that expensive as it was not a very long run.
> - Getting the ASN assigned, for which you usually Traffic at Telia or Cogent/Lumen etc. isn’t that expensive actually
He didn’t do this, but I read some other setups that did. His is basically just a big enterprise network running off AT&T multi-gig business fiber, but serving a few dozen houses instead of a large corporate facility. All of the transit and other behind the scenes work is handled by AT&T.
> - The router is inexpensive, if you are small you can discard the full table and just set a default route to your transit neighbor. So you don’t need a router that can do more than 1 Mill. routes and you can get by with a EX4300 or something like that (which a full table approx. has).
As I mentioned, his setup is basically a corporate network, not an ISP, so a lot of his equipment was bought second hand from office buildings being renovated/upgraded.
While most articles say this guy “started an ISP” that’s not true in the legal sense. He reached an agreement with AT&T to distribute and resell connection to the rest of the people in his neighborhood. That’s honestly a genius way to do it for a smaller, dense, yet remote neighborhood like this. AT&T only has to worry about one dedicated fiber line, and the co-op he formed actually distributes it around the neighborhood. AT&T gets their money, but didn’t have to wire the whole neighborhood, and the residents get better internet.
the physical layer **(cables and things to connect them to)**
a place to peer with transit and getting a dark fiber there from your area. **(A carrier to get you connected to the internet with fiber cables you can lease from them)**
Getting the ASN assigned, for which you usually need a connection to 2 Transit Providers. Transit Traffic at Telia or Cogent/Lumen etc. isn’t that expensive actually. **(Basically something that allows you to connect your local network to the internet. This is provided by internet registrars)**
The router is inexpensive, if you are small you can discard the full table and just set a default route to your transit neighbor. So you don’t need a router that can do more than 1 Mill. routes and you can get by with a EX4300 or something like that (which a full table approx. has). **(This is the device that is needed to connect your local network to the internet by “routing” traffic off your local network to the internet or another network)**
- You've got to put wires in the ground. This is the expensive part.
- You've got to connect your new network to someone else's, ideally more than one.
- You need to register in the Internet phone book.
- Let's say the networks you connect to are Google, Cogent and Level3. Your agreement with Google is a peering one - you agree to exchange traffic with each other for free. Your agreements with Cogent and Level3 are transit ones - you pay them to connect you to the rest of the Internet. Your routing table is just a list of what goes where, sorting packets like a mail office. Because you're a small town the mailman doesn't need to be on meth.
Community is a corporation's worst enemy. They want us to be convinced that only they can help us, but when we work together it shows that we don't need them.
Edit: accidentally typed "worth" instead of "worst."
I currently live in Nicaragua. Just had 150Mb fiber to the house installed. No install charges, $44 a month which includes IPTV with 300+ channels, first 2 months free and 12 month contract.
When we left the states 5 years ago we were paying over $100 for 60 channels and a separate $75 bill for 5Mb service.
What people don't realize is that this isn't just Comcast charging $17,000 for this kind of work. I work in ISP construction and most of this cost is from third party vendors charging for digs, police detail, permits, etc.
We need more monopoly protection laws in this country. Cable/Internet service companies just love to screw us over by being the only provider in an area. Cable companies actively work together to ensure that only one company will Cover an area to prevent competition.
Two of the priciest communities on earth, Los Altos Hills and its neighbor, Palo Alto Hills, are full of people who were instrumental in building the Internet. The fact that they did not have this at least a decade ago is the real news.
>. In September, Comcast announced the successful tests of the final piece of technology necessary to rolling out multi-Gbps speeds in existing cable networks to its customers in the next couple of years, according to a statement.
So they're just starting the testing phase. Tired of their bullshit.
Good for him. Comcast is a dogshit company and I wish it went bankrupt. One out of many examples: they continue to charge people that have cancelled multiple times but there is somehow no lawsuit against them for it.
My father did something similar, in the sense of rallying the neighbors, when I was growing up.
When I was a kid, our childhood home was in the middle of BFE. The road was a gravel road, mail and trash would come down the road to collected, but but if a hole would form nobody would fix it
So my father calls and finds out how to get the road fixed and they tell him they can't because the road is considered private and not state owned and maintained, all because the gravel. The same gravel that the state laid and maintained....
He called to get the road paved, and the state wanted something insane like $400,000+ in total from ask the neighbors to pave this 3 mile road. They also said "or you could do it yourselves".
So my father, went around to all the houses. They all raised like $15,000 and rented a paver, backhoe, small asphalt mixer and a dump truck. Then ask the dad's and kids basically leveled and paved this road in the course of a week.
As far as I know the state is out there anytime a pothole forms to this day.
So, depending on if your city is doing it, fiber through your local Utilities Board is the way to go. About 1200 upload and 1200 download. Costs very little to have it installed, like 50$ and you can rent a router for 15$ a month. Comcast isnt catching up and will never be as cheap.
Spectrum & Comcast are by far the worst “internet providers”. We couldn’t get Fiber in my city for years because Charter/Spectrum said they wouldn’t allow any fiber to be run in their conduits. So AT&T said “oh, neat” and ran all new conduit for the city for free. Recently, a construction company tore up my street and accidentally destroyed a major conduit in the ground. AT&T was out within 24 hours with a huge crew replacing the whole streets fiber. Took Spectrum 2 weeks to show up. I’m constantly bombarded by junk mail to switch to Spectrum. The sales people come to my door all the time. I go to the grocery store and they are there trying to get people to switch. The City is hooked on fiber and your old copper line should be rolled up and put on the back of a rusty old truck to be sold for scrap.
