A hundred years ago on irc someone from Russia was describing their internet connection, which was ethernet, while I had only ever heard of dial up outside of large companies.
It was just people had set up their own hubs and switches in their appartment buildings and strung cables between buildings.
This blew my mind. They just ran themselves ethernet and everyone got a drop from a switch in their building.
It wasn't clear how it got from a neighborgood level upstream.
But just the idea that they could all just decide to give themselves internet, and ethernet no less, string ethernet outside the walls of their own appartments to other appartments, and outside the building from one building to another? Unimaginable in the US. I was boggled and jealous.
swatcoder 56 days ago [-]
> Unimaginable in the US.
Not at all.
Even in the US, rural folk have been beaming directional wifi to each other for a couple decades now (at least), and sharing utilities by personally running electrical, coax, telephone, or ethernet throughout a shared building or across houses stretches back for as long as those services have been available.
Sharing ("stealing") Cable TV by just running coax around was huge before those systems transitioned from simply using sometimes-encrypted broadcasts to a more authenticated/addressable scheme. For decades, party lines (for the telphone) were both official installations from the telephone company and de facto local networks run by one's handy neighbors. Countless people punched ethernet between walls in apartment units just the way you describe to share upstream connections. Same goes for power in squatted urban units or among trailers/shacks where they would be clustered tightly.
What made it unfamiliar to you (and perhaps many here) was probably just the class and finances of your family and the people they mingled with.
Spivak 56 days ago [-]
Yep, a coworker of mine even made a business out of it. He owns a lot of land, put up (essentially) a big cell tower with directional radios, signed some paperwork with AT&T for the upstream and sold to his neighbors who only had shitty CenturyLink on the cheap. I think he's still doing it.
ethbr1 56 days ago [-]
> Same goes for power in squatted urban units or among trailers/shacks where they would be clustered tightly.
Something I've always been curious about: how much stolen electricity / water can a modern utility detect? And how well can they localize the source?
Asking for friend.
iforgot22 56 days ago [-]
I've seen this in remote areas in the US too. There's a broadband ISP, but they only connect to one house for some reason, even though others would be willing to pay. So "neighbors" (separated by a thousand feet) share ethernet and wifi.
56 days ago [-]
jeff_vader 56 days ago [-]
Not from Russia, but nearby.. It was very common - kinda wild east and nobody cared. As soon our telecom started providing DSL - we (neighbourhood kids) got a commercial DSL into my apartment and shared it between 2 five story apartment buildings. Our set up was tiny and not very reliable. Some local networks like this grew and became almost proper internet providers. But they continued this gray practice of pulling cables in the air, between buildings. They'd also do other sketchy stuff like installing hubs/switches into electrical boxes and tapping supply from the building. We learned about it when a technician from a provider like this dropped a screwdriver on live wires and knocked out power for half of the building.
alsetmusic 56 days ago [-]
You're describing the sort of daydreams I had about running a cable between my home and my friend's home when I was 14 years old. We were too far apart. But playing Descent matches would have been awesome. We got by on dialup, but a kid can dream.
I also dreamt of ISDN. Looking back, it seems such a paltry offering, but that tells you what an old man I've become.
jon-wood 56 days ago [-]
My neighbour and I did this when we were about that age, and it was just as good as you imagined it to be! I think we managed to talk our parents into it because it would mean we were no longer tying up the phone line and racking up bills to play Doom.
eep_social 56 days ago [-]
Very early on, say maybe late 90s, cable companies didn’t lock down their networks and you could effectively do this if you were on the same loop. It was amazing to browse neighbor’s windows SMB shares, play LAN games, etc.
Brian_K_White 56 days ago [-]
Later I had RoadRunner in Albany NY when it first came out, and it was exactly like that. Whole neighborhood was a lan.
newdee 56 days ago [-]
Having ISDN whilst most of my friends were on 56k made me really appreciate it. It connected silently and almost instantly, ping times were low with virtually no jitter, it was a consistent 64k whilst also leaving the phone line available (a boon for parents and kids alike) or you could use both lines for 128k. Fond memories.
int_19h 56 days ago [-]
Direct local PPP dialup (i.e. between two PCs) wasn't too bad for multiplayer for games that era.
seabass-labrax 56 days ago [-]
That you can do what you describe is why I love the Internet! There is effectively no limit to the scale and topology of the network, and with a well-configured system you can literally yank cables out and find the network operating without more than a second or two of additional latency. I play chess on lichess.org, and when the Wi-Fi signal drops out my device switches to LTE without even interrupting the game!
The fact that all of the above is possible with only a single kind of cable and generic, 'dumb' switches is icing on the (seven-layer) cake.
wil421 56 days ago [-]
Lots of co-workers in Serbia do this today. Someone gets a fast fiber connection and they run an Ethernet cable to their friend in the building across the way. They both split the costs.
wyldfire 56 days ago [-]
> Unimaginable in the US
With good reason. Building codes in the US prevent disasters like the one that happened at Grenfell Towers in the UK. Run plenum-rated wires through an appropriate space for safety's sake.
xnorswap 56 days ago [-]
UK building codes (we call them building regulations) should also have prevented Grenfell. A large issue was that the companies involved were using materials which weren't up to code.
londons_explore 56 days ago [-]
Specifically, they stuck to the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law. (made an 'equivalent' fireproof product, which legally didn't need retesting, but in fact performed far worse)
Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world)
The pattern is that complex regulations always have loopholes, when far better would be to wipe out all the regulations and simply put in prison people who don't take sufficient care of the environment or other peoples lives. Let courts decide what is insufficient care on a case by case basis.
pessimizer 56 days ago [-]
> The pattern is that complex regulations always have loopholes
I think the pattern is that regulations that prevent people who have money from making more money will always have loopholes lobbied into them, and thereby become complex. But the complexity is an effect, not a cause or really the problem. The problem is that they are going to make sure that a particular unsafe product or unsafe use of a product, that is known to be unsafe in other jurisdictions and banned, will not be stopped if subverting the legislation costs less than doing the unsafe thing will benefit.
I think specifically for Grenfell that the fact that the material was banned for that usage elsewhere created the pressure to lobby to maintain that unsafe usage in Britain. If they hadn't been able to sell it as cladding, they probably would have had to shut down production of it altogether.
And iirc it still would probably have been safe enough if it hadn't had a horrible corner cut installation that resulted in leaving flammable trash behind the cladding, and gaps.
This was not a design failure for difficult to devise regulation, this was a government failure, fueled by multiple layers of corruption. Putting it on the wording of the regulations, and implying that the problem is that regulations are inherently hard to write is just an apology for the guilty.
If anything, the difficulty of writing a lot of legislation is the difficulty of making it ineffective for the thing that it is purporting to regulate, but can't, because you've been bribed in some way. It's like the difficulty of writing RFPs that will only apply to a particular company that you've already agreed to award a contract to. It leads to complexity.
There's a reason why political jobs where you get to award contracts or write legislation cost more to get than they pay.
> Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world)
But this wasn't just a testing failure, this was people intentionally cheating on the test.
> wipe out all the regulations and simply put in prison people who don't take sufficient care of the environment or other peoples lives. Let courts decide what is insufficient care on a case by case basis.
The result of this would be extremely wealthy judges, prosecutors and judges and prosecutors families, you going to prison when you do something that was totally allowed, and rich men never even being indicted.
worik 56 days ago [-]
> There's a reason why political jobs where you get to award contracts or write legislation cost more to get than they pay.
That is extraordinary. Not necessarily false. Surely we can do better?
lotsofpulp 56 days ago [-]
I’m sure construction workers/supervisors/engineers would love the idea of having all of their decisions be subject to judgment by lawyers or a jury.
macspoofing 56 days ago [-]
> Building codes in the US prevent disasters like the one that happened at Grenfell Towers in the UK
US building codes are pretty good and well enforced, just as they are in the UK ... but even with that, you have a Surfside condominium collapse - so not perfect.
shiroiushi 56 days ago [-]
Surfside was almost a half-century old, so the building codes were surely different back then.
Also, building codes concern how to design and build a structure; they aren't going to help much with terrible maintenance.
potato3732842 56 days ago [-]
The code is just as bought and paid for by the materials manufactuers in the US as it is anywhere else.
They get fiery but mostly peaceful apartment building siding, we get spray foam and rotten roofs.
mapt 56 days ago [-]
Polyurethane spray foam is pretty damn fiery in most conditions, even if the right number of carcinogenic flame retardants can limit open flame spread on a surface. It's also got the most toxic, thick sort of smoke of the available options, other than the polyiso in Grenfall.
There are two inherently fire-safe, inexpensive insulation options, borated cellulose and mineral wool. You can even use them as fire-stops. Neither are good to use in an application where they receive rain.
