Re: Muni broadband sucks (was: New minimum speed for US broadband connections)

[Harry McGregor]

Hi,

Glass and Copper (and aluminum) infrastructure is a natural monopoly, 
similar to water service.


It was purely by chance IMHO that we ended up with Cable Co and Tel Co 
internet competing with each other in many locations in the US.


That was aided by the following:

 * Technology for TV over telephone wire really did not exist at the time
 * Telcos were not very interested in PayTV at the time
 * Technology for Telephone over Coax really did not exist at the time
 * Cable Co's were not very interested in Telephone service at the time

Basically they were viewed as two very different businesses, with very 
different physical plant needs.  Now both of them are primarily fiber 
based, with Coax or Telephone Wire (in many cases you can not even call 
it twisted pair) as the very last interconnect segment.


We can all agree with hind sight (and a lot of us at the time) that the 
Tel Co's made some very stupid decisions. Perfect example being 
installing remote DLC/SLC units when the demand for analog dial tone 
skyrocketed, along with more copper in the ground/on poles in 
neighborhoods. At first this blocked ADSL deployment until remote DSLAMs 
were installed, then it turns out most were NOT close enough to enable 
VDSL2 or g.FAST for the majority of customers serviced by them. They 
were both "in the way" and "too far away" at the same time. If instead 
of the DLC/SLC units the Tel Cos had instead favored (with the correct 
tariffs) moving any residential customer who requested a second POTS 
line to ISDN BRI, they would have saved all of the physical plant work, 
which has turned out to be a horrible investment.


We learned a long time ago that water lines, sewer lines, and electric 
lines were natural monopolies, and should either have a municipal 
granted license, or should be run by the municipality.


The next generation last mile will almost have to be a similar structure 
for Layer 1 and a form of Layer 2, with Layer 3 and above services being 
sold by anyone who wants to provide the service. This will collapse 
Cable Co, Tel Co, and independent ISPs onto the same physical 
infrastructure.  This will work well for dense locations of course.


Wireless ISPs, and LEO based ISPs will still of course have a major role 
to play for at least several decades if not more.


I also agree entirely that most consumers will "pay the ISP too much" 
for service they "don't need".  I have worked with several people who 
were paying for Gigabit Cable Service, with 30Mbit upload, or in 
Spectrum territory, they had 400Mbit service with 20Mbit upload, and the 
"downgrade" was 200Mbit service with 10Mbit upload. Being as that was a 
single individual with very low upload needs beyond video meetings, I 
recommended he downgrade to the 200/10 service. In all cases, a proper 
WiFi network and wireless offloading has made far more difference vs 
upping the cable co speeds. My personal sweet spot right now is 100/20 
business cable or 100/100 small business fiber (for the few spots that 
have GPON service in Tucson). The next tier of business cable is 200/20, 
and I find the extra 100Mbit download really does not change much. If it 
was 200/30 or 200/40, I would probably consider it.


None of the realities of current "needs" and "wants" really are going to 
change the financial need to consolidate physical networks. 
Unfortunately instead of it being a Layer1/2 provider and L3+ 
competition, most Internet networks in new developments around here are 
being deployed as physical layer and service monopolies. The home 
builder will make an alliance with Cox, Comcast, or CenturyLink, and 
then the others will not build out physical plant in the community.


-Harry


On 6/2/21 11:50 AM, William Herrin wrote:

On Wed, Jun 2, 2021 at 9:46 AM Andy Ringsmuth  wrote:

Muni broadband sucks for several reasons but the most important one is:

Competition. Municipal broadband eliminates it. If it's not obvious
why, feel free to Google how competition and monopolization impact
product quality. It's a pretty universal trait.


If you were to structure muni broadband to enhance competition rather
than limit it, you might get a different result. For example, if
municipalities installed and leased fiber optic cables to every
structure but didn't provide any services on those cables, relying
instead on third parties directly billing the customer to do so, it
could work out as well as having municipalities pay for roads and
letting people buy their own cars and trucks to use on them.

In many municipalities, you can choose your electricity provider. And yet there 
are not multiple companies running power lines to every house.