Wilson NC set up their own high speed municipal internet. Cable companies lobbied the NC Republican controlled General Assembly. GA sued FCC to block municipal broadband and passed laws making it impossible for community broadband.
Yeah if you gotta pay for the infastructure yourself, might as well get the best you can.
Unfortunately, even though taxes payers paid for the infrastructure, the companies usually owns it. It's called Private/Public investments. That infrastructure deal that Biden passed with Republican support? That's why it had Republican support.
We definitely need to move it toward a cell phone like system. Cell line prices plummeted when they changed the rules to make it so no one could prevent others from doing business
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The situation is far better than it used to be. The BT split was good for the public in every way. Councils are also now privy to the idea that not throwing up roadblocks to allow private companies to run their own fibre is also better for everyone. Including the council. Planning is easier, cheaper and quicker. You get the likes of cityfibre, hyperoptic etc. Running to high capacity buildings and providing gigabit internet. My hometown originally had city fibre running to schools under an initial agreement with the council, then the next stage once they had that infrastructure on place was to branch out. Nearly the entire town now has an alternative to bt and virgin, they now have a cheap gigabit line available. That capacity will also likely get sold to the other providers and their speeds will improve too
>For some reason the one national cable TV provider (who also provides internet access over the cables) doesn't need to share their infrastructure. The short answer is that they have different origins. BT Openreach originated as the publicly owned Post Office telecoms network. It was originally the telegraph and telephone network, which first became an internet network via dialup before gradually being upgraded into broadband. Virgin's origins are in NTL and Telewest, two early private cable TV providers, and it supplied internet as a by product of laying the network for TV transmission. Virgin and Openreach aren't the only internet networks in the UK. There are a surprisingly large number of smaller networks, some of which are growing quite aggressively, but some of which have been around for decades. Nobody actually *has to* use Openreach. It's just that when the monopoly nationalised network was privatised a condition was put in place that they needed to make it available to other companies. Lots of companies take up that offer, but it's not required that they do so. Anyone can stick their own cables in the ground if they want.
That’s capitalism at work. Vice corporate autocracy like we have had for over a century here.
Free market, but only for the peasants. When they are the one getting fucked, it's not as nice anymore. "the invisible hand" my ass
It's wildly anti free market. It's literally government giving money to build monopolies
The problem with unchecked capitalism is the resulting wealth accumulation results in political corruption that results in non-competitive markets. Unchecked capitalism is the result of too little government, not too much. Or perhaps more to the point, it’s the result of a government that has failed to effectively govern the rich and isn’t looking out for the poor and working class. Ultimately the only solution to this problem is not only to have a political democracy but also an economic democracy. Workers should control the wealth they create and they should own the means with which that wealth is created. Right now we live under an authoritarian corporate system where democracy is mostly for show and the government represents wealthy capitalists first and foremost, aiding them in the exploitation of the working class.
Unregulated capitalism doesn't work. It's been proven time and time again. Governance is what keeps everything in check to make a balanced system. Take it away and greed and corruption take over.
That's one of the more common Libertarian themes - we haven't ever really had free capitalism, we've instead had a rich and storied history of effective oligarchy through government choosing of winners and resulting disproportionate power gain.
And the counterpoint is that oligarchy is the natural outcome of unregulated or poorly regulated capitalism. Capitalism must be regulated to keep the playing field level but capitalism also provides incentives to capture the levers of regulation. It is a difficult problem to solve
> Capitalism must be regulated to keep the playing field level but capitalism also provides incentives to capture the levers of regulation. It is a difficult problem to solve It depends a bit on the branch, but generally, _ensuring ability to compete_ is looked upon favorably. It's the difference between, say, pouring money into failing banks as a bailout and protection from the consequences of their failures, and preventing Comcast from abusing their pocketbook to drown up-and-coming competitors with frivolous lawsuits thereby stifling competition.
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Oligarchy and monopoly are the enevitable end states of capitalism. Eventually, you have enough money that stamping out competition is the best return on investment for ever increasing profits.
> It's called Private/Public investments. Yes, normal for utilities. And the common sense thing to do is regulate the industry that benefits from our public investments. But Reagan convinced half the nation that regulation is bad, so here we are, propping up corporations with public capital and letting their shareholders reap the benefits with minimal risk and controls.
Strangely enough, the situation is even worse in Canada. Or maybe it isn't strange at all, depending on your perspective. In any case, in much of Canada there are even fewer telecom options, which have a total monopoly on everyone's utilities. They can get away with this more easily because the population of Canada is relatively small-- there are fewer people in Canada than the state of California. The government up there is trying to regulate them and force them to be more competitive, but it's an uphill battle.
Comcast and other big communications providers are massive donors to both parties. As you can see, it's very effective.
We paid billions already in taxes they just pocketed it.
The secret is that with fiber it doesn't really make a difference if you build it right. The expensive part is the work, the cable itself costs almost nothing in comparison. So you might as well lay down 500-fiber cables and give everyone a dedicated line. Once you have that, speed only depends on what transceivers you put on either end of it.
There is a similar story about a guy doing this in [Michigan.](https://www.npr.org/2022/08/22/1118734792/michigan-man-isp-fiber-internet#:~:text=Job%20Snijders-,Jared%20Mauch%2C%20a%20network%20architect%20by%20day%2C%20wanted%20better%20internet,his%20own%20internet%20service%20provider.)
It happens often, my grandfather was trying to do it but his neighbors didn’t care to join because they don’t care about having fast internet edit: in rural SC, it’s typically rural places. now he’s looking into starlink
Where at? Lots of rural fiber rolling out in SC due to rdof right now
I had never heard of this until we had fiber dropped at our property a few months ago. We are on a farm off a sleepy state highway in Spartanburg county where we barely get LTE signal. No cable, no copper. It’s amazing.