Polystyrene and fiberglass get runner up status because they melt & retreat from a fire at sub-ignition temperature, which doesn't spread the flame but does open up the wall.
potato3732842 56 days ago [-]
Fire departments generally love foam because while it does burn it fills entire spaces and prevents fire spread and limits exhaust of combustion byproducts (which limits oxygen intake on the other end). What would have been total losses turn into minor repair and smoke damage rehab. I'm still not a fan though.
trogdor 56 days ago [-]
> What would have been total losses turn into minor repair and smoke damage rehab.
In my (admittedly minimal) experience as a volunteer firefighter, “minor repair and smoke damage rehab” isn’t a thing once a fire is progresses handheld fire extinguishers.
Water causes a massive amount of damage, and you often need to rip apart walls and floors - with water sometimes joining the party - in order to ensure the fire is fully extinguished.
renewiltord 56 days ago [-]
Yeah, one of the things that makes disasters impossible in the US is that we have real Professional Engineers with Iron Rings doing everything. If you don’t have an iron ring, you can’t really understand what it takes to build a thing in the real world. You can play with your software or whatever but you’re not going to reliably change the real world.
Even Ghost Ship had no iron rings present. That’s what got them. You need those rings. One of my friends has one on each finger. A true 10x Professional Engineer. Nothing he has ever built has a single flaw.
I wired up 1/2 of our building by just throwing cables between rooms via the windows. We got our upstream via a commercial DSL connection, which when split 11 ways, was about the same price as dialup, but way faster.
Propelloni 56 days ago [-]
That's how I learned the limits of hub cascades ;) Add collision domains on top and you are in not-funny-land.
blitzar 56 days ago [-]
IPv6 will fix that ;)
avidiax 56 days ago [-]
Just to be clear, hub collisions are a layer 2 problem, and nothing at layer 3 (IPv4/IPv6) can fix it.
int_19h 56 days ago [-]
In mid-00s this was still how much of the country got its Internet, actually, even in Moscow. I wouldn't say those things were "community", exactly; it would usually be a few people with enough knowledge to set it up, running it all as an actual business - officially registered and all - with other residents of those buildings paying for their connectivity.
But even then it was still very anarchic. For example, one common perk of such setups for their customers was that traffic inside the LAN would be free. And they'd run searchable file sharing servers and P2P hubs (Direct Connect, usually) inside the net, which members would use to share their file collections.
Some of those actually evolved into "proper" ISPs eventually.
Brian_K_White 55 days ago [-]
Oh that's right, I think I remember them talking about local file stores and other local services too.
Initially they had only said something off hand that was normal for them, but the whole room was fascinated and asked them questions and they ended up describing as much as they could.
They didn't actually know that much about how it worked or was set up, they were just a regular user.
secstate 56 days ago [-]
There was a great book (that I thought was called Nerds 2.0, but now I can't find it again) that I read decades ago that described how Cisco got there start. Running wires through gutters on Stanford's campus and hoping no one asked any questions. Built their own routers and what not. The official story now looks like Stanford knew what a great idea that was, but the history that Lerner provided in the book suggests that their initial response was pretty negative and only positive once they formalized the project and made a company around it.
brk 56 days ago [-]
Odds are those connections weren't sanctioned by the building management and were the result of lax enforcement. There are actually plenty of smaller apartment buildings in the US where tenants could get away with this as long as they didn't damage the building or cause frustration for other tenants.
Dracophoenix 56 days ago [-]
> A hundred years ago on irc someone from Russia was describing their internet connection, which was ethernet, while I had only ever heard of dial up outside of large companies.
I don't think it is community owned, but the distinction doesn't seem that important from a customer experience standpoint. The scale and locality of the business is what makes it great. They can care a lot about the network quality because there isn't so much of it that they need to outsource everything. All elements of their infrastructure are not only on battery backup but also standby natural gas generators. My power and water go out before my fiber does. I've never had an outage outside of scheduled maintenance windows.
dv_dt 56 days ago [-]
That works out great until some capital pool decides to start acquiring smaller isps to roll them up into a larger corporate behemoth. As has happened in multiple other industries from groceries, animal vets, rentals, software niches, to hospitals and these days nursing homes
Then the "efficiency" becomes how much can be extracted from the business and customers
bob1029 56 days ago [-]
Privately held companies have the option to reject these offers. A business doesn't have to be a non-profit or community-owned in order to do something principled. One good leader/owner is all it takes.
dv_dt 56 days ago [-]
One pattern I see is small private companies that have that have a pretty great owner/leader, but it all breaks down near retirement, or hand-off to another generation of the owning family, or maybe a temporary financial bottleneck.
Maybe it's ok that small companies have lifetimes and get replaced, but the problem is that today, there is always a capital pool collecting and the large pools live forever, so maybe they won't collect today, but if they are systematically there at the transition points, then we get big entrenched interests with enough accumulated mass to bend the market rules.
hobs 56 days ago [-]
And one bad (next) owner, a hostile takeover, a change of ordinances, a license not renewed, etc - there's so many ways to use money and entrenched positions to destroy a single business operator.
sangnoir 56 days ago [-]
Everyone has a price. If you reject the offer but the ISP in the neighboring community doesn't, they'll grow into your area and use predatory pricing to get drive you out of business. A lot of roll-ups happen as the original owners retire, which happens regardless of how principled they are.
nicoburns 56 days ago [-]
> One good leader/owner is all it takes.
It takes continued good leadership to maintain this status. And once such a company is sold to a public company, it's gone forever.
mschuster91 56 days ago [-]
that can be made very hard to outright impossible (or prohibitively expensive) to do, if the foundational documents of the company are set up correctly. Say, a non-profit, or a cooperative-ownership model...
Yes, non-profits can be fucked up too (as we saw with "Open"AI recently) and cooperative-ownerships can be bought out if one is willing to spend enough money, but it at least raises the bar a significant amount.
56 days ago [-]
eqvinox 56 days ago [-]
Community-owned _broadband networks_ I'm not sure about.
Community-owned _physical infrastructure_ (especially last-mile — fiber & copper going to everybody's house) … that needs to be the default.
And if it's not community-owned, it needs to be regulated with open access requirements.
Yes you can theoretically build a second fiber network and hook up people's houses. Yes it has happened in actual practice. But it is commercially questionable and just completely silly.
bombcar 56 days ago [-]
Having the "last mile" be owned by the community just makes complete sense; in fact it should be a requirement of future government subsidies (perhaps with an option for the existing infrastructure, if "good enough - fiber" to be sold to the community) as it reduces overlap and waste.
Around here we have had THREE separate companies drop fiber in the last year (technically not to everyone's house as they only do that last connection when you subscribe) - so my yard now has five fiber lines through it. That's a bit overkill.
They could have had the municipal electric utility run fiber to everyone, and then designate a single building as a POP/exchange and let any company that wanted to run a fat pipe to that and start reselling.
Analemma_ 56 days ago [-]
What you're talking about is called local loop unbundling - the government owns the last-mile infrastructure, then leases access on FRAND terms to ISPs. It's a perfect alignment of incentives and a huge win for customers, so naturally ISPs fiercely oppose it and look to immediately crush any move in that direction whenever they can.
nickff 56 days ago [-]
It's not a perfect alignment because it gives the government monopoly power, to raise the price, decrease the service level, and reduce consumer surplus. That said, you can also make the case that governments (in most places) already have that power because of their permitting powers, and ownership of many poles or conduits.
eqvinox 56 days ago [-]
The term "monopoly" doesn't really make sense for a government, they don't operate in a commercial/economic space where 2 governments could compete with each other. Also luckily a lot of us live in democracies where you have at least some degree of control over what the government does.
(Edit: eh, I'm too tired, I guess you're arguing there is a monopoly on last-mile infrastructure then, which theoretically doesn't need to be a monopoly. Okay. In most cases it's a monopoly anyway because "over-building" existing last-mile connectivity won't be used by everyone and is thus less profitable.)
nickff 56 days ago [-]
Your edit caught my meaning; I should have been more clear.
There's always less profit potential where there is more competition, which is one reason why people suggest that monopolies are capable of providing higher-quality products (and services).
Interestingly, some local governments are known (or at least have historically) to use their permitting powers to extract significant amounts of money from telecoms and others. I am not really sure what to do about this, but in the early days of power poles, few/no permits were required to use them, and there were many power providers sharing the same poles; it was messy, and contributed to unreliability, but it worked and allowed for competition.
bryanlarsen 56 days ago [-]
Communities own the roads, trucking companies are commercial.
Propelloni 56 days ago [-]
It's almost like someone read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations!
red-iron-pine 55 days ago [-]
something something externalities something
sangnoir 56 days ago [-]
> And if it's not community-owned, it needs to be regulated with open access requirements.
What kind of communist, socialistic talk is this? It's frankly anti-American and hurts the linchpin of the best country on earth, out job creators /s
ensignavenger 56 days ago [-]
Missouri's law was "reinterpreted" to allow broadband networks. The article even mentions KCFiber, a wholly owned fiber network (owned by the city of North Kansas City) which provides free services ($300 one time activation fee) to the entire city! Another one is Springfield, which built a fiber network which it owns but leases to ISPs (currently only one offers service, but in theory others could participate as well).
