Final comment before I shut up: The idiots I'm thinking of in all cases
DID bring service to people who previously didn't have service. So it's
not as though the program was entirely useless. I'm not aware of a
circumstance where the operator didn't put in a a real effort to reach
the unserved households they were supposed to reach. So I'm not
accusing anyone of fraud and I'm not saying rural broadband funding is
inherently bad. You will also never, ever, read a story about someone
who got broadband funding to build cable on a road and actually built
cable on that road because that's just not an interesting thing to disect.
I guess I'm just saying sometimes there are dumb people, and sometimes
they end up in a position where there are consequences to what they do.
I think if we're already primed to assume fraud and corruption then we
look at suboptimal outcomes and assume there's fraud and corruption there.
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
On 3/5/2021 1:11 PM, Mathew Howard wrote:
Well, no, if somebody is saying he can do 100 down AND UP with CBRS
LTE, he's just plain lying (or an idiot), even if it is only 1 cpe...
and it's in the same room as the eNB.
On Fri, Mar 5, 2021, 11:51 AM Adam Moffett <dmmoff...@gmail.com
<mailto:dmmoff...@gmail.com>> wrote:
I've seen physical audits to confirm that when we submitted for
reimbursement for 100 base stations that we actually deployed 100
base stations. There are financial audits of course, and they'll
harp on any perceived irregularity until they're satisfied.
Sometimes the physical auditor wants to see some examples of
deployed CPE.
In NY Connect and NY Broadband, the project plans had to be
reviewed by an outside engineering firm chosen by NY State. That
firm was supposed to assess the technical feasibility of the
project. For wireless coverage we had to tell the firm how we
projected coverage and they attempted to duplicate it and confirm
that it wasn't made up. But if they were told "the system has
xxDb of gain and coverage is projected to -90RSSi because this
spec sheet here says the CPE will connect at -90" then that's what
they'll go by to verify that you projected it accurately. If
anybody just drew a circle they would not have made it past the
feasibility study.
I never saw or heard of a "testing node" to verify coverage in the
field, but if they could raise it to the CPE height used in the
projection and measure down to the signal shown on the map, then
it would have been totally fine.
If you had a reasonable projection of coverage and a reasonable
projection of capacity then you'd pass feasibility study. The
issue is I don't think anybody put the coverage and capacity side
by side and said "you can't connect -xx RSSI and ALSO sell yy
Mbps. It's one or the other".
.....see I think the difference is you're assuming there's graft
or corruption when the reality is that it's just an idiot operator
who's being managed by an idiot regulator. The system will catch
the truly incompetent people, but if the operator is marginally
competent and also can talk a good game then he can get funded.
It might help if he also plays golf with a senator, but that's not
strictly a requirement (nobody I was involved with did that level
of hobnobbing). See most people on this list are here saying
"100Mbps disqualifies me as a WISP from getting this funding."
But right now, there's some clown saying, "I can do 100Mbps with
my CBRS LTE." And he's RIGHT as long as he's careful about how
many subs per base station and what SNR's he's connecting, but
he'll be WRONG if he promises to do that for every census block
out in the woods. In spite of being wrong, he can produce
documents from the vendor and empirical testing to "prove" he's
right. He's only wrong when all the pieces come together.
-Adam
On 3/5/2021 12:21 PM, Steve Jones wrote:
I see traffic counters set up on random rural roads for no good
reason (probably is a good reason) all over. There isnt any
reason to not have official testing nodes (I thought there were)
to verify. Wireless coverage can be propagated, and should be
more than a circle on a map. I didnt like it when this all began,
When we were providing our data to one of the mapping agents I
called for assistance, basically was told to lie(ish). list our
coverage of what we "could" cover within 7 days. and that was
very loose, we had tranzeos laying around and that was enough for
"could cover". Irritated me to be grey area honest
On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 11:03 AM Adam Moffett <dmmoff...@gmail.com
<mailto:dmmoff...@gmail.com>> wrote:
A lot of them already work that way. In NY you don't get a
grant until you've built something and then you get
reimbursed for it. CAF gives you monthly distributions and
does not cover any up front capital at all. I haven't seen
every program, but the ones I have seen all required you to
spend your own money first and then get reimbursed after.
But think about why does that even matter? The two sources
of data they have are both unreliable:
1. Reports from the end user who's ignorant.
2. Reports from the operator who might also be ignorant (or
liar).
They'll have what % of users are bitching at us, and how good
are the excuses from the operator. Whether you distribute the
funding before or after construction won't change that.
Distributing afterwards means you can't take the money, buy a
ferrari, and drive to Mexico.
Besides....LOT's of people build shit networks with their own
money.
On 3/5/2021 11:53 AM, Steve Jones wrote:
this is why i wish they would go to recovery awards. you get
your money AFTER you serve the area and verify. A whole lot
less grift when playing with your own money. Ill get shot
here, but I think no funding for anything other than a
hardline solution like fiber should be available anywhere
within X miles of any town of population.