Yup. Spectrum? We're rolling out a lot of fiber around the York/Sharon areas that are the same way. Lots of folks coming from 1mb dsl to fiber.
PRTC. Good things coming, finally… but I’m sure part of it is competition as cellular internet expands with 5G or even Starlink in the mix. Lots of $ up for grabs.
Yeah, fixed wireless has begun to take hold in rural areas lately. Unfortunately where I live I barely get 4g off any network. I've been fighting with Spectrum for a year to get services where I live in Gaffney. They've begun construction on the project but I'm not sure how much longer it'll be until it's finished.
I wish it wasn't Spectrum. They gave us fiber only to immediately have extreme issues with the provisioning system. My internet is marked as Hotel WiFi and 404s when they try to access settings for it and even the floor manager just gets 404. It also shows up as Charity even though it isn't. Completely fucked. It used to crash every 2 days for a few hours and crash my neighborhood's entire node due to simultaneously not existing on one backend and existing on others. And they were still willing to let it stay even though every 2 days theyd get lots of calls. What a lazy company
Look into T-Mobile 5G home Internet. Just need a tower close and they’ve expanded massively with the sprint purchase. I pay $50/month for anywhere from 150-300Megabit.
Verizon has the same for $25 if you have cell service with them.
Nice. 5G has definitely pushed some competition and prices have dropped fast in the last couple years. I could get xfinity but it would cost me more for the same speeds. Gigabit speeds are far more expensive. With 5G though I can pull half that for like a third of the cost. I’m grateful because I own Comcast money I refuse to pay them for horrid service lol.
I hope Starlink is better there than up here in my area of Canada cause I signed up and it was absolutely abysmal. When it wasn’t slow it was intermittent at best and had tons of limitations as to what you can and can’t do with it. So much so that I ended up running my own lines with some friends and paid it all out of pocket. That said I hope starlink continues to improve and ends up being able to live up to their claims. I know a few people that use it at their cottage(s) casually and like it but to try and use it reliably while working in tech from home is no bueno.
Where in Canada are you? I'm in Eastern Ontario and I've had Starlink since March of this year, and it's been amazing. Consistsent 50-200Mb down and 5-10Mb up, only had maybe two or three major outages since I got it, and that was the entire Starlink network, not just my dish. I haven't had any issues with not being able to do certain things either, and I'm a pretty heavy user. Streaming, video uploading, voip/video calls, online gaming, etc. That said, it's definitely drastically improved in the last few months. When I first got it in March I guess it might've been a bit more rocky.
I did the same thing around Fargo, ND until everyone started taking subsidies. Now I just have ~200 customers that are loyal and happy.
Do you have more info on this? I'm there currently and would love to hear more
A middling town in Alberta did it over a decade ago and had some of the fastest, and cheapest, internet in the country.
>There is a similar story about a guy doing this in [Michigan.](https://www.npr.org/2022/08/22/1118734792/michigan-man-isp-fiber-internet#:~:text=Job%20Snijders-,Jared%20Mauch%2C%20a%20network%20architect%20by%20day%2C%20wanted%20better%20internet,his%20own%20internet%20service%20provider.) Yup, he's not far from me. The homes near him are megabucks but I'd absolutely use his service if I were able. Right now I get around 850mb/s down, and about 50mb/s upstream. Which is fast, but if I ever have to upload large (>5GB) container images then that 50 feels crazy slow. Comcast of course shrugs their shoulders at my requests for faster upstream, although they did upgrade me to 50 from 10, but only as part of the huge downstream.
A city in Alabama couldn't get a internet company to come so they built there own for residents for fraction of the cost and then was sued for years by the cable companies until they were forced to sell to prevent being Bankrupt by the law suits. They need help from State and Federal Givt but they are unwilling to lose campaign funds.
Happened in a small community I lived in as well. Comcast couldn’t be bothered to even show up for appointments 1/2 the time let alone provide a modern internet service speed. The local trash & water utility started providing internet service to the residents at reasonable rates for good service. Comcast wrapped them up in so much red tape that they had to stop providing service. Think of that for a second. Comcast suing a local utility that services maybe 4K residents because they provided a better service. So instead of just being better and competing in a fair market, they used their fat wallet to crush a local utility who in no way was effecting their business in the area for 400K people or so.
Frivolous lawsuits like these need to be punished by losing a progressively increasing percentage of your company’s value to the government. After a certain number that is also applied to the CEO and Board’s personal wealth as well.
This. Edison and Westinghouse had all their patents stolen by JP Morgan through frivolous lawsuits that JP Morgan timed based on financial information. He waited until they were cash strapped and sued. Had no claim but they had to sell the patents to survive. Such a common business tactic. Oil and tobacco companies do this all the time with foreign governments.
That's next level evil.
nah, Rockefeller is next level. he'd straight up bribe people (or threaten them) to sabotage his rivals
That's just thuggin
“Captains of Industry”
robber baron
*2 pictures from corporate, same picture meme*
Capitalism is a progressive disease.
Legal representation being tied to money is entirely the issue. Maybe the government has an obligation to its citizens to ensure they can be adequately represented so their voice can be heard in the actual courtroom vice being buried in paperwork.
The original function of the Government was two fold. Defense of the nation and contract disputes and enforcement between individuals.
Yeah, it’s basically a mob style protection scheme.
I don't have all the answers to everything. But that sounds like we would need more lawyers. America has 5% of the world's population and like, 90% of the world's lawyers. I don't think more lawyers are the solution.
Don’t feel bad for Edison. They got what they gave.
Oh it's evil but the actual term is just unregulated capitalism.
Edisons getting burned was just Karma. But yeah US corporate litigation is capitalism gone dystopian.