Despite this ban, many communities in these states have pushed forward.
jvanderbot 56 days ago [-]
And there's more good news. Minnesota is not on that map, but Minnesota has moved in very good directions re: ISPs. My rural neighbors have community internet, and it's _good_. High quality fiber.
I have centurylink - ok not a community plan, but it competes directly with T-mobile, Xfinity (comcast), and other cell-based providers, and provides an excellent product for much cheaper.
Centurylink mentioned in the same ballpark as a "community network" is hilarious to me, having grown up in Minnesota.
It's literally the incumbent Bell provider - back in the day being AT&T and then USWest after the antitrust breakup.
Times certainly have changed for someone to even have this thought, much less write it down!
jvanderbot 56 days ago [-]
Right - not exactly what we were referring to, but a really good product at a cheap price, nonetheless.
56 days ago [-]
waveBidder 56 days ago [-]
I've been confused by that law, because I'm pretty sure Bemidji has an internet coop (which is quite good, especially for a small town like it).
Onavo 56 days ago [-]
> Minnesota is not on that map
What are they doing down there? Their governor is literally the Democratic VP nominee.
mhuffman 56 days ago [-]
If I recall the original law in North Carolina to limit community-owned broadband was called "Saving North Carolina Jobs Act" or something similar. It came about as a backlash to powerline broadband. Ironically all the people that seem to be laying fiber are contractors from Florida.
plussed_reader 56 days ago [-]
And this won't change for at least the next 4 years. Regulatory capture is a bitch.
bluejekyll 56 days ago [-]
This debate about regulations is alway interesting. There are regulations which help protect the environment, like not being allowed to dump dangerous chemicals into your local stream or river.
Then there are regulations like these which are aimed at protecting the investment companies have made into infrastructure, effectively granting them a monopoly.
When people debate this, they often are thinking of the first class of protective regulations that are too onerous on companies, but I think most people like clean drinking water and rivers that no longer catch fire.
Whereas the second class of protection is really harmful to the consumer, and the powers-that-be have effectively been given a monopoly, and with that the money and power to protect their place in the market through continued influence on elections and other things to maintain these rent seeking businesses. We all hate the latter, but these companies have a lot of sway over politicians.
gosub100 56 days ago [-]
And from the article, the telecom industry receives billions in corporate welfare. A common argument against cutting it off is that telecom is capital intensive infrastructure, and if you cut their govbux you're blocking poor people from being able to communicate, we all deserve the right to communicate. But if that's your take, how can you also hate the protectionist laws? Telecom are given a monopoly because it doesn't make sense to, say, have N sets of telephone poles or power lines from each provider.
altacc 56 days ago [-]
In some countries there is sometimes a cable & data connection owner and then a separate service provider. Laws regulate that the cable provider must let other companies provide connections to customers over their cables. The service provider pays the cable owner for a bulk of data that its customers use. The cable owner can't charge more than it charges itself when it acts as a service provider.
Not sure if that made sense! I pay company B but my fibre connection is provided by Company A. If I want to change to Company C I start a contract with C and the only thing I change is the cable modem.
plussed_reader 56 days ago [-]
That's googleFI, cricket, and Mint; others paying for service on anothers infrastructure; an MVNO(mobile virtual network operator).
Laws already regulate that space; what's your point?
pc86 56 days ago [-]
These are state laws, the Presidential election has nothing to do with this.
tzs 56 days ago [-]
Congress could do it, either directly or by granting more authority to the FCC.
SoftTalker 56 days ago [-]
Does the FCC have authority over fiber and cable? That's not using any public airwaves/broadcast bandwidth.
hn_acker 56 days ago [-]
Yes, the FCC has authority over fiber and cable. Skim the amended Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S. Code § 151 - Purposes of chapter; Federal Communications Commission created [1]):
> For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges...
The FCC and FTC have a huge say on this. See the scandal with bulk-loaded, astroturfed public comments on broadband under the former Trump-appointed FCC chair.
The FCC determines what broadband is, and which companies get federal government subsidies for it. Federal subsidies > state subsidies.
plussed_reader 56 days ago [-]
Yes, the 50 state solution is inefficient. Your point?
plussed_reader 56 days ago [-]
Yes, the 50 state solution is inefficient.
Thank you for confirming my point.
helf 56 days ago [-]
[dead]
burnt-resistor 56 days ago [-]
Money in politics is root cause of most politically-caused problems.
silisili 56 days ago [-]
Of all the states I've lived, TN blew me away wrt internet the most, by far. Most have heard about EPB over in Chattanooga. KUB in Knoxville recently did the same thing. But those aside, it seems like every little nook and cranny has some sort of fiber, whether it's from the utility board or a private company.
I lived in a city of about 20k, not near any big city. There were two different fiber companies(one utility, one private) and Spectrum offering service. Cookeville, Crossville, McMinnville, Manchester, Tullahoma, etc...cities most probably haven't even heard of, all have generally great FTTH coverage.
bwanab 56 days ago [-]
I really hate to make a political connection here, but it's hard not to notice that of those states exactly one didn't vote for the current President-elect.
johnea 56 days ago [-]
Your notice is valid. I would expect the situation to regress significantly as the FCC is reorged...
ck2 56 days ago [-]
It's weird to me anyone thinks this is going to improve?
The exact opposite is very likely to happen in the next four years, a federal ban on community networks, lobby paid for by the same big telecom that was previously doing it piecemeal at the local level, they'll just buy 100 rooms at that special hotel in DC and the bill will get signed in sharpie like a 5-year-old.
Sure, it will end up at the supreme court in a lawsuit but of course that's a lock too now.
IIRC, North Dakota, despite its Republican voting record, is actually pretty socialist (including a few legitimately state-owned companies).
adabyron 56 days ago [-]
They also have a state owned bank. ND once had a very strong "Democratic Farmer Labor party". Not to get into R vs D here, as the parties have flip flopped a lot since then & the Limbaugh movement changed the state from a very purple state (all Congress members were D in the 80s-90s). The only way you win in the state now is with a R next to your name, so the Rs are having an identity crisis.
The real good call out is the coop attitude that has been very strong in ND for decades. Sadly I have seen some of those coops start to spend a lot of money on creating talk shows with extreme political personalities who have little actual knowledge on things.
I would love to see the state go back to being more neighborly & community building. Either way the history of the coop attitude is a great one for building strong communities. Every community should take notice of this.
For rural communities, especially in the early 90s & 00s, having internet access was equivalent to access to an elite private school.
tivert 56 days ago [-]
> They also have a state owned bank. ND once had a very strong "Democratic Farmer Labor party". Not to get into R vs D here, as the parties have flip flopped a lot since then & the Limbaugh movement changed the state from a very purple state (all Congress members were D in the 80s-90s). The only way you win in the state now is with a R next to your name, so the Rs are having an identity crisis.
Minnesota had the DFL. North Dakota had the NPL.
Yeah, I think the intrusion of national political culture has been pretty toxic everywhere. IIRC, Heitkamp, the last ND Democrat, lost (or at least had some trouble), because she had to hem and haw on abortion to appease her out-of-state donors and could not adapt to local circumstances. Didn't really follow that election too closely, so I don't really know what else was going on.
adabyron 56 days ago [-]
> Minnesota had the DFL. North Dakota had the NPL.
You are right. I blame my recollection of it being very "farmer based".
I believe Heitkamp lost to Cramer who was an early Trump backer, in a state that was/(still possibly is) in love with Trump - possibly due to him being 1 of few candidates to ever stop in the state due to lack of electoral votes.
The polarization of the state also gave her no chances of winning. She had won the seat from Sen Conrad (of the Democrat party & in-law of former Republican governor Ed Schafer). Conrad was senator for roughly 26 years. It'll be interesting to see if/when the Dakotas ever goes back to being purple.
tivert 56 days ago [-]
> It'll be interesting to see if/when the Dakotas ever goes back to being purple.
IMHO, that'll be when the national political apparatus once allows politicians to be heterodox again. I wouldn't be surprised if Democrats the Dakotas used to reliably send to the federal government were of the "blue dog" variety that's practically extinct (i.e. relatively conservative, especially socially). But with the withering of local media and its replacement with stuff made far away for a national audience (cable news, New York Times, etc.), I think it's more likely things will just polarize more along national lines, since people will know less about their community and pay less attention to it, and instead know a lot more about the dumb national controversy of the day and pay attention to that.
Honestly, I'd kind of like to see some kind of regulation that limits the reach of a media organizations beyond their home regions, to preserve local culture and attitudes. Sort of like Canada's Canadian content requirements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content).
SoftTalker 56 days ago [-]
I don't think community broadband should be banned, but if we're talking about municipalities, they really don't know what they are doing. My town is installing municipal broadband, and the contractors they hired are ripping up people's lawns, punching holes in gas, water, and sewer lines, and generally making a huge mess in a way that would never be tolerated if ATT or Comcast were doing it. Only time will tell if the service will be any good, once all the collateral damage is mended.
