There is a case to be made that much of the tearing up of the streets is a function of people laying down multiple communication infrastructures along side each other. We looked though the permits for the last 12 months and compared that activity to a on-going repaving and road maintenance work. There are several interesting variables at play in that, cost to maintain (tax based), property tax (revenue), new permits (revenue). If you consider switching the physical layer to an infrastructure basis you eliminate multiple fiber/copper paths under the street, multiple fiber/copper vaults in sidewalks and on street corners, and replace them with a common set of conduits. That helps a number of costs, site surveys for digs, delays for city work, and multiple trenching/paving jobs with different standards of integrity. My city, Sunnyvale, is dealing with ways to make maintaining the city more efficient. This sort of change helps that in ways that are not immediately obvious to folks because they happen with dozens of different actors across dozens of different departments.
My goal is to get the city thinking differently about communications (more like roads and sewers than 'optional thing some folks have') so that we can move past the current hodgepodge into a more efficient and maintainable system. If I can get my city to change, then other cities can see the change and see how it helps or hurts and decide independently to change. As a particularly tech savvy city we have a strong alignment with citizens who want better communications, and we've seen from places like Kansas with Google fiber that such communications upgrades increase property values, which increases property tax revenues. My hope is we can get everyone (communication providers, city, citizens) all aligned on this idea. If so it will get done.
Basically, many cities have much more pressing problems than telecom infrastructure. Not to mention that federally, the FCC holds jurisdiction and thus final say over what cities can and can't do. What may look like standardization to you in Sunnyvale starts to look like a hodgepodge of municipal implementations at a federal level, and the FCC may stop you from standardizing at the local level until they've developed standards at the federal level. It's bureaucracy at its finest; but it does serve a purpose.
The second thing that is interesting is that having a city maintained connectivity infrastructure actually has some positive social justice aspects as it starts to chip away at the digital divide. Once existing contracts have expired and the city is in a position to change things (current single provider contracts don't allow for this) a charitable organization could be an "ISP" without the cost of maintaining the physical plant to/from the subscribers. This greatly expands the available market and gives at risk populations more accessibility. Currently kids study at the city library (which has publicly accessible Internet) rather than at home.
Keep them coming folks, these are exactly the sorts of things we're trying to surface and look at.
Wired broadband, to me, is more of an entertainment consumption platform. Wireless serves the needs of low-bandwidth information consumption quite well these days, and at a significantly lower cost and better market dynamics. Wouldn't a city be better served by pushing Wi-Fi or 4G? Especially given the mass adoption of smartphones by all segments of the economy.
The solution when you want to have "wireless" devices but there isn't enough wireless spectrum is to use wireless for the "last 50 meters" rather than the last mile. In other words, you have fiber to the premises and then WiFi within the building. By keeping the wireless power levels as low as possible you reduce the number of other users you're sharing the spectrum with and allow each user to have a satisfactory amount of bandwidth. Then reserve cellular wireless for users not in a building, e.g. accessing a map from your car, and have all manner of stupid bandwidth caps to discourage usage of cellular wireless whenever it isn't strictly necessary.
> Is a mesh network an answer?
No. Mesh networks would allow you to have more bandwidth per user by reducing wireless power levels and shrinking the geographic size of the collision domain, but that would require peers to act as repeaters between other peers and the tower. That's an epic fail. It adds latency, reduces battery life, impacts reliability if any peer's device is flaky, has security implications, etc. Wireless mesh networks ironically work much better for fixed-position devices than mobile devices, because they can use directional antennas, don't have the extreme power constraints mobile devices do, etc.
The biggest advantage of a wired home broadband connection over a wireless one that I see is the ability to stream video. A wired connection has a lot of disadvantages: it's useless outside the home and the infrastructure is significantly more expensive. Wireless has signal and coverage issues for sure, but wireless is a much more competitive industry than wired access in no small part because it's cheaper to deploy.
I don't think it would be going out on a limb to say the HN audience is much wealthier and more technology-literate than the average citizen, and thus would be more likely to want multiple Internet connections and have more use cases such as running file servers, etc. I think the HN crowd overestimates what people use their Internet connections for; the average person uses their home broadband connection primarily to watch video. It's not a bad use case by any means; but I'm not sure the government needs to be building infrastructure that will be primarily used by video streaming companies. Traditional cellular wireless (which can use any mix of wireless, wired or satellite backhaul depending on the application) and Wi-Fi are flexible enough to cover the "access" part of Internet access; especially in an increasingly post-PC world.
Excluding today's most demanding use case doesn't get you anywhere. If you need a wired connection for that then you need a wired connection. The installed base of smartphones and tablets is still growing significantly and that's going to eat any technological improvements you can make to cellular and then some. Meanwhile people still want to be able to watch Netflix on a tablet from the back of a minivan, and to be able to make that happen at scale you're going to have to remove as much other traffic from the cellular network as possible.