Hi Andy,

Take a closer look at how that works. Your electricity vendor is also
the one who chooses which generating companies to buy from. You're
stuck with the municipal distribution network (just like you're stuck
with the municipal roads) but you have a choice in who you buy
electricity from and how you 

Re: Cable Company Hotspots

[Harry McGregor]

Hi,

Cable Cos do this in several ways.

Enabled hot spot on the cable provider cpe with separate ssid, sometimes the 
same channel sometimes dedicated radio and channel (I prefer the same channel 
as many areas have way too much noise).  This hotspot service is using it's own 
docsis channels and generally a tunnel.

Also many are installing wire or poll mounted access points for outdoor 
coverage.  These are not using anything at a customer location.

Harry

On November 20, 2020 4:26:33 PM MST, Rod Beck  
wrote:
>Hey Gang,
>
>How do the cable companies generally deliver this service? A friend
>insists it piggybacks off the WIFI radios of existing cable company
>subscribers. In other words, the cable company WIFI router in a flat is
>providing both a private link for the flat's subscriber, but also a
>public hotspot service.
>
>I concede it is possible, but I am skeptical that the high quality of
>hotspot service we get here in Budapest could be achieved that way.
>
>
>
>
>Roderick Beck
>
>VP of Business Development
>
>United Cable Company
>
>www.unitedcablecompany.com
>
>New York City & Budapest
>
>rod.b...@unitedcablecompany.com
>
>Budapest: 36-70-605-5144
>
>NJ: 908-452-8183
>
>
>[1467221477350_image005.png]

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Re: 60ms cross continent

[Harry McGregor]

Hi,

Startlink 1.0, probably will not have lower latency vs Fiber (either 
cross country or across oceans)


Once the laser based inter-sat links are running (Starlink 2.0?), it 
should be lower latency vs Fiber.


With ground stations only: https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY

With laser links: https://youtu.be/QEIUdMiColU

-Harry


On 7/6/20 8:00 PM, james jones wrote:

"In Theroy" -- ROFL

Don't get me wrong it would be awesome if that turns out to be the case.

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 10:05 PM joe mcguckin > wrote:


Theoretically, Starlink should be faster cross country than
terrestrial fiber.


Joe McGuckin
ViaNet Communications

j...@via.net 
650-207-0372 cell
650-213-1302 office
650-969-2124 fax

Re: Companies using public IP space owned by others for internal routing

[Harry McGregor]

Hi,

I know of some enterprise IT equipment that does this.  It was reserved space 
at the time it was picked.

It does not leak from the box, but every once in a while one of these IPs show 
up in a customer visible log, and causes confusion.

In ways it is better then rfc 1918 space as it has less chance of conflicting 
with a management network.

Harry

On December 17, 2017 3:42:48 PM MST, Richard  wrote:
>
>
>On 12/17/2017 04:30 PM, Robert Webb wrote:
>> Will anyone comment on the practice of large enterprises using non
>RFC1918 IP space that other entities are assigned by ARIN for internal
>routing?
>>
>> Just curious as to how wide spread this might be. I just heard of
>this happening with a large ISP and never really thought about it until
>now.
>>
>> Robert
>>
>>
>     It is more common than you would think. Why use public IP's when 
>you can have many rfc1918 options. Always amazes me after the initial 
>confusion.
>     Richard

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Re: Purchased IPv4 Woes

[Harry McGregor]

Hi,


This is why I moved away from static black lists years ago.  When the 
68/8 and 24/8 blocks were released and tons of networks had it blocked 
since it was "reserved" I observed and felt the pain.


My networks are small, and I rely on things such as fail2ban which auto 
remove the blocks.


I would be willing to bet that many of the network operators/admins that 
blocked your range are either not in the job any more or even dead.  No 
one in the company knows the blocks exist...


-Harry

On 03/12/2017 04:51 PM, Pete Baldwin wrote:
So this is is really the question I had, and this is why I was 
wanting to start a dialog here, hoping that it wasn't out of line for 
the list.  I don't know of a way to let a bunch of operators know that 
they should remove something without using something like this mailing 
list. Blacklists are supposed to fill this role so that one 
operator doesn't have to try and contact thousands of other operators 
individually, he/she just has to appeal to the blacklist and once 
delisted all should be well in short order.