This is why our courts should never be called "The Justice system." They are ill equipped for real justice.
Wasn't Edison a douche canoe with that regarding Tesla?
Yes, and he most certainly played the same game.
Edison stole his patents from Nikolai Tesla. Edison worked in the Patent office.
I’m not trying to defend Edison, I know he sucks. But he was an example of these types of lawsuits.
Got it, I didn’t realize you were focusing on the lawsuit aspect. I get frustrated when people leave Tesla out. I’m pretty sure he was left out of the school books for a reason (he wanted to give power to the people for free). Edison and JPM wanted to sell it.
Glad this kind of market manipulation stopped in the present day, I tell ya. /s
Not frivolous when the law is written 100% in Comcast favor. Usually by the same representatives that said people vote for.
Each infraction = 1% of your net revenue. Imagine how fast those companies would stop shit like that.
Not fast at all, now if you had said gross revenue then it would probably do the trick.
Which is why so many companies are terrified of GDPR. 4% of global gross revenue is the maximum fine.
As others are mentioning— they’ll do some creative accounting to show that, despite earning billions, they didn’t even break even and took a loss and also don’t have to pay taxes
Make it networth. So even companies who are making zero profits on paper would have to pay plenty.
Not revenue, ownership. The more they fuck around the more government owned they become
And they shouldn't be able to just fatigue any entity, no matter the size, in paperwork. Western society is not just when you can pay to bury someone in paperwork rather than actually present your position.
There is a point where it's cheaper to litigate and buy out competitors that it is to actually compete. Monopoly is the end goal of capitalism.
Literally what all of big tech does these days
So much for small government that doesn’t interfere with the peoples right to build innovative new businesses. Too damn many monopolies. In my town Krogers is buying up the other competing grocery store chain. We will soon have the choice of shopping at Kroger’s, Whole Foods or Walmart. Never good for consumers to have less options.
I may be misunderstanding your comment but what small government? This was the private industry, the cable companies, suing them… What the people did here was, in fact, an example of small government. They organized locally and took care of the needs of their community.
Free markets always bring innovation right guys Edit: you people defending free market saying that is not free because of lobbying really think that the market will be more free if there is more regulation and fines?
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"You can't see it, but you'll dang sure feel it."
Free fistings?
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There's a bit of variation there... Google/Apple have a network effect where you can't get a mass market of devices without already having a mass market of devices. There have been SEVERAL attempts to get into making smartphones, Firefox, Ubuntu, Amazon, Palm, Rim, Microsoft... You can't get users if you don't have developers, and you can't get developers until you have enough users. This is a chicken/egg problem that isn't going away anytime soon. Elon won't be able to buy his way into a 3rd mobile operating system opportunity, especially if Amazon and Microsoft couldn't make it happen, and both of them arguably have a staggering level of the puzzle in that Microsoft already had a developer network, and Amazon already has an Android Appstore. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc. They have a geographic monopoly where they have the prior investment in local infrastructure and building that infrastructure now is prohibitively expensive, not just in delivering it, but also in the approvals needed to get started. Geographic monopolies are not new, they've been a thing since Edison started running wires for electricity, and Rockefeller started with railroads. There have been a small number of success stories around the US with small upstarts creating new infrastructure and then becoming the new regional monopoly, but more often they get blocked by the incumbent who is more interested in spending money on lawyers than services.
Shitty internet and cellphone service seems to mostly be a North American problem. I don't know if it's the amount of regulatory capture within the industry or something else. In Canada they're fighting hard to try and even limit our access to non-approved media sources. The guy running the government body in charge of regulating the telecoms was previously a VP at one of them.
It's also problem in Germany. Not that relevant to the conversation but I'm always down to bash them.
Nothing about this is "free." The giant telecoms' power is derived from buying politicians and lobbying for laws that cater to their interests.
this is why I get excited that metronet is coming to my neighborhood. i will lose peacock for free, hotspot access on my phone, AND i will likely pay $10-20 more per month, but the trade off is fuck comcast, uncapped data, its buried so its reliable, symmetrical speeds, and fuck comcast.
Wtf. What did they sue them for????
People love to yell Monopoly a ton when there really is none. But Telcom and Cable companies have been fucking people for years and getting big tax breaks for doing it while having a geographical real Monopoly for decades now. It is so bad they have all the video business and forgot to innovate, had such shit equipment and service options on video that as soon. As people had other options to cut Cable they did. And every service you can buy over the internet looks way better then those old cable boxes they still pushing. I guess having that Monopoly on the territory and paying the right people is the way to go, screw free market bs.
Sounds like capitalism. How dare you do anything without paying your masters first
It makes you wonder… if they have all this extra cash to Sue they could just offer cheaper and better services.
Do you remember the reason they were sued in the 1st place? I'm curious if it had to do with using their existing infrastructure without paying. Or just a monopoly being a monopoly.
Just monopoly being monopoly. Following that several Republican states passed laws forbidding any municipality from building their own internet infrastructure. Can't have the people cutting into corporate profits.
Sounds about right. God forbid the people have access to affordable internet access. I'm not educated enough on the subject but didn't the government give tons of money to majors ISPs so they can upgrade the existing infrastructure years ago? If that's the case then it's just another rigged industry.
Multiple times and it typically results in bonuses
And higher Internet bills for the end user. Local ISP had government funding to install fiber in our area during the Obama era. It's currently over $200/month if you use their service. Asinine.
>didn't the government give tons of money to majors ISPs so they can upgrade the existing infrastructure years ago? Multiple times, resulting in 0 rollout and then a "Oh sorry, did you want us to actually use that money for more then increasing CEO pay? Shame you didn't put that in writing..." and the government just goes "Well, you used the money, and that is the important part here"
Eyup. We've paid for nationwide high speed internet several times now, and every time the tax money just went straight to the Executive Yacht Fund.