> Wireless is easier to deploy and as its use grows, more spectrum will likely open up. Free markets have the benefit of deploying scarce resources where they are most in demand.
Free markets can't change the laws of physics. Allocating more spectrum is a linear increase. 20% more spectrum costs billions of dollars and only makes it 20% faster. The market solution when there is a high demand scarce resource is to shift usage to a resource that isn't as scarce for any use case where the alternative resource is viable. There is a reason one of the first things you already do when you get to a friend's house for the first time is ask for the WiFi password, and it's not because there is no cellular coverage.
> The biggest advantage of a wired home broadband connection over a wireless one that I see is the ability to stream video.
The advantage is that it allows you to transfer more bits cheaply. Today's most prevalent use case for that is streaming video, sure. It's hardly the only one. Anything that requires uploading or downloading large amounts of data is a bad fit for cellular. And we can't predict what interesting applications will become commonplace once the typical connection is 1Gbps.
> A wired connection has a lot of disadvantages: it's useless outside the home and the infrastructure is significantly more expensive.
The infrastructure is significantly more expensive, once. The cost to maintain fiber is not materially different than the cost to maintain copper. And it's not useless outside the home when everybody else has one too. If you're at home you have WiFi. At work? WiFi. Friend's house? Coffee house? Hotel? WiFi. About the only fixed places there is no WiFi are the places there is also no cellular, like the middle of the woods.
Using cellular when you're in a building with WiFi doesn't make sense. Using cellular when you're on the move does -- and that's the use case we should be preserving the scarce wireless spectrum for, by using wired connections everywhere else.
You're right; and costs to maintain copper run about 5-10% of initial costs PER YEAR. Physical networks with lots of endpoints are very expensive to maintain.
We already have physical networks. Maintaining them is a fixed cost.[1] You can't eliminate it because you can't reasonably expect to replace the entirety of Cable TV and U-verse with cellular, so the money might as well be going to maintain fiber rather than copper.
I'm not trying to be sarcastic here -- this is how the government thinks about things. We have an existing infrastructure that is less than optimal, but it still functions and is in no danger of imminent collapse. Contrast with our healthcare system which barely functions and is on the verge of effective collapse. Or our public schools and police departments, which have collapsed in a number of cities.
In short, it's hard to drum up political support for large infrastructure projects even if you can show the need. There has to be a demonstrable catastrophic impact if we don't do the project, which just isn't the case with broadband.
Wireless isn't this huge gamechanger that people may think. To beat shannon's law you would need so many base stations in the long term it looks awfully like what we have now with DSL/Fiber/DOCSIS and wifi APs.
I use my phone for almost everything else: online shopping, communication, news consumption, even work since I tether my laptop to it when I'm on the go. It's a lot more convenient; and the only thing I really need high bandwidth for is media playback.
Not that fiber is particularly "easy", looking over street maps and figuring out what sort of bundles/routing you need to get full coverage is quite an exercise in itself.
[1] http://www.lightreading.com/optical/400g-terabit/euronews-bt...
I guess I remain unconvinced how this is not effectively a subsidy to the media companies (Netflix et. al; including Comcast once they start offering a cable-over-internet product) given that the primary use case of wired high-speed internet access is overwhelmingly streaming video (since over 80% of Internet traffic is streaming video). I also don't imagine it would lower costs significantly over a company like Comcast in the long run; the margins aren't great on a business like that and line maintenance is much more expensive long-term than people realize.
How do you figure? I pay $30/month each for wireless & wired services. My wired services are unlimited; wireless is capped.
From there, the city can just lease the space on a basis of (meters * diameter * demand coefficient for a particular route)
Does such a standardized conduit design exist?
They'll choose D. Build a new sportsball arena
Citi Field in New York: $900 million
Allianz Arena in Munich: 340€ million
Sounds like the U.S. already has such regulation - anti-trust regulation. As ChuckMcM noted above, the problem is that Comcast has a monopoly over the last mile. Effective and enforced anti-trust regulations would break up this monopoly into several different competing companies.
BTW, here in Israel, the government apparently has taken the position that services requiring significant infrastructure investment (Internet or cellular networks) are best handled by handing out a limited number of licenses using a bid. We then get an oligopoly where the companies are wildly profitable, until the government has decided we got the infrastructure we wanted, and removes the barrier to entry. Specifically for Internet, we have a duopoly over the last mile "going until the city exchange" to put it in ChuckMcM's terms, then a lot of ISPs taking it from there. IMO, not a bad way to go - we don't pay a lot and get decent Internet everywhere in the country.
And given that, lets move the infrastructure into the same place, city owned/maintained raw pipes, company services accessible by those pipes.
I don't think that is a hard choice at all. I've see what happens when the government tries to 'overhaul the education system', and it isn't pretty. I'd rather they stay out of that market and leave it to the local governments. Laying fiber on the other hand, that they may be able to accomplish.