TechDebtDevin 56 days ago [-]
AT&T uses the same contractors your municipality would have.
SoftTalker 56 days ago [-]
Perhaps, but if they were running amok like they are, there would be riots at the mayor's office and outraged citizens at the city council meetings. But because it's "municipal" it all gets a shrug and a pass.
56 days ago [-]
burnt-resistor 56 days ago [-]
Ah, but a workaround is a regional co-op not necessarily tied to a city or county. gvec.net is one example around hill country in TX.
jmyeet 56 days ago [-]
The legislation banning municipal broadband is a symptom. The problem is capitalism.
All capitalism does is try and create enclosures and then use that monopoly to jack up prices for people who absolutely do not have to see the negative externalities of those endeavours. It is the most parasitic form of intermediation.
National ISPs are terrible. They shouldn't exist. The best Internet in the US by a mile (and it's not even close) is municipal broadband (eg [1]).
What about mesh networks like Guifi in Spain, Freifunk in Germany, or Red Hook Mesh in Brooklyn?
guest__user 55 days ago [-]
All those well informed state legislators really have it out for community broadband, I wonder what could have influenced them.
mrbluecoat 56 days ago [-]
Once space-based broadband Internet becomes widely available, I predict shortsighted ISPs will join the ranks of Kodak and Blockbuster.
jvanderbot 56 days ago [-]
This has a "Bitcoin will solve finance" feel to it. Not to be super dismissive, but there's just as much likelihood it will help as it won't.
But in your corner:
It's true that right now space-based deployment of broadband will provide broadband in locations where it's not currently available - perhaps spurring competition.
It's also probably true that space-based broadband will be able to compete directly with urban / dense areas where Comcast & company have an effective monopoly - also a good thing!
But there's no reason to think it will put comcast/company out of business at all. Has cell-tower based intenet service at all displaced comcast? Verizon and T-Mobile canvas my neighborhood claiming to offer the best internet, but as far as I can tell, everyone still uses Xfinity, even if Centurylink is much, much better.
sabbaticaldev 56 days ago [-]
TV made radio irrelevant, the internet made TV irrelevant. Both still exists but as money-losing mass manipulation tools
jvanderbot 56 days ago [-]
But those are new kinds. Not new providers.
There's no phone company that made all other phone companies irrelevant.
There's no tv channel that made all other tv channels irrelevant.
And there's no radio station that .. you get it.
And so it's hard for me to concolude that there's some ISP that will make all other ISPs irrelevant. Honestly most people will probably have about a 50/50 split between home wifi and phone internet. And that home wifi might have significant intrusion from space-based ISP, but not completely. (I realize spacex is also hoping to provide some phone service from satellites, but I digress)
badgersnake 56 days ago [-]
TV certainly didn't make radio irrelevant, radio is very relevant in situations where you can't look at a screen, or would prefer not to. It's also much lower bandwidth, takes up a lot less space, uses a lot less power on the receiver (even compared to say a modern mobile device) and audio only content is much cheaper to produce.
I've heard it argued that podcasts make radio obsolete. That is more plausible.
cogman10 56 days ago [-]
How will Internet access make Internet access irrelevant?
This is much like saying satellite TV made cable TV irrelevant. Or magazines made newspapers irrelevant.
HPsquared 56 days ago [-]
TV was always an advertising platform first and foremost. In other words a money-losing mass manipulation tool.
salawat 56 days ago [-]
Believe it or not, Farnsworth, (inventor of the principles making Television possible) had no intention of it being used as an advertising or propaganda tool when setting out to figure out the problem. That's very much a "what people decided to do with it" thing. Bored farmer figures out thing, industry does horrible things with it is a tale as old as time.
It was supposed to be for recording and playing back images. That was pretty much it. His original aspiration was for it to be employed in educational contexts to help make tge spread of visual information possible.
Now if you're talking TV Broadcasting as an industry, then you're absolutely correct. That was the business model settled on, but not without some foundational hmmm'ing, haww'ing and experimentation in coming up with business models in the radio broadcasting space. The history is in itself an interesting piece of work to dive into.
EGreg 56 days ago [-]
Genuinely wondering, why are so many people on HN allergic to any mention of decentralized solutions? It was precisely the opposite in 2014.
Now, anything that smells of BFT consensus, open decentralized protocols, smart contracts, distributed computing, gets lumped with “Web3” and downvoted to oblivion. I was surprised Freenet got through the other day without being associated with it, despite having WASM smart contracts and all of it.
Shouldn’t “hackers” welcome building new, disruptive things, especially if they are open source and disrupt entrenched centralized solutions of the entseeking “establishment” cartels? I feel like an old grandpa on HN today, still embracing the “old” “Hacker Ethos” that was being promoted by YC when HN was in its early days.
Has hacker ethos really today shifted to unironically supporting closed, centralized solutions, and attacking most disruptive technology by deriding it, downvoting people who speak about it in any terms other than dismissive, and trying to make sure it doesn’t take off?
It feels a bit like the story of the political left and liberalism — once upon a time the goal of liberals was to make race a non-issue, for instance, but now that same attitude is considered racist by many on the left. Once hackers were anti-establishment in an “information wants to be free” way. To liberate “systems” from “the man” and bust them open. I remember it. It was still the case a mere 10-15 years ago. On today’s “Hacker” News, if you’d look across a large swath of reactions to projects which aim to do just that, you’d never know it…
tialaramex 56 days ago [-]
Where are you seeing a "decentralized solution"?
EGreg 56 days ago [-]
“Communities getting together and making their own broadband”? Big Telco Cartels using Big Government to shut it down?
Oh! Yes, “Communities getting together and making their own broadband” does sound like a decentralized approach and I agree that it's worth doing and certainly shouldn't be outlawed. I didn't see allergic reactions to that - but maybe I didn't look enough yet.
This sub-thread seems to be about using StarLink, which I don't see as any sort of "decentralized" given it is literally global and in effect controlled by one billionaire so hence my question.
iainnash 56 days ago [-]
another decentralizedish community solution in nyc is https://nycmesh.net/ which I used for years and volunteered on an install. biggest issue with nyc and why I can't use it anymore is you need line of sight to a hub node.
badgersnake 56 days ago [-]
Everything with a blockchain turns into a pump and dump grift. The only exception is things that started out as a pump and dump grift.
EGreg 56 days ago [-]
Everything is quite a claim.
Can you prove that?
Is that a reasonable thing to ask, or are we supposed to simply nod along and say “yes, your dogma is correct in 100% of cases”?
For example tell us how these are a grift: FileCoin. UniSwap. Aave. DID and Sidetree protocol (used by bluesky sky).
And decentralized systems go way past blockchains. Email. Heck even the Web itself. If anything I’d say they tend to centralize because of the “grift” which is capturing open protocols and doing rent extraction (eg GMail) or surveillance capitalism:
That centralization and control over millioms and billions of people is worse than a grift. Why can’t we talk about disrupting THAT?
mullingitover 56 days ago [-]
I dunno, blockchains have been around for over a decade or more, and the stuff you listed might be cool. I don't know, because blockchain itself is such a toxic brand that I automatically disregard anyone and anything related to it.
It's like there's a swimming pool full of sewage, and sure there might be a new PS5 Pro floating in there, but I'm sure as hell not wading in to find out.
MyFirstSass 56 days ago [-]
Im extremely jealous of this techno optimism perspective. In my view at no point has there been a decrease in monopolisation or increase in democratisation since the hopeful cybernetic 90's, so i just don't see this as good, more like some Tyrell or state owned corporate almost fascist dystopia where everything is owned and censored by the few, and just because it's "awesome and space based" only adds to the exclusivity. It's already leaked Musk is working for the US military, so it isn't some benevolent, utilitarian or even broad scaled project it's a project for world domination and enslavement.
cj 56 days ago [-]
If that happens, wouldn't it be potentially worse than the current situation?
Surely your local neighborhood isn't going to deploy its own dedicated satellite constellation.
If/when satelite broadband becomes widespread, it will likely be consolidated and provided by 1 provider (maybe 2?) which might end up resulting in higher costs for everyone all around.
jtbayly 56 days ago [-]
It is very hard for me to imagine space-based internet ever being able to be competitive financially with an earth-based option outside of special circumstances.
toast0 56 days ago [-]
Running an LEO satellite constellation is very expensive. But installing and maintaining a wire to everyone's house is also very expensive.
IMHO, it's a question of capacity and acceptable service levels.
Starlink monthly pricing is higher than my DSL and nearby cable as well as my local muni fiber. But it's not so much higher as to rule it out. And the install fee is a lot lower than muni fiber. It's going to take a long time to get ROI on my installation cost for the muni fiber if I compare monthly cost to Starlink. Muni fiber service level should be much better, but Starlink service would probably have been good enough.
jtbayly 56 days ago [-]
But wires aren’t the only terrestrial option.