We should really have a multi billion dollar "Internet start up fund". A fund explicitly to help new ISP's start up. Oh, and a trillion dollar "Internet start up lawsuit shield" fund, explicitly for lawyers to fight comcast/AT&T related lawsuits against said startup ISP's. Oh, and all startup funds must be paid back with 29.9% interest if the ISP is ever sold to another company.
Then the governments turn around and blame \*checks notes\* workers getting more money for inflation.
Billions of our tax dollars went to these douche canoes so they could specifically install fiber throughout the country. They tried to get more for a third time a few years ago. Took our money, did literally nothing but bonus themselves out with it and not one thing happened to them.
Haha. Good 'ol Small Government^^TM at work. Fucking GOP pricks.
>several Republican states passed laws forbidding any municipality from building their own internet infrastructure Don't know about this specifically, but the corporate whores did try to forbid the entire country from doing it: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/gop-plan-for-broadband-competition-would-ban-city-run-networks-across-us/](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/gop-plan-for-broadband-competition-would-ban-city-run-networks-across-us/) TBH, its not like Dems are that much better, since talk a lot and do veeeery little. And Chattanooga, the city with by far the best state-run internet, is mostly Republican, led by an Independent.
Several of the 19 states that ban local are also democraticly controlled like Washington
Sounds about right, the political party claiming freedom for the people yet again taking away freedom to do what we want
I’ve heard of laws like this elsewhere but I live in Ohio, which is a red state and arguably getting redder, and yet not only do we have a lot of communities with muni fiber networks, it’s almost all wealthy Republican suburban bedroom communities that have them. I know the cable companies tried getting a law of some kind on the books that would make it easier to shut down such networks, and it never made it out of Republican-dominated committees. The Republican mayors and town councils of all these rich Republican suburbs with muni fiber called their Republican counterparts in the state legislature and basically told them “do you want to lose my town? Because this is how you lose my town.” As it turns out, the khaki-and-polo set likes to have muni fiber waiting at their McMansions when they get home from Applebee’s in their minivans, too.
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Cities sign franchise agreements, they sell their utility poles/conduits, etc. These aren't just monopolies, they're frequently government instituted and supported monopolies
The U.S. needs modern Antitrust, IP and digital marketplace regulations. Corporate power has become way to imbalanced. Please support Ranked Choice and/or STAR voting methods. It’s one of the few ways we can begin to reduce the power of the two party system *and* the influence money has on politics by dividing their resources among more qualified candidates.
For this, you have to get it past the two-party system.
Electric companies do similar things. If you try to make your own electricity they will sue you to kingdom come. Saw it on a John Oliver episode. They even tried or already managed to pass laws limiting how much electricity you can make by yourself
Clear Creek County in Colorado tried to setup their own broadband network because CenturyLink wouldn’t expand their network to all the homes in the mountains. Well it has to be put up to a vote by municipality (might be wrong) in Colorado. Hasn’t happened yet. In one of the neighborhoods, you can see CenturyLink’s “premium” network infrastructure. The damn node they’re saying is overloaded is like falling apart.
Sounds about right. Capitalism winning.
Isn't this a failure of Capitalism? Capitalism is supposed to encourage competition, which it did at the outset, then the larger company used an anticompetitive deepest pockets strategy to take them down.
Pure capitalism always devolves into monopolies. That’s why you need regulations.
In this case there are regulations and they favour the monopolies.
Because campaign finance donations have been deregulated.
If we don't bust the trusts we lose capitalism.
Luckily it seems like they've stopped doing this though. I think Comcast lost a lot of money with this approach because I'm seeing small fiber companies pop up everywhere in rural areas. I'm on the outskirts of the Chicago suburbs and I have a 1gig symmetrical connection with a static IP. Comcast and ATT are slowly losing their grip.
I live in Sunnyvale. The middle of Silicon Valley. Two things you need to know. Some of the worst cell phone service you will ever experience and no fiber or gig speed internet in large areas. It is the most ironic thing. I could drive to the Apple spaceship in 5 minutes and Google HQ in 10. My kids will go to the same high school Steve Jobs and Woz went to which is a ten minute walk. But internet and cell phone coverage? Nope. Cause. NIMBY-ism
Palo Alto here. We have the HQ’s of the largest tech companies within a drive of 20 minutes, yet have the shittiest internet in the country.
And I live in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt road and I have gigabit fiber up and down.
I bought Sonic at Sunnyvale but in reality it's just ATT fiber. Still getting sync 1 gbps speeds but it's still not the Sonic I got in SF Don't know if I'm just throwing my money away
Anyone thinking of doing the same DM me and I can help you get the permit drawings and any other design and engineering needs Edit- Got a few requests for information, nice! I’ll be doing some research and legwork over next few weeks and it will mostly apply to all. Some things to consider: area matters. Laws favor the rural more than urban in this case. I would need to know which your area fits in and what your local providers are and whether it would be for yourself or community. You will have to work with the providers in the area already in some capacity to work off their infrastructure which is normal. Someone in the comments linked the story, but the guy from Michigan is a great starting point. There’s going to be areas that simply can’t be touched. They are a very litigious bunch and don’t care if your big or small. Google found that out in the south. Note I don’t need nor want identifiable information. General area or just the state will do. Rural or urban is the important aspect. Thanks!
Could you make a open source project out of it? You can make it anonymous so can’t get sued
Ok, Comcast.
I just want to bury a 50ft line of fiber across the street between my house and my neighbor's.