Fiber optics are awesome now. Fiber optics were awesome in the 2000s, and the 90s, and the 80s, and the 70s...
Quantum fiber isn't a thing. Nobody has even proposed anything to replace fiber with and copper has lasted more than a hundred years. You can get Tbps out of fiber so we should be good for a while. If somebody invents something to replace fiber with, we can deal with that when it happens (probably a hundred years from now).
It's worth pointing out the economic benefit to whoever invents the Next Big Thing -- if they make it compatible with existing conduit, it can just be pulled through replacing existing infrastructure.
It turns out the only irreplaceable part is the tubes.
Think datacenters, high density offices and apartments, Level 3's long haul links, etc. They will all be looking for a way to pull Next Big Thing like it was fiber.
This is what the condemnation process is for. The government is unlikely to have to spend $500B to rebuild it; probably much less for the depreciated capital.
> Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't. All I have to do is look at the pothole-strewn roads outside my house to know that.
I wouldn't judge that quality of municipal infrastructure maintenance by the number of potholes, because fuel taxes pay for road maintenance, and many jurisdictions haven't raised fuel taxes in decades (i.e. they're not keeping up with inflation).
Instead, you might look to your water, sewage, garbage and electricity services - there, public utilities score quite well, and it's because they're usually not operating at a significant loss.
I hear this criticism quite a bit, but I really don't understand. Do we have any evidence at all that the government is actually less efficient, less trustworthy than private companies? The problem we're discussing is caused by private companies not living up to their responsibilities. There are endless examples of this other places as well.
Sure, there are dangers inherent in public services that are not present in private, but the inverse is true as well.
What we're talking about in this specific instance is infrastructure that is a societal benefit, and if that doesn't fall into the domain of public government, I don't know what does.
Pretty sure that's a false dichotomy, there's no reason you can't have both (given a few years).
US military budget is ~$650 billion. Is that more important than investing in an educational system that desperately needs overhauling?
>But criley2, how do we spend trillions if $500B is larger than our budget
Discretionary budget, not mandatory spending like social security or welfare.
$500B is an enormous sum of money, it truly is.
$500B/10Y would still be an incredibly large sum subject to an incredible amount of corruption and graft...
But actually we did have an opportunity to reboot last-mile networks from scratch, because FTTx is essentially all-new network.
For example, last week, they were tearing up the street in front of my building to put in new sewer lines. I don't even want to speculate what that might have cost. But now that the work is done, to lay fibre, they'll have to do it again. If, instead, they'd said, "Well, while we're here, let's just drop some conduit for fibre", and continued to do that going forward, a national FTTx last-mile infrastructure would cost considerably less.
It wouldn't be free, of course. It's not merely "[dropping] some conduit", and there are plenty of places where they'd probably have to tear up the streets just for this purpose anyway. But, if every time we tore up the street for unrelated work, we leveraged that to put in place the FTTx-relevant things we'd also need to tear up the street for, we'd be so much closer, and at so much lower a cost...
I know they literally work on sewers, but they aren't dumb. They understand their business better than random people on the Internet do.
That said, it kinda blows my mind that someone on HN would actually think I was talking about the people laying the sewer line when I said, "Well, while we're here..." Were you straw-manning, or did you really just not think that one through?
Most common, SewerCo says "pay for half of our digging costs" and FibreCo says "You're getting paid by the city to dig it up already! Why should we pay again?"and round and round we go. Also, if either SewerCo or FibreCo's work has delays, then there's another whole drama about who pays/is responsible for additional work, penalties, and so on. And the respective Project Managers don't give a rat's ass about the other company since hitting their budget/timeline is the only thing that matters.
Seems like something that can (and should) be worked out, but unless local government steps in and mediates/forces their hand there doesn't seem to be a great urgency. Locally (in NZ) ElectricCo and FibreCo are starting to be the same company in a number of cases, in which case "stop arguing and just do it" is just a management edict.
Sadly, that last sentence is the kicker. "As long as there is the budget." There's no line-item in the city budget for building a municipal data network that covers the last mile (Seattle has a rather sizable not-quite-last-mile fiber network).
The problem is that we're not starting from scratch. It's a lot harder for the government to justify that expense when there are a number of viable privately-owned alternatives. Or to put it another way: if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose?
Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't. All I have to do is look at the pothole-strewn roads outside my house to know that. Fiber optics are awesome now; but what happens in 10 years when we need a new type of quantum fiber made from carbon nanotubes to go faster? Will the cities be able to make the investments? I have my doubts given the overall poor state of municipal infrastructure around the country for things like water and sewage.
The system we have now is far from perfect, but we're going to need to figure out how to make something work within the confines of what we have today: a privately owned and operated physical infrastructure controlled by a small number of companies. How do we craft regulation such that those companies are more profitable when they do what we want them to do?