This doesn't really make sense to me. Only 30% of Americans have jobs where they can't work from home? Truck drivers, factory workers, cashiers, taxi drivers, etc all make up less than 30% of America? I dont buy that.
Smells like selection bias to me... are they interviewing people already at home because their work allows it?
They do mention -
> There are certainly some folks who work in healthcare, grocery stores, auto shops, etc., where you wouldn't think a strong home internet connection was a requirement.
But I still remain skeptical that so many claim they require home internet. At the very least work email can be done on a phone.
1. The survey found that only 63.8% said their job required a home internet connection pre pandemic, so it's closer to 40% of Americans with jobs that don't require home internet.
2. Sending emails from your phone at home is for all intents and purposes the same as a home internet connection. If you were no longer able to connect to the internet from within your home, you wouldn't be able to send those emails i.e. do your job.
3. There is a difference between jobs that can theoretically be done without home internet access, but that in practice require it. For example, you could theoretically drive a truck without any home internet. But, in practice, most truckers find loads and contracts via load boards, which you obviously need an internet connection to access.
With all of those considerations, the percentages don't seem too fishy to me. I buy that pre-pandemic, roughly 64% of Americans were in jobs that required them to connect to the internet from home for at least some work-related function, even if it is not the core of their work.
It sounds like the survey was done post-pandemic and then asked respondents whether they could've done their jobs without the Internet pre-pandemic. This is a very different survey: it means that the ~20-30% of Americans who lost their jobs in the pandemic are not included in the survey. This is almost half of the labor force (which has been hovering around 60-65% of Americans since 2009).
I'd suspect that there is strong selection bias, in that truckers, factory workers, cashiers, taxi drivers etc. were a lot more likely to lose their jobs in the pandemic and the ones that kept them are much more likely to work for "modern" companies that do require Internet. If you assume 37% of Americans are not in the labor force, 23% were unemployed and hence not in the survey, that implies 70% of the 40% remaining (~28%) require a home Internet connection, with about 3% being those whose employers recently switched to requiring Internet. That seems a lot more reasonable.
US employment rate dropped from 61.1% to 51.3%. So, around 17% of the working population lost their jobs. However, that includes many people outside of direct customer facing jobs.
> There is a difference between jobs that can theoretically be done without home internet access, but that in practice require it. For example, you could theoretically drive a truck without any home internet. But, in practice, most truckers find loads and contracts via load boards, which you obviously need an internet connection to access.
I think this is the crux of it. When you also add in jobs that require checking and responding to an email a couple of times a day, submitting a timesheet or expense reimbursement weekly, etc, then I think the numbers make sense. We're talking about jobs where 99.9% of the work is NOT done online but there are one or two quick tasks that do require an email or mobile app and so technically an internet connection is required.
Having worked for a manufacturing firm, I can guarantee that the workers doing 99% offline work are fed directly by teams that do a lot of their work online, or at least connected to a domain/email server/file server/ERP/etc.
Many of the machines running in the shop didn't have external network access (a few incidents with adult content and management just blocked everything on the floor) but still do email or access plans from the file share or work order itself. Their process was still mostly paper based including large format printing of plans with bar codes for tracking so if the network goes down they can still work.
It's this odd balance of welder demanded processes (workers would boycott new IT or automation tools so they had to hire a new guy to run a parts tower machine) combined with old school practices. When I was there 4 years ago it was mostly old dudes pushing out retirement to do 1 more year of income and buy their truck of choice while management was seeing SEC checks and auditing for tax/securities fraud. I'm surprised it's still in business at this point.
You can work as a factory worker and still require internet access for scheduling days off, getting payroll information, etc. In fact, it's likely that people not working desk jobs are those most in need of home internet access, as they might not be provided such at work.
People like that could get by with dial up if people like the ones reading this comment would stop loading 80MB of JS just so they can save a couple lines of code.
Edit: The dailup part was an exaggeration but if your web app doesn't suck 3g and two bars or a 1Mb down DSL pipe should be fine for most CRUD type business tasks that. There's no reason that signing in and signing up for a shift should take more bandwidth than Craigslist.
The employee has absolutely no control over that and sure, you could pass regulations - but those regulations are going to be fairly difficult to enforce.
But you know, we could just start trying to make sure everyone has decent internet. Work isn't the only benefits to this.
Ask me how I know you haven't used dialup recently. First, you can't even get dialup in many places because the pots system has been ripped out and replaced by partial fiber.
Second of all, Once you add a phone line and pay for dialup you're looking at a cheap broadband cost.
I'll preface this with noting it's a little odd to act as though adding 80 MB of unnecessary JS is a popular idea on HN.