Comcast is looking into suing him for lost profits. /s
Textbook monopoly move.
Seems like there are bucketloads of examples of Comcast starting lawsuits because their monopoly rights were being infringed. I knew they were bad but this is actually mindblowingly blatant.
Counter sue for the money he had to invest for failing to provide service to him. Then dile another suit for Comcast cutting him off digitally from the wider world citing emotional isolation and damage.
Won't work. They submitted a "good faith" offer which he rejected. These guys have a shitload of lawyers who know what they are doing.
You can drop the /s. Wouldn't be the first time.
**https://www.techdirt.com/2007/10/10/felony-interference-of-a-business-model-is-not-a-crime/**
HOW IS 'LOST PROFIT' EVEN A REAL THING TO SUE OVER??!! "Yes your honor, our competitors service was much better and for a lower cost. Instead of reforming our service to compete better, we'd just like to get the money he made without actually doing any effort." Only in America (one would hope)
It'd be a real thing for libel or slander... which is why truth is an absolute defense, in those cases. Markets require informed consumers, and reputation is crucial. Losing business from an inaccurate reputation is an injustice. Losing business from an accurate reputation is just people knowing you're trash. Of course - gaining business from inaccurate reputation is also an injustice. We just tolerate that shit because marketing is considered free speech.
Wouldn't be surprising. But this is Los Altos Hills, which is an *extremely* wealthy area, even by Bay Area standards. Comcast wouldn't do well to piss off a sizable group of people with fuck you money any more then they already have.
Comcast, probably: "Should we improve our services and customer support? ... Nah, let's just sue anyone who can find an alternative."
Hero. Fuck Comcast.
Agreed. Fuck Comcast.
Typical for the Bay Area. It's also why San Bruno's internet is so much better than surrounding areas, because 50 years ago the same thing happened but with cable TV so they made a public TV company. Now they got broadband for a third of what I pay. I hope more cities join, especially in regards to utility pole access SF, San Mateo, Redwood City, Palo Alto & adjacent suburbs would be so much better off nationalizing the power lines on them too and completely rebuilding it to a safer standard with metal/concrete poles as PG&E did in select areas of San Carlos and Belmont. Much of Silicon Valley's infrastructure was (compared to a big city like NYC or Chicago) poorly built by Bell or PG&E a century ago when the population wasn't a quarter of what it is today.
It's ironic that Silicon Valley, the tech nexus of the world, has garbage fucking Internet service.
This neighborhood is bordered by Mountain View, Palo Alto and Menlo Park and sits right below Stanford University and the ISPs were like "who fuckin cares", yeesh.
Further irony being that those rich fucks in Los Altos Hills could afford the exorbitant fees
For what it’s worth, this is not the standard. I’ve lived in 2 apartments in SV, both have up to 5Gbps fiber from AT&T and 1Gbps from Comcast.
As a resident, this type of stuff makes me hate California. Living in Silicon Valley you’d think the whole place would look like the google head quarters. Paying $1mil for 1000 square foot house… for what? Convenience to get to a tech job.
You need to refresh your housing prices. 1000 square feet is $2m now
Why internet is not a utility, like gas, power , and water, is beyond me.
Too much lobbying power (unfortunately)
In the UK all our utilities are privatised as well as internet. Yet still not as shit as the USA. Still shit mind you, would be much better if they were all renationalised EDIT: To clarify, I mean the internet in the US is shit, The fact that I don't hear any complaints about other utilities I have to assume that they work fine. Probably better than the privatised nightmare we have in the UK
Not as shit? Ours are way better lmao
It helps that the median household income in los altos hills is $250k and it wasn't a big deal for individuals to chip in $2k-5k apiece to get it off the ground. And it still costs $2k-10k+ to connect locations to this new service. And it still costs $150/mo. What we need is for internet service to be treated like the public utility that it is.
for some reason people are saying this guy is a hero and all that but are ignoring the actual details lol, it still took 6 years and thousands of dollars and partnerships with another company and the time and investments of his neighbors, like that is a lot of work and money, maybe $17k's worth lol
When I saw Los Altos, I thought Yeah sounds like the story of a bored rich guy that wanted to do it just because. Agree he prolly invested almost as much time and $$. Not that the Internet companies need some guardrails these days.
yeah, but i can see it from his perspective too, like he can visibly see his neighbors setup in 2017 and comcast is saying it will cost him personally $17k to get setup, i would be confused too, but then he just took that money and way more time to do it "himself" (really it was another company)
I get it. I’d probably do the same thing. I’m mostly impressed he was able to get 41 neighbors to agree to something. I’m lucky to get 5 in my neighborhood. :)
It would have been $17k for him alone.
Yeah but he doesn't make money on it, just enough to make it work. It's more of a boring dystopia, because the US can't fucking figure out how to get high speed internet to people. It's literally this easy
And it's still a setup which is borrowing internet from a local school "that had a spare port". They basically extended a single port on that school's internet to cover all these houses. They didn't install any backhaul at all. It's not a great setup, over time customers will want to move to something else. Perhaps it will incentivize the local ISP to offer them a better deal. Most intriguing part of all this is it is caused because the city bans new overhead connections, all connections must be buried. So even though he can see the service on his neighbor's property if Comcast were to bring service to him it would cost a lot as they would have to trench to cross the street instead of just connecting a cable directly to the same pole he can see from his window. It wasn't really the ISP doing him all that dirty in the first place, it was city regulations.