I can’t fathom how many satellites it would take to support all the internet users as a monopoly.
toast0 56 days ago [-]
Fair enough; I didn't read your comment very closely, I guess. Terrestrial radio seems a lot less expensive in areas with population. When you get out beyond rural and more into wilderness, satellite is likely cost competitive, because having a LEO constellation cover the wilderness comes at no additional cost, and having radio coverage in the wilderness involves setting up base stations with low usage --- you can do some things with longer range / larger cells, but it depends on terrain and maybe protocol limits? GSM had a concept of 'timing advance' that effectively limited the maximum cell size, but I don't know if that's a limitation if you're not using TDMA.
deepsquirrelnet 56 days ago [-]
Security in LEO will eclipse the cost of everything else. Right now it’s free. When it becomes critical infrastructure, it has to be protected.
toast0 56 days ago [-]
Security in outside plant isn't free either. We're a long way away from widespread outages because someone thought they could get high with the proceeds of a stolen satellite, but there are lots of disruptions when people take down pole mounted fiber because they thought it would be worth something.
FpUser 56 days ago [-]
They could be considered as infra provider in this case. Like for ground phone lines and required to lease those to competitive service providers. If this happens here will be a pressure from such providers to lover the price.
conradev 56 days ago [-]
Or maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll have to compete on quality as well as price.
When Verizon laid down fiber optic cable in my (former) neighborhood, it was so much better than Xfinity’s service, and everyone I knew switched.
Not to say that the type of physical cable matters as much, DOCSIS 4.0 is in the cards, but latency and bandwidth will always be better on a (good) wired connection.
One quirk worth mentioning, though, is that WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband (which isn’t everywhere). Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi, the fastest wireless speeds I saw were on ultra-wideband connections to my phone.
vel0city 56 days ago [-]
> WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband
> Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi
So after you upgraded your WLAN it was faster than your WAN until you bothered upgrading your WLAN.
That's a personal deployment decision not necessarily a matter of what was or wasn't' available at the time. >1G WiFi existed years before ultra-wideband was a thing.
conradev 56 days ago [-]
The first phone to ship with ultra-wideband was the iPhone 11 in 2019, and the first phone to ship with 6GHz was the Galaxy S21 Ultra in 2021. The Intel AX210 was the first wireless card to ship with 6GHz at the end of 2020 and the first laptop to include it from MSI shipped in 2021.
Calling WiFi 6 >1G is a pretty far stretch. I don't think I've seen a real world test that breaks that barrier in favorable conditions, even with today's routers:
Whereas ultra-wideband was capable of pulling 2Gbps in 2020, something I have not even seen Wi-Fi 7 able to do. Ultra-wideband still has quite an edge:
> I've also tested 160 MHz channels, which quickly run into the ~930 Mbps TCP throughput limit of a gigabit Ethernet connection, but perform worse at range. I'll cover 160 MHz channels and 2.5 Gbps Ethernet in more depth when the U6-Enterprise leaves early access
So yeah, when the author limits the tests to <1Gb none of the results were >1Gb. Who would have expected those results.
I've had >1G WiFi 5 networks in operation since 2018. It didn't require 6Ghz.
Your equipment or your environment may not have enabled it, but it was around.
a_vanderbilt 56 days ago [-]
It might come even sooner as mobile internet becomes faster and gets lower in latency. I used to have Cox, and the service availability was so bad it was nigh unusable. Switched to TMobile home 5g and in some cases, it's actually faster. That shouldn't be a thing but here we are. I don't play twitchy games so latency isn't really a concern for me. By the time 6g or whatever it's going to be called is well established, I think we'll see the incumbents get blockbuster'd.
paxys 56 days ago [-]
It takes 5 minutes of back of the envelope calculations to realize that this is a pipe dream. Starlink isn't a substitute for fiber internet, it's a substitute for no internet.
bombcar 56 days ago [-]
The missing piece is "buckets of Internet" where you pay a provider to have a connection, and they deal with whether it comes over 5G or fiber or Starlink or whatever. Nobody cares about HOW the connection is delivered, just the speed, latency, and reliability.
pmb 56 days ago [-]
No. Satellite (except when they use lasers, but nobody is proposing space lasers) is a broadcast medium and wire is point to point. Wires will almost always be cheaper and more reliable and faster on a per-customer basis and have less interference.
MrBuddyCasino 56 days ago [-]
Starlink has insufficient capacity for metropolitan areas. I don't think this is easily solvable, given the shared medium and the bandwidth constraints.
tzs 56 days ago [-]
Let's try some back of the envelope calculation for providing broadband to the US via LEO satellites.
Initially assume everyone is spread out uniformly, and that we need a broadband connection for every three people, and that 100 Mbps counts as broadband.
If all connected were in use at the same time downloading at 100 Mbps we need an aggregate bandwidth of 11000 Tbps. Actual usage would be more bursty, so let's assume we can oversell by a factor of 100. That reduced the aggregate bandwidth need to 110 Tbps.
Wikipedia tells me the satellite with the most bandwidth currently are those in the ViaSat-3 constellation of geosynchronous satellites, each with a bandwidth of 1 Tbps. Let's assume we can get LEO satellites with that bandwidth.
We would need 110 to get the required aggregate bandwidth. However, since each satellite only spends roughly 1/8 of its time over the US we need to multiply the number of satellites by 8.
That brings is to 880 satellites, but remember, we were assuming a uniformly spread out population. We need to take into account the non-uniformity of the actual population.
To do that we need to know the ground area that a satellite can serve simultaneously. That depends on the height of the satellite.
Google is telling me Starlink's around around 350 miles up, so let's assume that is what we use too. A naive distance to horizon calculation says that a satellite at that height would have an horizon around 2500 miles away.
I'm not sure if that means it could actually broadcast to people 2500 miles away from whatever its spot is over or if there would be problems due to the shallow angle the signal would have to travel to the receiver.
If each satellite can effectively broadcast to such a large circle then most of the 110 visible at a given time from the US would be visible over a wide enough area that how the population is distributed might not matter much.
This is assuming that the satellites do not interfere with each other. My guess is that there would be interference and they would have to operate more like cellular networks operate, with each satellite having a limited ground area that it broadcasts into using some kind of spot beam.
Feasibility now depends on the size of those spot beams and how accurately they can be aimed. If they can adjust the beams to cover large areas when they are serving a rural area and small areas when serving a dense area, and if they can aim that spot anywhere in that 2000+ mile radius circle where the satellite is visible then 880 satellites may be enough.
If, on the other hand, their beams are pretty much fixed in size and direction, then we would probably need a lot more satellites. Given the area of the US, for everyplace to have coverage the 110 satellites that would be over the US on average would have to each be responsible for a circle of around 200 miles in diameter, and could handle the needs of 3 million people.
If you've got more than 3 million people in a 200 mile circle you'll need more satellites over that circle.
Suppose we have an area that needs several satellites. It might be possible to arrange orbits so particular places always have a lot of satellites so that you could cover that area without having to simply make your constellation bigger.
I have no idea if that is possible. If not you may have to increase you constellation size so that you every place has the number of satellites that your highest density 200 mile diameter circle needs.
I don't think that there is any 200 mile diameter circle in the US that would need more that 20 satellites, which would mean we'd need 17600 satellites in the constellation.
Note that this is quite dependent on the circle size so could be way off from reality. Also I've not considered communications from the ground to the satellite which might also impose constraints.
Conclusion: it doesn't seem obviously impossible to provide 100 Mbps broadband via satellite to everyone in the US. A more detailed analysis is needed.
56 days ago [-]
alwayslikethis 56 days ago [-]
Is the total possible bandwidth available on these even comparable to optical fibers?
YetAnotherNick 56 days ago [-]
The bigger concern is the latency. Even if some technical progress increases the bandwidth, latency is bounded by speed of light and couldn't be as low as cable.
larkost 56 days ago [-]
The low-earth orbit generally means that this is not as big of an issue as in older satellite technologies. Currently if you are in an area where the satellite does not need to bounce your data through one or more other satellites before hitting a ground station they are in the tens of milliseconds of latency (20-60).
Comcast is generally in the 20-30 neighborhood, unless you are using their gigabit service, then it is more like 10-15 milliseconds.
So it is higher, but not debilitatingly so (unless your application is very sensitive to latency). I would imagine there is a lot more jitter in Starlink, but that is more a feel than real numbers.
Mainly on a terrestrial system you wind up bouncing through more substations on the way to the general Internet, whereas with Starlink you are generally bouncing straight from your dish to the satellite to the base station. So less bounces, but farther to go. The physics favors the wire, but not as much as it used to.