In cases where companies have their own internal lists, or only 
update them a couple of times a year from the major lists,  I don't 
know of another way to notify everyone.


I get why people are more cautious and  filter entire blocks when 
just a few hosts are attacking/spamming them, and everyone has a 
choice on how they want to handle these situations.  As an ISP, I want 
to do as little filtering as possible.  I want all of my customers to 
have access to everything possible.  If a netblock changes hands, I 
want to give the new owner the benefit of the doubt and only filter 
traffic if it repeats the same old behaviour.  We're all using this 
finite space and I don't want to let the hostile minority slowly ruin 
what's left of the ipv4 assignments.



-

Pete Baldwin
Tuckersmith Communications
(P) 519-565-2400
(C) 519-441-7383

On 03/12/2017 11:40 AM, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote:
How do all the AS's that have their own internal blacklists find out 
that

they should fix their old listings?

Re: net neutrality peering dispute between CenturyTel/Qwest and Cogent in Dallas

[Harry McGregor]

On 08/15/2015 09:44 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
snip


The most viable solution, IMHO, is to require a separation between physical 
infrastructure providers and those that provide services over that 
infrastructure. Breaking the tight coupling between the two and requiring 
physical infrastructure providers to lease facilities to operators on an equal 
footing for all operators will reduce the barriers to competition in the 
operator space. It will also make limited competition in the facilities space 
possible, though unlikely.

This model exists to some extent in a few areas that have municipal residential 
fiber services, and in most of those localities, it is working well.

That’s one of the reasons that the incumbent facilities based carriers have 
lobbied so hard to get laws in states where a city has done this that prevent 
other cities from following suit.

Fortunately, one of the big gains in recent FCC rulings is that these laws are 
likely to be rendered null and void.

Unfortunately, there is so much vested interest in the status quo that 
achieving this sort of separation is unlikely without a really strong grass 
roots movement. Sadly, the average sound-bite oriented citizen doesn’t know (or 
want to learn) enough to facilitate such a grass-roots movement, so if we want 
to build such a future, we have a long slog of public education and recruitment 
ahead of us.

In the mean time, we’ll get to continue to watch companies like CC, VZ, TW 
screw over their customers and the content providers their customers want to 
reach for the sake of extorting extra money from both sides of the transaction.

Owen


I have talked about this idea for years, but most places seem to have a 
difficult time understanding the difference between layer 0, layer 2, 
and layer 3 networks.


IMHO the should be one residential fiber network (either passive or 
active, depending on the deployment and the physical layout of the 
area), and it should be run by an essential utility, such as the 
city/county water department, or if necessary the local electric company 
(I far prefer the water department).  The access would be near 
universal, and the layer 0 and layer 2 network fees would be part of the 
water bill.  Apartment complexes may have to be serviced with G.fast 
or other technologies to make the deployment faster and easier.


Getting IP bandwidth, technical support, voice service, and video 
service would be a competitive service provider model, with local ISPs, 
and large Cable COs and TelCOs competing on top of this physical 
network.  You could even have providers that specialize in low income 
life line services, such as 5Mbit of IP bandwidth and local voice 
service with e911.


Historically services that have huge sunk costs, and high build out 
costs have been a natural monopoly and regulated.  You would not think 
of trying to build out a competitive water or sewer network, and most 
building codes prevent the installation of a septic system if a sewer 
connection is at all possible.   Why we are not going this way for a 
high cost of build out network (last mile) is beyond me.


Before this happens (ie when hell freezes over), I would like to see new 
home communities deploying fiber networks as part of the building of the 
master plan of the community.   That way the home owners association 
can go out for bid every year or few years for a service provider to 
operate the fiber network.   Around here (souther AZ) new communities 
tend to either alliance with CenturyLink, Cox, or Comcast depending on 
the location, and they DO NOT bring in the other providers.  If a 
builder goes with Cox, you can NOT get a CenturyLink (ILEC) landline or 
DSL, if a builder goes with CenturyLink, Cox will not run anything into 
the community.


-Harry