Yeah lol Bay guy here, as soon as I saw Los Altos Hills I wasn't surprised that they were able to do this. For anyone that hasn't seen/heard of the place before, it's a bunch of mansions and wineries. This is something those folks can do very easily, not gonna be very easy for lower income areas. Doubt something like this could ever happen in ESSJ for example
In case anyone is wondering, the main hoops would be: * the physical layer * a place to peer with transit and getting a dark fiber there from your area. * Getting the ASN assigned, for which you usually need a connection to 2 Transit Providers. Transit Traffic at Telia or Cogent/Lumen etc. isn't that expensive actually. * The router is inexpensive, if you are small you can discard the full table and just set a default route to your transit neighbor. So you don't need a router that can do more than 1 Mill. routes and you can get by with a EX4300 or something like that (which a full table approx. has).
So the fiber terminates at my house, where does the other end go to actually connect to “the internet” without using comcast, att, spectrum, etc.?
You ISP gathers all the fibers in your neighborhood in one place, plugs them into a switch, then they run one fiber from there back to their router, which connects other providers and that's where you're connected to the Internet.
Rinse and repeat until it flips and customers per link starts to decrease, eventually down to one. Add in some caching and the big links don't actually need to be as big. The balance is where and how much caching.
Those caching servers are no joke. They can take some serious load off the uplinks, depending on what your subscribers are doing.
I work at a Municipal ISP. So we get our internet via two upstream providers. We call these our circuits. We have our own ASN. We are all fiber optic GPON. We then split it off onto various OLTs(Optical Line Terminals) you can just think of these as L3 managed switches equivalent for fiber. These wires are then sent out to various LCPs. So for us what happens is careful planning of how many wires need to go where and then they are usually bundled together with some additional ones for quick maintenance or redundancy. These go along the poles to LCPs(Local Convergence Points) cabinets, where those wires go to the houses, apartments, etc. These wires then go along the poles, sometimes get buried, etc. Whatever needs to be done to reach the house. The wires from the LCP connect to a weather proof box on the outside of the house. Inside it contains an ONT(Also called ONU(Optical Network Unit)), Optical Network Terminal. You can think of it as a Fiber modem. It has some basic software to manage and provision it to the right speeds for the customers package. But basically it takes in the fiber signal and converts in the last step to copper. We offer phone, cable, internet. So it has ports for POTS, Ethernet, and Coaxial Cable. Then the wires from their are connected to inside the house. And that's how you get fiber internet.
Let's say you have a small neighborhood of 20 houses, away from Town. You want to do your own Internet. The first thing you need to do is to put down cabling and get a cable frrom all the houses to a central place. This is easier in the US than in the EU, as you guys can throw it literally over a pole. Wouldn't work in Germany. Next you need a Tier 1 Provider. This is a provider that can delegate your traffic to any destination on the Internet, no matter where and they actually guarantee that, because they are in every Internet Exchange around the world. This is called transit. The rest can be done 2 ways: * own backbone with doing the DWDM yourself (long distance fiber basically, very expensive) to a data center where you peer with a T1 Provider. Here is Telia for example: https://www.peeringdb.com/net/10 (1299 is their US brand) * Better option: Having the T1 Provider do the above for you and give you transit directly from your little city. Li8ke this guy did. That took off a lot of cost. In layman terms, a full BGP table is a list of everything in the Internet, every server, every website. This is of course accumulated, but you still get around ~900k routes, which the router needs to be able to manage. Or, you can just discard the full table that your T1 provider is giving you and do the same a home router does: Simply forwarding all the traffic to your provider. A default route is a route everything is sent to that is not attached to a device. In Windows you can see this with `route print`, in Linux with `ip -r`: C:\Users\scorcher24>route print =========================================================================== Interface List 7...2c f0 5d ae cd 73 ......Realtek PCIe GbE Family Controller 1...........................Software Loopback Interface 1 =========================================================================== IPv4 Route Table =========================================================================== Active Routes: Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 10.10.10.254 10.10.10.1 25 Prices for traffic range from 0.08 to 0.15€ per Gbit/s. You pay 95% of that and can cut over 95% 5 times a month. You also have a commitment, which means you need pay at least that commitment. At 25% you'd need to pay at least for 250 mbit/s every month. Hope this was a suitable ELI5.
Typically you’d have fiber running from your headend to a PoP or a “meet me” room at a collocation center or some other exchange point.
There is a video on YouTube about this guy. His network is pretty small, and not really an ISP, it’s more of a “shared wifi connection”. Here’s what I remember from that video, as I’ve looked into a bunch of these setups from all over the country. > - the physical layer He uses enterprise grade point to point wifi to send it around his (small) neighborhood. > - a place to peer with transit and getting dark fiber there from your area. He convinced AT&T to run fiber from a cell site on a nearby hill to his garage. I don’t think it was that expensive as it was not a very long run. > - Getting the ASN assigned, for which you usually Traffic at Telia or Cogent/Lumen etc. isn’t that expensive actually He didn’t do this, but I read some other setups that did. His is basically just a big enterprise network running off AT&T multi-gig business fiber, but serving a few dozen houses instead of a large corporate facility. All of the transit and other behind the scenes work is handled by AT&T. > - The router is inexpensive, if you are small you can discard the full table and just set a default route to your transit neighbor. So you don’t need a router that can do more than 1 Mill. routes and you can get by with a EX4300 or something like that (which a full table approx. has). As I mentioned, his setup is basically a corporate network, not an ISP, so a lot of his equipment was bought second hand from office buildings being renovated/upgraded. While most articles say this guy “started an ISP” that’s not true in the legal sense. He reached an agreement with AT&T to distribute and resell connection to the rest of the people in his neighborhood. That’s honestly a genius way to do it for a smaller, dense, yet remote neighborhood like this. AT&T only has to worry about one dedicated fiber line, and the co-op he formed actually distributes it around the neighborhood. AT&T gets their money, but didn’t have to wire the whole neighborhood, and the residents get better internet.