0xcde4c3db 56 days ago [-]
SpaceX apparently doesn't like to give definitive numbers (perhaps there are too many configurable tradeoffs and/or dynamic adjustments to variable environmental conditions for that to make sense), but the downlink throughput of a Starlink V1 satellite is reportedly about 20 Gbps over an area of several square miles. Putting that on a single fiber wavelength is mature enough to be firmly in SOHO/homelab territory these days (e.g. QNAP and Mikrotik both have 25Gbps switches that are about $1000). It looks like commodity CWDM mux/demux boxes can cram 16 of those into a single fiber. It's safe to assume that the big guys like Comcast and CenturyLink/Lumen can get equipment capable of far more than that.
badgersnake 56 days ago [-]
Pretty obviously not, theoretically you could have tens of terrabits per fibre core. The limiting factor is the electronics at either end.
wintermutestwin 56 days ago [-]
AFAIK, latency sensitive games like CoD and Fortnite suffer badly on Starlink. Don't you think that would have a massive impact on adoption in areas where you can get "wired" internet?
dboreham 56 days ago [-]
Shannon says no.
PittleyDunkin 56 days ago [-]
? What does "space-based broadband" offer that's so attractive?
lokar 56 days ago [-]
Musk
ravenstine 56 days ago [-]
We don't even need space based broadband for this. Terrestrial radio (5G and LTE) already will gradually drink the milkshake of most cable and fiber based ISPs.
wintermutestwin 56 days ago [-]
Maybe if you have an antenna on top of your house? As it is, I regularly lose internet connectivity (2 bars or LTE or 1 bar of 5g) on my phone when I step into many buildings that are within .25km of highway 80 in a large CA city.
gosub100 56 days ago [-]
I hope so but I don't think any constellation can handle even a medium sized town without significant throttling.
hotpotatoe 56 days ago [-]
So? We trade a terrestrial based monopoly for a space based one?
lxgr 56 days ago [-]
We'd also trade the fragments of resilience we have left against a single point of failure (both organizationally and infrastructurally).
Space-based internet makes total sense for very remote areas or as a bridge technology, as well as a technology to compete with incumbent terrestrial monopolies, but I'd hate to see fiber and terrestrial 5G rollouts stopping entirely in favor of it.
orwin 56 days ago [-]
> We'd also trade the fragments of resilience we have left against a single point of failure
It's the characteristic of the 21th century, trading resiliency and robustness for performance. As long as the world is stable, it's nice.
Just another reminder U.S. is not a real democracy
helf 56 days ago [-]
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T3RMINATED 56 days ago [-]
[dead]
red-iron-pine 55 days ago [-]
tl;dr:
Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, N Carolina, Pennsylvania, S Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
FL, LA, and NE are called out as having the worst prohibitions
varispeed 56 days ago [-]
[flagged]
hansvm 56 days ago [-]
When trying to convince a Russian engineer a few years ago that the west has plenty of corruption, his main counterpoint was "yes, but it's not the same; you guys have a kind of corruption that's at least able to function." He made a big deal about how severe it is even in very minor roles.
With recent events I imagine the difference is going to decrease a bit, but I don't think it'll be the same within 4yrs.
astrodust 56 days ago [-]
Lawful evil versus chaotic evil.
AnimalMuppet 56 days ago [-]
"Corruption" isn't a binary.
It exists in the West. It's bad that it exists in the West. But it exists less in the West than in some other places, and that difference matters.
3D30497420 56 days ago [-]
It also depends a lot on the type of corruption and how it works.
I recall an econ class from ages ago that compared two middle-income countries. In one, there was a strong central government, so the corruption was relatively organized and predictable. The economy was harmed by the corruption, but still functioned, grew, and helped to reduce poverty.
In the other country, the central and regional governments were weak, so nearly every interaction with government officials (police, judges, customs, etc.) resulted in some kind of bribe with highly variable costs. This dramatically slowed down and reduced economic activity and increased poverty.
rlili 56 days ago [-]
In many countries, lobbying is considered corruption. That it is legalized in the US alone, suggests to me that it actually exists more in the West.
krapp 56 days ago [-]
I don't think that anyone, anywhere, ever says that. Not even in the West.
terminalbraid 56 days ago [-]
No one says this.
bitcharmer 56 days ago [-]
[flagged]
cornstalks 56 days ago [-]
"Ban" is used pretty loosely here. For example, Utah allows community-owned networks but requires them to be "wholesale-only" instead of direct-to-customer. It's a limitation, sure, but I have a hard time considering that a real "ban."
Rendered at 20:00:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It was just people had set up their own hubs and switches in their appartment buildings and strung cables between buildings.
This blew my mind. They just ran themselves ethernet and everyone got a drop from a switch in their building.
It wasn't clear how it got from a neighborgood level upstream.
But just the idea that they could all just decide to give themselves internet, and ethernet no less, string ethernet outside the walls of their own appartments to other appartments, and outside the building from one building to another? Unimaginable in the US. I was boggled and jealous.
Not at all.
Even in the US, rural folk have been beaming directional wifi to each other for a couple decades now (at least), and sharing utilities by personally running electrical, coax, telephone, or ethernet throughout a shared building or across houses stretches back for as long as those services have been available.
Sharing ("stealing") Cable TV by just running coax around was huge before those systems transitioned from simply using sometimes-encrypted broadcasts to a more authenticated/addressable scheme. For decades, party lines (for the telphone) were both official installations from the telephone company and de facto local networks run by one's handy neighbors. Countless people punched ethernet between walls in apartment units just the way you describe to share upstream connections. Same goes for power in squatted urban units or among trailers/shacks where they would be clustered tightly.
What made it unfamiliar to you (and perhaps many here) was probably just the class and finances of your family and the people they mingled with.
Something I've always been curious about: how much stolen electricity / water can a modern utility detect? And how well can they localize the source?
Asking for friend.
I also dreamt of ISDN. Looking back, it seems such a paltry offering, but that tells you what an old man I've become.
The fact that all of the above is possible with only a single kind of cable and generic, 'dumb' switches is icing on the (seven-layer) cake.
With good reason. Building codes in the US prevent disasters like the one that happened at Grenfell Towers in the UK. Run plenum-rated wires through an appropriate space for safety's sake.
Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world)
The pattern is that complex regulations always have loopholes, when far better would be to wipe out all the regulations and simply put in prison people who don't take sufficient care of the environment or other peoples lives. Let courts decide what is insufficient care on a case by case basis.
I think the pattern is that regulations that prevent people who have money from making more money will always have loopholes lobbied into them, and thereby become complex. But the complexity is an effect, not a cause or really the problem. The problem is that they are going to make sure that a particular unsafe product or unsafe use of a product, that is known to be unsafe in other jurisdictions and banned, will not be stopped if subverting the legislation costs less than doing the unsafe thing will benefit.
I think specifically for Grenfell that the fact that the material was banned for that usage elsewhere created the pressure to lobby to maintain that unsafe usage in Britain. If they hadn't been able to sell it as cladding, they probably would have had to shut down production of it altogether.
And iirc it still would probably have been safe enough if it hadn't had a horrible corner cut installation that resulted in leaving flammable trash behind the cladding, and gaps.
This was not a design failure for difficult to devise regulation, this was a government failure, fueled by multiple layers of corruption. Putting it on the wording of the regulations, and implying that the problem is that regulations are inherently hard to write is just an apology for the guilty.
If anything, the difficulty of writing a lot of legislation is the difficulty of making it ineffective for the thing that it is purporting to regulate, but can't, because you've been bribed in some way. It's like the difficulty of writing RFPs that will only apply to a particular company that you've already agreed to award a contract to. It leads to complexity.
There's a reason why political jobs where you get to award contracts or write legislation cost more to get than they pay.
> Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world)
But this wasn't just a testing failure, this was people intentionally cheating on the test.
> wipe out all the regulations and simply put in prison people who don't take sufficient care of the environment or other peoples lives. Let courts decide what is insufficient care on a case by case basis.
The result of this would be extremely wealthy judges, prosecutors and judges and prosecutors families, you going to prison when you do something that was totally allowed, and rich men never even being indicted.
That is extraordinary. Not necessarily false. Surely we can do better?
US building codes are pretty good and well enforced, just as they are in the UK ... but even with that, you have a Surfside condominium collapse - so not perfect.
Also, building codes concern how to design and build a structure; they aren't going to help much with terrible maintenance.
They get fiery but mostly peaceful apartment building siding, we get spray foam and rotten roofs.
There are two inherently fire-safe, inexpensive insulation options, borated cellulose and mineral wool. You can even use them as fire-stops. Neither are good to use in an application where they receive rain.
Polystyrene and fiberglass get runner up status because they melt & retreat from a fire at sub-ignition temperature, which doesn't spread the flame but does open up the wall.
In my (admittedly minimal) experience as a volunteer firefighter, “minor repair and smoke damage rehab” isn’t a thing once a fire is progresses handheld fire extinguishers.
Water causes a massive amount of damage, and you often need to rip apart walls and floors - with water sometimes joining the party - in order to ensure the fire is fully extinguished.
Even Ghost Ship had no iron rings present. That’s what got them. You need those rings. One of my friends has one on each finger. A true 10x Professional Engineer. Nothing he has ever built has a single flaw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring
I wired up 1/2 of our building by just throwing cables between rooms via the windows. We got our upstream via a commercial DSL connection, which when split 11 ways, was about the same price as dialup, but way faster.