On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 10:39 AM Adam Moffett
<dmmoff...@gmail.com <mailto:dmmoff...@gmail.com>> wrote:
There's too much emphasis on Mbps, but my guess is the
political decision makers observe that cable and fiber
companies selling 100M+ generate fewer complaints from
constituents than wireless operators offering 25Mbps.
<rant mode>
I'm not going to name any names, but I've seen a few
grant funded wireless networks who qualified for funding
by "offering" 25mbps that they couldn't actually deliver
consistently. You can do 25Mbps if load isn't too high,
SNR is good enough, not too many inefficient low mod
stations, etc. If the design is built with maximal
capacity in mind, then you can do 25Mbps for sure, but
to qualify for funding they typically have to hit every
household in a geographic area so they focus too heavily
on coverage rather than capacity. They'll get
projections showing coverage down to a -80 RSSI when
really they couldn't deliver that 25Mbps consistently
unless everybody was getting -65 or better. (I saw one
using -90 for projecting coverage in a grant
application, and ALSO using excessively generous system
gains in their link budget based on recommendations from
some fool doing tech support at the VAR.)
There's reasoning motivated by the requirements of the
funding. They're told they HAVE to offer 25mbps AND
they HAVE to cover 100% of the people in a given area,
and they end up stretching to try to make both things
true when they really can't ever both be true at the
same time. They'll never admit it. They've made it true
in their own minds so they can talk to the regulators
about it and feel that they aren't lying. End result is
a funded network with poor performance and constituents
bitching at somebody about it. The politician getting
bitched at doesn't understand the root cause and
couldn't prequalify applicants on any other criteria so
they just increase the required Mbps.
I think usually these guys aren't really liars, they're
just ignorant. They listen to a vendor telling them a
product can deliver eleventy thousand Mbps without
understanding the qualifying conditions. They'll test
with one or two CPE with perfect signal to "prove" that
it's true. I think they're honestly surprised when they
call me in to troubleshoot and I have to tell them that
there's not much wrong with their network and it just
can't do what they're trying to do. There's really
nothing to fix except go to each CPE location and try to
make them all 30 SNR.
If you have to qualify for a grant by offering 100Mbps
to EVERY household in EVERY eligible census block in an
entire town, then you are going to have to do it with
fiber or coax. There will still be people trying it
with wireless, but they'll only be the most egregious
liars and fools. Eventually the government agencies
will stop being technology agnostic and just say "no
fixed wireless".
<disclaimer>I do know some things, but I don't actually
know what motivates this specific decisions. That part
is conjecture.</disclaimer>
</rant mode>
On 3/5/2021 10:20 AM, Mathew Howard wrote:
You would think that since they bothered coming up with
excuses why the current standard isn't good enough,
they could at least come up with a number based on
their imagined need, instead of just coming up with a
random number with no basis in anything other than
"100/100 sounds good".
It's not that hard... according to them, Zoom needs
3.8mbps upload per 1080p stream (and obviously
everybody in the house absolutely needs to be using
1080p), so lets say a lot of households are running 5
simultaneous Zoom sessions (which I'm guessing is
actually fairly rare)... that's 19Mbps, so throw in
some overhead and make it, say 25Mbps. That's
realistically going to be way more upload bandwidth
than the vast majority of people ever need, so why
exactly do we need to make the standard four times that?
I guess it's one way to only fund fiber, which probably
isn't a terrible idea if we're going to insist on
throwing tax payer money away on such projects.
On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 10:21 PM Steve Jones
<thatoneguyst...@gmail.com
<mailto:thatoneguyst...@gmail.com>> wrote:
As long as they're tossing arbitrary numbers for
need out there without any fact based justification
I think we should get carte blanche to do as we
please to make it happen. No need for ROW, we will
take the O out of OTARD and give it a big fat
REeeee. Dont want us running cable through your
living room to your neighbors house? Move. That 300
year old oak is in the way? Federal money for
husqvarna solutions. 1 watt per mhz? F that, 1.12
gigawatt at the cpe. We will burn those
obstructions out of the way, make it disappear like
micheal j fox in a Polaroid.
On Thu, Mar 4, 2021, 9:29 PM Ryan Ray
<ryan...@gmail.com <mailto:ryan...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Just create another CBRS database and let's get
a huge swath of spectrum dedicated to PTMP
without huge fees for rural areas. Lots of
places where we could service 700-800 people if
only more spectrum was available and it
wouldn't impact anyone else in that band. If it
does? Shut it off. Spectrum feels like such a
wasted resource. We could be doing so much more
with it, we understand how it propagates and
software can now handle that on the fly in
order to allocate to as many people as
possible. I honestly think a fluid and dynamic
database like this is the future of wireless.
On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 5:45 PM Steve Jones
<thatoneguyst...@gmail.com
<mailto:thatoneguyst...@gmail.com>> wrote:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/4/22312065/fcc-highspeed-broadband-service-ajit-pai-bennet-angus-king-rob-portman
<https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/4/22312065/fcc-highspeed-broadband-service-ajit-pai-bennet-angus-king-rob-portman>
Meth and kickbacks. They need to just free
up 500mhz-120ghz for just WISP use. Then
each wisp can have a ton of spectrum to get
that porn to every device
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