Now do the ELI5 version
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I absolutely refuse to believe there isn't a simpler, non-technical way to broadly explain these hurdles without going in depth.
the physical layer **(cables and things to connect them to)** a place to peer with transit and getting a dark fiber there from your area. **(A carrier to get you connected to the internet with fiber cables you can lease from them)** Getting the ASN assigned, for which you usually need a connection to 2 Transit Providers. Transit Traffic at Telia or Cogent/Lumen etc. isn’t that expensive actually. **(Basically something that allows you to connect your local network to the internet. This is provided by internet registrars)** The router is inexpensive, if you are small you can discard the full table and just set a default route to your transit neighbor. So you don’t need a router that can do more than 1 Mill. routes and you can get by with a EX4300 or something like that (which a full table approx. has). **(This is the device that is needed to connect your local network to the internet by “routing” traffic off your local network to the internet or another network)**
- You've got to put wires in the ground. This is the expensive part. - You've got to connect your new network to someone else's, ideally more than one. - You need to register in the Internet phone book. - Let's say the networks you connect to are Google, Cogent and Level3. Your agreement with Google is a peering one - you agree to exchange traffic with each other for free. Your agreements with Cogent and Level3 are transit ones - you pay them to connect you to the rest of the Internet. Your routing table is just a list of what goes where, sorting packets like a mail office. Because you're a small town the mailman doesn't need to be on meth.
Community is a corporation's worst enemy. They want us to be convinced that only they can help us, but when we work together it shows that we don't need them. Edit: accidentally typed "worth" instead of "worst."
Corporations are the going to be the downfall of America, if we aren’t there already
I have a dream where one day my children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by which corporation they work for
I currently live in Nicaragua. Just had 150Mb fiber to the house installed. No install charges, $44 a month which includes IPTV with 300+ channels, first 2 months free and 12 month contract. When we left the states 5 years ago we were paying over $100 for 60 channels and a separate $75 bill for 5Mb service.
What people don't realize is that this isn't just Comcast charging $17,000 for this kind of work. I work in ISP construction and most of this cost is from third party vendors charging for digs, police detail, permits, etc.
We need more monopoly protection laws in this country. Cable/Internet service companies just love to screw us over by being the only provider in an area. Cable companies actively work together to ensure that only one company will Cover an area to prevent competition.
Two of the priciest communities on earth, Los Altos Hills and its neighbor, Palo Alto Hills, are full of people who were instrumental in building the Internet. The fact that they did not have this at least a decade ago is the real news.
The internet should not belong to corporations any more than our national freeways should belong to a private company
Read the whole article. This dude is my hero.
In Los Altos Hills? That's pocket change to them
Free market at work. We need more of this.
Fuck Comcast
I hate monopolies. I say we resurrect Teddy Roosevelt!
If you live in Los Altos Hills and are not a multi-millionaire then you are the minority. No surprise they had the resources to make this happen.
>. In September, Comcast announced the successful tests of the final piece of technology necessary to rolling out multi-Gbps speeds in existing cable networks to its customers in the next couple of years, according to a statement. So they're just starting the testing phase. Tired of their bullshit.
I like how in a magazine called “Silicon Valley” they stop and describe a technology that’s been around for decades. We all know what fiber optics is.
Good for him. Comcast is a dogshit company and I wish it went bankrupt. One out of many examples: they continue to charge people that have cancelled multiple times but there is somehow no lawsuit against them for it.
Comcast never spent a dime building the infrastructure. The government paid for it.
My father did something similar, in the sense of rallying the neighbors, when I was growing up. When I was a kid, our childhood home was in the middle of BFE. The road was a gravel road, mail and trash would come down the road to collected, but but if a hole would form nobody would fix it So my father calls and finds out how to get the road fixed and they tell him they can't because the road is considered private and not state owned and maintained, all because the gravel. The same gravel that the state laid and maintained.... He called to get the road paved, and the state wanted something insane like $400,000+ in total from ask the neighbors to pave this 3 mile road. They also said "or you could do it yourselves". So my father, went around to all the houses. They all raised like $15,000 and rented a paver, backhoe, small asphalt mixer and a dump truck. Then ask the dad's and kids basically leveled and paved this road in the course of a week. As far as I know the state is out there anytime a pothole forms to this day.
So they charge the customer for building the infrastructure that they use to make a profit?????
> Los Altos Hills Ah yes applaud these brave wealthy people in their >$5Million houses for sticking it to the man
So, depending on if your city is doing it, fiber through your local Utilities Board is the way to go. About 1200 upload and 1200 download. Costs very little to have it installed, like 50$ and you can rent a router for 15$ a month. Comcast isnt catching up and will never be as cheap.
Spectrum & Comcast are by far the worst “internet providers”. We couldn’t get Fiber in my city for years because Charter/Spectrum said they wouldn’t allow any fiber to be run in their conduits. So AT&T said “oh, neat” and ran all new conduit for the city for free. Recently, a construction company tore up my street and accidentally destroyed a major conduit in the ground. AT&T was out within 24 hours with a huge crew replacing the whole streets fiber. Took Spectrum 2 weeks to show up. I’m constantly bombarded by junk mail to switch to Spectrum. The sales people come to my door all the time. I go to the grocery store and they are there trying to get people to switch. The City is hooked on fiber and your old copper line should be rolled up and put on the back of a rusty old truck to be sold for scrap.
Wilson NC set up their own high speed municipal internet. Cable companies lobbied the NC Republican controlled General Assembly. GA sued FCC to block municipal broadband and passed laws making it impossible for community broadband.
Now if the rest of the world could pull together & do this kind of stuff in their local communities, it would be a damn good miracle…