But even then it was still very anarchic. For example, one common perk of such setups for their customers was that traffic inside the LAN would be free. And they'd run searchable file sharing servers and P2P hubs (Direct Connect, usually) inside the net, which members would use to share their file collections.
Some of those actually evolved into "proper" ISPs eventually.
Initially they had only said something off hand that was normal for them, but the whole room was fascinated and asked them questions and they ended up describing as much as they could.
They didn't actually know that much about how it worked or was set up, they were just a regular user.
He might have been a student at Moscow State
https://scribe.rip/p/moscow-state-university-network-built-b...
I don't think it is community owned, but the distinction doesn't seem that important from a customer experience standpoint. The scale and locality of the business is what makes it great. They can care a lot about the network quality because there isn't so much of it that they need to outsource everything. All elements of their infrastructure are not only on battery backup but also standby natural gas generators. My power and water go out before my fiber does. I've never had an outage outside of scheduled maintenance windows.
Then the "efficiency" becomes how much can be extracted from the business and customers
Maybe it's ok that small companies have lifetimes and get replaced, but the problem is that today, there is always a capital pool collecting and the large pools live forever, so maybe they won't collect today, but if they are systematically there at the transition points, then we get big entrenched interests with enough accumulated mass to bend the market rules.
It takes continued good leadership to maintain this status. And once such a company is sold to a public company, it's gone forever.
Yes, non-profits can be fucked up too (as we saw with "Open"AI recently) and cooperative-ownerships can be bought out if one is willing to spend enough money, but it at least raises the bar a significant amount.
Community-owned _physical infrastructure_ (especially last-mile — fiber & copper going to everybody's house) … that needs to be the default.
And if it's not community-owned, it needs to be regulated with open access requirements.
Yes you can theoretically build a second fiber network and hook up people's houses. Yes it has happened in actual practice. But it is commercially questionable and just completely silly.
Around here we have had THREE separate companies drop fiber in the last year (technically not to everyone's house as they only do that last connection when you subscribe) - so my yard now has five fiber lines through it. That's a bit overkill.
They could have had the municipal electric utility run fiber to everyone, and then designate a single building as a POP/exchange and let any company that wanted to run a fat pipe to that and start reselling.
(Edit: eh, I'm too tired, I guess you're arguing there is a monopoly on last-mile infrastructure then, which theoretically doesn't need to be a monopoly. Okay. In most cases it's a monopoly anyway because "over-building" existing last-mile connectivity won't be used by everyone and is thus less profitable.)
There's always less profit potential where there is more competition, which is one reason why people suggest that monopolies are capable of providing higher-quality products (and services).
Interestingly, some local governments are known (or at least have historically) to use their permitting powers to extract significant amounts of money from telecoms and others. I am not really sure what to do about this, but in the early days of power poles, few/no permits were required to use them, and there were many power providers sharing the same poles; it was messy, and contributed to unreliability, but it worked and allowed for competition.
What kind of communist, socialistic talk is this? It's frankly anti-American and hurts the linchpin of the best country on earth, out job creators /s
Despite this ban, many communities in these states have pushed forward.
I have centurylink - ok not a community plan, but it competes directly with T-mobile, Xfinity (comcast), and other cell-based providers, and provides an excellent product for much cheaper.
And I know for a fact that colorado has been fighting the good fight. https://communitynets.org/content/colorado-passes-new-broadb...
It's literally the incumbent Bell provider - back in the day being AT&T and then USWest after the antitrust breakup.
Times certainly have changed for someone to even have this thought, much less write it down!
What are they doing down there? Their governor is literally the Democratic VP nominee.
Then there are regulations like these which are aimed at protecting the investment companies have made into infrastructure, effectively granting them a monopoly.
When people debate this, they often are thinking of the first class of protective regulations that are too onerous on companies, but I think most people like clean drinking water and rivers that no longer catch fire.
Whereas the second class of protection is really harmful to the consumer, and the powers-that-be have effectively been given a monopoly, and with that the money and power to protect their place in the market through continued influence on elections and other things to maintain these rent seeking businesses. We all hate the latter, but these companies have a lot of sway over politicians.
Not sure if that made sense! I pay company B but my fibre connection is provided by Company A. If I want to change to Company C I start a contract with C and the only thing I change is the cable modem.
Laws already regulate that space; what's your point?
> For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges...
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/151
The FCC determines what broadband is, and which companies get federal government subsidies for it. Federal subsidies > state subsidies.
Thank you for confirming my point.
I lived in a city of about 20k, not near any big city. There were two different fiber companies(one utility, one private) and Spectrum offering service. Cookeville, Crossville, McMinnville, Manchester, Tullahoma, etc...cities most probably haven't even heard of, all have generally great FTTH coverage.
The exact opposite is very likely to happen in the next four years, a federal ban on community networks, lobby paid for by the same big telecom that was previously doing it piecemeal at the local level, they'll just buy 100 rooms at that special hotel in DC and the bill will get signed in sharpie like a 5-year-old.
Sure, it will end up at the supreme court in a lawsuit but of course that's a lock too now.
IIRC, North Dakota, despite its Republican voting record, is actually pretty socialist (including a few legitimately state-owned companies).
The real good call out is the coop attitude that has been very strong in ND for decades. Sadly I have seen some of those coops start to spend a lot of money on creating talk shows with extreme political personalities who have little actual knowledge on things.
I would love to see the state go back to being more neighborly & community building. Either way the history of the coop attitude is a great one for building strong communities. Every community should take notice of this.
For rural communities, especially in the early 90s & 00s, having internet access was equivalent to access to an elite private school.
Minnesota had the DFL. North Dakota had the NPL.
Yeah, I think the intrusion of national political culture has been pretty toxic everywhere. IIRC, Heitkamp, the last ND Democrat, lost (or at least had some trouble), because she had to hem and haw on abortion to appease her out-of-state donors and could not adapt to local circumstances. Didn't really follow that election too closely, so I don't really know what else was going on.
You are right. I blame my recollection of it being very "farmer based".
I believe Heitkamp lost to Cramer who was an early Trump backer, in a state that was/(still possibly is) in love with Trump - possibly due to him being 1 of few candidates to ever stop in the state due to lack of electoral votes.
The polarization of the state also gave her no chances of winning. She had won the seat from Sen Conrad (of the Democrat party & in-law of former Republican governor Ed Schafer). Conrad was senator for roughly 26 years. It'll be interesting to see if/when the Dakotas ever goes back to being purple.
IMHO, that'll be when the national political apparatus once allows politicians to be heterodox again. I wouldn't be surprised if Democrats the Dakotas used to reliably send to the federal government were of the "blue dog" variety that's practically extinct (i.e. relatively conservative, especially socially). But with the withering of local media and its replacement with stuff made far away for a national audience (cable news, New York Times, etc.), I think it's more likely things will just polarize more along national lines, since people will know less about their community and pay less attention to it, and instead know a lot more about the dumb national controversy of the day and pay attention to that.
Honestly, I'd kind of like to see some kind of regulation that limits the reach of a media organizations beyond their home regions, to preserve local culture and attitudes. Sort of like Canada's Canadian content requirements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content).
All capitalism does is try and create enclosures and then use that monopoly to jack up prices for people who absolutely do not have to see the negative externalities of those endeavours. It is the most parasitic form of intermediation.
National ISPs are terrible. They shouldn't exist. The best Internet in the US by a mile (and it's not even close) is municipal broadband (eg [1]).
[1]: https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/?#choose-your-plan
But in your corner:
It's true that right now space-based deployment of broadband will provide broadband in locations where it's not currently available - perhaps spurring competition.
It's also probably true that space-based broadband will be able to compete directly with urban / dense areas where Comcast & company have an effective monopoly - also a good thing!
But there's no reason to think it will put comcast/company out of business at all. Has cell-tower based intenet service at all displaced comcast? Verizon and T-Mobile canvas my neighborhood claiming to offer the best internet, but as far as I can tell, everyone still uses Xfinity, even if Centurylink is much, much better.
There's no phone company that made all other phone companies irrelevant.
There's no tv channel that made all other tv channels irrelevant.
And there's no radio station that .. you get it.
And so it's hard for me to concolude that there's some ISP that will make all other ISPs irrelevant. Honestly most people will probably have about a 50/50 split between home wifi and phone internet. And that home wifi might have significant intrusion from space-based ISP, but not completely. (I realize spacex is also hoping to provide some phone service from satellites, but I digress)
I've heard it argued that podcasts make radio obsolete. That is more plausible.
This is much like saying satellite TV made cable TV irrelevant. Or magazines made newspapers irrelevant.
It was supposed to be for recording and playing back images. That was pretty much it. His original aspiration was for it to be employed in educational contexts to help make tge spread of visual information possible.
