A Note about Net Neutrality and Why We Support It

[LordEntrails]

I will say that I currently support Net Neutrality. I believe it is needed because of the reasons outlined by others. And because in short, it is not yet a competitive service and far from a commodity.

Someday, I hope it will become like a commodity and then there will be little need for regulation. Some new technologies/delivery systems that are being developed that may bring significant competition to the cable companies include Facebook's UAV effort and efforts to provide comprehensive service by mounting systems on commercial airlines. Neither are what I would consider break through technologies, but they are a step further towards removing geographic costs and increasing overall competition.

Here's hoping for a world in which government regulation is not necessary, but realizing such will probably never be possible without sacrifices most are unwilling to make.

[JeffKnight]

Food for thought. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rural-a...ville-georgia/

$40,000 per mile of fiber optic cable. If there's 20 customers that are 50 miles from the nearest city, that's 2 million dollars of fiber optic cable for 20 customers. Most likely that number is higher unless all 20 residents live next to each other given how sparse rural communities are. Chances are that number is far higher for maintaining all the wire and paying for work crews to dig it up.

Regarding those companies not improving to fiber, you're asking them to dig up and install new wire for a small rural customer base, it's not even economically beneficial. Companies don't do this out of the good of their heart, and I doubt another company will move in to provide that oft toted 'superior' service. Unless that rural community suddenly becomes a profitable market, they will ignore it unless they have investment opportunities. That's essentially a waiting game where the community slowly shows viability while other counties and towns immediately get the economic benefit of fiber for making that 'sweet heart deal'. It's all trade offs. If a city council is getting demand from businesses for faster internet threatening possible relocation, they'll be more willing to make these telecom exclusivity deals.

There's all this 'but i can switch to another company' but what other company would be willing to take that cost trade off without incentive? And if they take that incentive they need county or federal sweetheart dollars to make the investment. Companies aren't going to throw around money like that without a deal to their benefit, often a exclusivity deal. I feel there are people that don't really understand the economics of the situation as to why those monopolies exist; not that they're good, but it's a part of why there is cable in the first place absent of a feasible market. To then take that and use it as a weapon against Net Neutrality because 'regulation is bad' is adolescent.

Net neutrality is akin to Federal banking regulations but for your data. Bank's can't do a lot of fishy activity with the money you entrusted them to safe hold. Likewise, ISPs can't do fishy information that you transfer over their wires given that you 'paid' for it. For the analogy to a highway, without Net Neutrality ISPs can make it so that only red cars can go in the fast lane and that even plates are limited to 30 mph on the weekend. In addition, they can close exits outright to locations they wish to steer traffic away from, forcing the use of side roads.. or even block access to that location entirely. Speed isn't their only gating factor, they can discriminate against locations and even ban all silver cars from accessing exits 20 -> 34.

Do you really want to give ISPs that power? Going back to the rural question, if you only have 1 ISP, do you want them to have it given you have no other alternative? If you have another ISP, great, perhaps competition can make data privacy protections/access marketable, but this isn't like pizza shops, chances are you'll have 3 to choose from if you're lucky and even then all 3 of them will be looking towards profit so hoping that the market will drive a privacy advocate to the surface is akin to hoping that Lucifer is a good person sometimes.

The biggest issue here is that most areas aren't asking for fiber to the premises. Many would be happy with just plain ol' coax but upgraded nodes. The cable node infrastructure in the area where my dad lives is 30+ years old (in that it hasn't had a complete/major upgrade in my lifetime). There are 1200 people in the village limits, and 1 cable company and 1 telephone company. The phone lines are even older than the cable co's and can't do DSL.

[Ken L]

The biggest issue here is that most areas aren't asking for fiber to the premises. Many would be happy with just plain ol' coax but upgraded nodes. The cable node infrastructure in the area where my dad lives is 30+ years old (in that it hasn't had a complete/major upgrade in my lifetime). There are 1200 people in the village limits, and 1 cable company and 1 telephone company. The phone lines are even older than the cable co's and can't do DSL.

Node upgrades don't provide as much of a speed boost as laying upgraded cable, and still cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per node. It's really a market viability problem. Given you mentioned 1,200 population, that's a small customer base assuming around 500 or less house holds with 75% of them purchasing a plan. It would take decades to pay off the initial cable laying, and perhaps a dozen to half a dozen years to break even on node upgrades.