Now if you're talking TV Broadcasting as an industry, then you're absolutely correct. That was the business model settled on, but not without some foundational hmmm'ing, haww'ing and experimentation in coming up with business models in the radio broadcasting space. The history is in itself an interesting piece of work to dive into.
Now, anything that smells of BFT consensus, open decentralized protocols, smart contracts, distributed computing, gets lumped with “Web3” and downvoted to oblivion. I was surprised Freenet got through the other day without being associated with it, despite having WASM smart contracts and all of it.
Shouldn’t “hackers” welcome building new, disruptive things, especially if they are open source and disrupt entrenched centralized solutions of the entseeking “establishment” cartels? I feel like an old grandpa on HN today, still embracing the “old” “Hacker Ethos” that was being promoted by YC when HN was in its early days.
Has hacker ethos really today shifted to unironically supporting closed, centralized solutions, and attacking most disruptive technology by deriding it, downvoting people who speak about it in any terms other than dismissive, and trying to make sure it doesn’t take off?
It feels a bit like the story of the political left and liberalism — once upon a time the goal of liberals was to make race a non-issue, for instance, but now that same attitude is considered racist by many on the left. Once hackers were anti-establishment in an “information wants to be free” way. To liberate “systems” from “the man” and bust them open. I remember it. It was still the case a mere 10-15 years ago. On today’s “Hacker” News, if you’d look across a large swath of reactions to projects which aim to do just that, you’d never know it…
Why is this bad:
https://qbix.com/blog/2017/12/18/power-to-the-people/
This sub-thread seems to be about using StarLink, which I don't see as any sort of "decentralized" given it is literally global and in effect controlled by one billionaire so hence my question.
Can you prove that?
Is that a reasonable thing to ask, or are we supposed to simply nod along and say “yes, your dogma is correct in 100% of cases”?
For example tell us how these are a grift: FileCoin. UniSwap. Aave. DID and Sidetree protocol (used by bluesky sky).
And decentralized systems go way past blockchains. Email. Heck even the Web itself. If anything I’d say they tend to centralize because of the “grift” which is capturing open protocols and doing rent extraction (eg GMail) or surveillance capitalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
That centralization and control over millioms and billions of people is worse than a grift. Why can’t we talk about disrupting THAT?
It's like there's a swimming pool full of sewage, and sure there might be a new PS5 Pro floating in there, but I'm sure as hell not wading in to find out.
Surely your local neighborhood isn't going to deploy its own dedicated satellite constellation.
If/when satelite broadband becomes widespread, it will likely be consolidated and provided by 1 provider (maybe 2?) which might end up resulting in higher costs for everyone all around.
IMHO, it's a question of capacity and acceptable service levels.
Starlink monthly pricing is higher than my DSL and nearby cable as well as my local muni fiber. But it's not so much higher as to rule it out. And the install fee is a lot lower than muni fiber. It's going to take a long time to get ROI on my installation cost for the muni fiber if I compare monthly cost to Starlink. Muni fiber service level should be much better, but Starlink service would probably have been good enough.
I can’t fathom how many satellites it would take to support all the internet users as a monopoly.
When Verizon laid down fiber optic cable in my (former) neighborhood, it was so much better than Xfinity’s service, and everyone I knew switched.
Not to say that the type of physical cable matters as much, DOCSIS 4.0 is in the cards, but latency and bandwidth will always be better on a (good) wired connection.
One quirk worth mentioning, though, is that WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband (which isn’t everywhere). Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi, the fastest wireless speeds I saw were on ultra-wideband connections to my phone.
> Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi
So after you upgraded your WLAN it was faster than your WAN until you bothered upgrading your WLAN.
That's a personal deployment decision not necessarily a matter of what was or wasn't' available at the time. >1G WiFi existed years before ultra-wideband was a thing.
Calling WiFi 6 >1G is a pretty far stretch. I don't think I've seen a real world test that breaks that barrier in favorable conditions, even with today's routers:
https://evanmccann.net/blog/2022/5/u6-pro-and-u6-mesh-review
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-wi-fi-router...
Whereas ultra-wideband was capable of pulling 2Gbps in 2020, something I have not even seen Wi-Fi 7 able to do. Ultra-wideband still has quite an edge:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ATT/comments/gbr335/this_might_be_a...
So yeah, when the author limits the tests to <1Gb none of the results were >1Gb. Who would have expected those results.
I've had >1G WiFi 5 networks in operation since 2018. It didn't require 6Ghz.
Your equipment or your environment may not have enabled it, but it was around.
Initially assume everyone is spread out uniformly, and that we need a broadband connection for every three people, and that 100 Mbps counts as broadband.
If all connected were in use at the same time downloading at 100 Mbps we need an aggregate bandwidth of 11000 Tbps. Actual usage would be more bursty, so let's assume we can oversell by a factor of 100. That reduced the aggregate bandwidth need to 110 Tbps.
Wikipedia tells me the satellite with the most bandwidth currently are those in the ViaSat-3 constellation of geosynchronous satellites, each with a bandwidth of 1 Tbps. Let's assume we can get LEO satellites with that bandwidth.
We would need 110 to get the required aggregate bandwidth. However, since each satellite only spends roughly 1/8 of its time over the US we need to multiply the number of satellites by 8.
That brings is to 880 satellites, but remember, we were assuming a uniformly spread out population. We need to take into account the non-uniformity of the actual population.
To do that we need to know the ground area that a satellite can serve simultaneously. That depends on the height of the satellite.
Google is telling me Starlink's around around 350 miles up, so let's assume that is what we use too. A naive distance to horizon calculation says that a satellite at that height would have an horizon around 2500 miles away.
I'm not sure if that means it could actually broadcast to people 2500 miles away from whatever its spot is over or if there would be problems due to the shallow angle the signal would have to travel to the receiver.
If each satellite can effectively broadcast to such a large circle then most of the 110 visible at a given time from the US would be visible over a wide enough area that how the population is distributed might not matter much.
This is assuming that the satellites do not interfere with each other. My guess is that there would be interference and they would have to operate more like cellular networks operate, with each satellite having a limited ground area that it broadcasts into using some kind of spot beam.
Feasibility now depends on the size of those spot beams and how accurately they can be aimed. If they can adjust the beams to cover large areas when they are serving a rural area and small areas when serving a dense area, and if they can aim that spot anywhere in that 2000+ mile radius circle where the satellite is visible then 880 satellites may be enough.
If, on the other hand, their beams are pretty much fixed in size and direction, then we would probably need a lot more satellites. Given the area of the US, for everyplace to have coverage the 110 satellites that would be over the US on average would have to each be responsible for a circle of around 200 miles in diameter, and could handle the needs of 3 million people.
If you've got more than 3 million people in a 200 mile circle you'll need more satellites over that circle.
Suppose we have an area that needs several satellites. It might be possible to arrange orbits so particular places always have a lot of satellites so that you could cover that area without having to simply make your constellation bigger.
I have no idea if that is possible. If not you may have to increase you constellation size so that you every place has the number of satellites that your highest density 200 mile diameter circle needs.
I don't think that there is any 200 mile diameter circle in the US that would need more that 20 satellites, which would mean we'd need 17600 satellites in the constellation.
Note that this is quite dependent on the circle size so could be way off from reality. Also I've not considered communications from the ground to the satellite which might also impose constraints.
Conclusion: it doesn't seem obviously impossible to provide 100 Mbps broadband via satellite to everyone in the US. A more detailed analysis is needed.
Comcast is generally in the 20-30 neighborhood, unless you are using their gigabit service, then it is more like 10-15 milliseconds.
So it is higher, but not debilitatingly so (unless your application is very sensitive to latency). I would imagine there is a lot more jitter in Starlink, but that is more a feel than real numbers.
Mainly on a terrestrial system you wind up bouncing through more substations on the way to the general Internet, whereas with Starlink you are generally bouncing straight from your dish to the satellite to the base station. So less bounces, but farther to go. The physics favors the wire, but not as much as it used to.
Space-based internet makes total sense for very remote areas or as a bridge technology, as well as a technology to compete with incumbent terrestrial monopolies, but I'd hate to see fiber and terrestrial 5G rollouts stopping entirely in favor of it.
It's the characteristic of the 21th century, trading resiliency and robustness for performance. As long as the world is stable, it's nice.
Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, N Carolina, Pennsylvania, S Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
FL, LA, and NE are called out as having the worst prohibitions
With recent events I imagine the difference is going to decrease a bit, but I don't think it'll be the same within 4yrs.
It exists in the West. It's bad that it exists in the West. But it exists less in the West than in some other places, and that difference matters.
I recall an econ class from ages ago that compared two middle-income countries. In one, there was a strong central government, so the corruption was relatively organized and predictable. The economy was harmed by the corruption, but still functioned, grew, and helped to reduce poverty.
In the other country, the central and regional governments were weak, so nearly every interaction with government officials (police, judges, customs, etc.) resulted in some kind of bribe with highly variable costs. This dramatically slowed down and reduced economic activity and increased poverty.