These are businesses after all, and they factor volume of customers per mile of laid cable when they decide to upgrade parts of their network. I don't know if your county has a deal for getting the initial cable laid or even if that exclusivity deal has an expiration date. The best you can hope for is to contact your assemblyman/woman to figure out what the ground game is, and if they can twist some strings to get the ISP to upgrade. Chances are the deck is in the ISP's hand already as ~500 customers is an acceptable loss if the 'big stick' employed is losing access to those customers leaving them with no ISP.

If ISPs become a public utility then more pressure could be had, but rulings on that have varied. in NY the push is strong and the state can strong arm ISPs to provide a minimum of broadband for rural areas in our state. Sometimes regulation is good, intelligent regulation, I'm really tied of the 'get off my lawn' folks who scream free market until the market turns around and f----s them as it sees them as expendable.

[swbuza]

Laying replacement coax cable is more expensive then placing new fiber.

[swbuza]

Also, I'd point out that the take rate is nowhere near 75%. It's less than 50% and often less than 30%. I have done the network design work for several thousand miles of cable. The economics are ugly and neither regulation nor public ownership will ever fix that in rural America. I have places in my footprint with fiber passing by 150,000 homes and can't even get a 40% take rate. That's in an urban area. If people aren't buying it there, you can't cost justify building it in podunkville.

I have been involved in dozens of community ventures where local townspeople decided they weren't going to wait for the telco's to place fiber and they applied for various grants like USDA Rural Development, Telecom Infrastructure program, Community Development Block Grants, and various Universal Service Fund projects through the FCC. It starts out with a great idea and people are motivated, and 95% of them fail for economic reasons. I've seen it over and over and over again over the last 20+ years I've been in this industry.

Telco's and CableCo's tend to operate on very thin margins; most of them haven't seen a profit in a decade, competition is fierce, buyouts are common (I just got laid off during a buyout in fact). It's not a pretty picture; and most of the problem in the industry is related to existing regulations that make it almost impossible to build out networks organically due to things like "provider of last resort" requirements, etc. Until people buy what is already in place, I just don't see a whole lot of future investment on the horizon.

[Andraax]

These are all reason why our group went wireless. Only one end of the wireless network needed to be attached to wire / fiber. The rest were a strung out series of wireless repeaters, going a couple hundred miles into areas where there was no wires. Much cheaper to build out than wire / fiber.

[swbuza]

These are all reason why our group went wireless. Only one end of the wireless network needed to be attached to wire / fiber. The rest were a strung out series of wireless repeaters, going a couple hundred miles into areas where there was no wires. Much cheaper to build out than wire / fiber.

What kind of bandwidth capabilities are you achieving with wireless backhaul? We did some stuff like this along the coast to reach small island communities where undersea cable was on the order of $250K per mile, but it was pretty well limited to single digits in Gbps. It doesn't tend to replace DWDM as far as I know, meaning it's not going to scale for a carrier.

Maybe the wireless technology has come along in the last few years and I've lost touch. Was this a pure residential play, or were there some anchor enterprise institutions involved?

[Andraax]

What kind of bandwidth capabilities are you achieving with wireless backhaul? We did some stuff like this along the coast to reach small island communities where undersea cable was on the order of $250K per mile, but it was pretty well limited to single digits in Gbps. It doesn't tend to replace DWDM as far as I know, meaning it's not going to scale for a carrier.

Maybe the wireless technology has come along in the last few years and I've lost touch. Was this a pure residential play, or were there some anchor enterprise institutions involved?

There has since been fiber laid through my area, so I'm no longer with that group. At the time (starting 2004 to like 2011) it was less than 10Mbps at the endpoint (I'm thinking around 5? 6?), but that was *worlds faster* than -0-. :-) And for the time, 5Mbps was reasonable. I'm sure the tech has improved over time. It was mostly residential, small businesses, and local governments. Everyone involved bought their own equipment (antenna, radio modem, amp, etc.) and paid a monthly fee which supported the repeaters. At the time, without their service, I couldn't even get ADSL from the phone company.

[Ken L]

It looks like net neutrality will be repealed some time after thanksgiving given the current dynamic and FCC chairman. It will be interesting to see what happens. For myself and those with the financial means to purchase 'high priority' access, it'll be more costly. For those out in low populated areas; well.. . .However Some states have vowed to require enforcement of it within their borders while there's a case by the network conglomerates (comcast, time warner, verizon etc..) to prevent states from doing that at the federal level as it would make their interstate commerce 'difficult'.

I'm very curious how supporters of its repeal will react when the effects start to sink in. It won't be immediate but will it be akin to a frog in boiling water?

[Marswipp]

Only if it ever gets that far off base, sadly. From what I've heard, the vote will be in December. All we can do is wait to be disappointed for one reason or another.