They couldn't if they needed to work asynchronously. Or if they couldn't speak or hear well over the phone, the likelihood of which approaches 1 if you have so much as a different accent. Or if you don't want the other person to hear your accent.
It's a bit cliche maybe, but I know people who've benefited from all of those features of IP-based communication, and they're reasons to be happy about the Internet. And since just about any telecommunications system that transmits voice can be bullied into transmitting IP packets, there's really little cost.
I mean, we can all agree, I imagine, that many pages have too much JS. But then what do we cut? My idea of what's "useless" is probably different than the people cutting my checks. Saying pages don't need "unnecessary" JS is tautological but not really illuminating. I do think there is plenty of reason lots of people would benefit in their work from single-page applications, not to mention video and audio that would dwarf the JS anyways.
My point is that the kinds of CRUD and spreadsheet manipulation tasks that most people who don't work at a screen all day need to do on a screen can be done over a trivially tiny pipe if that pipe is used with at least a token amount of efficiency.
Everything is more important than that... until it's not. People don't know what they really care about until their assumptions are unchecked. When nobody HAS to use their phone for certain online actions, those actions likely won't be optimized for mobile, and people will care much more about popup tooltips, navigation, color scheme, logos and branding, extra random reporting, etc. Once people are forced to use mobile and it's not a couple minute experience once every week or month, then page load speed (and initial page payload size for SPA) become very important to those people.
Assuming I did bring in an 80mb js library into a web app wouldn't there be something in the build process that removes unreachable code? I mostly have backend and mobile experience with only a little frontend experience. But I agree many modern pages are way larger then they really need to be.
IMO most websites are products, and possibly irrational too. Whether or not to prioritize a poor customer is more of a business judgment than an engineering one.
And if we’re talking mobile, wouldn’t an app experience be the best?
How are they monopolies? Competition is allowed. They choose to not compete in markets, either by not entering the market or buying up competitors. America used to have a stronger take on competition law, but for decades it's considered anti-business government regulation.
Google Fiber only launched in a handful of cities where the local bureaucracy had committed to bypassing many longstanding procedural barriers. They found laying new cables to be all but impossible everywhere else.
Do you think consistent campaign contributions to both parties, relentless industry lobbying and this all being perfectly legal may have something to do with it as well?
So did factories not exist prior to the internet? How on earth did people get paid, coordinate shift changes, or ask their boss for time off back in the 1950s?
I think the reaction from GP was likely due to a difference in how people interpret the meaning of the word can't, as in some people mean "I currently use the internet because non-internet solutions are inconvenient" vs "It's literally impossible to do my job without the internet or losing the internet would make my job completely irrelevant(such as being a dev on the Google search team)."
I think that even for work from home jobs, if the internet disappeared tomorrow a lot of employers would figure out how to do the important stuff with non-internet solutions, like accepting longer business timelines, couriering paper documents, sending faxes (this might require getting fax machines and landlines for employees, but companies will pay for them if they need to), and having telephone meetings instead of Zoom.
Some employers would probably cut employees/tasks that weren't adding as much value as the effort required to shift to non-internet solutions, but I don't think it would be as high as a literal interpretation of this survey would imply.
Indeed - my dad just happen to retire the same week the eliminated the steno pool since everyone was starting to get computers on their desk (286's with WordPerfect - ah, the days)
> I think the reaction from GP was likely due to a difference in how people interpret the meaning of the word can't, as in some people mean "I currently use the internet because non-internet solutions are inconvenient" vs "It's literally impossible to do my job without the internet or losing the internet would make my job completely irrelevant(such as being a dev on the Google search team)."
This is why I never pay attention to self reported studies. You could argue they are crafted to make the most clickbait headlines while also saying nothing of worth.
What about people working for companies who's policies dictate that certain actions must be done through some internet system (eg time clocks, payroll, scheduling, etc). It might be physically possible to ask someone else to do some of these things for one, but it also might not be allowed. EG if all time off requests including sick days have to be entered in a web scheduling system, then it may not be possible to just do the old "ask the boss for the day off" and have it not be considered an unexcused absence by corporate higher-ups.
If you're a remotely decent employee, your manager will figure out a workaround or help you get an exception to the policy. It's hard to find good help, and if you're fired because of a completely inflexible system where you have to clock in with an internet system, then you weren't really fired for the lack of internet, you were fired because management wanted an excuse to fire you.
For the segment of the workforce that we're taking about, there's no such thing as weekly 1:1's or quarterly skip level meetings (ie I scheduled a meeting with my bosses boss.) "Your manager" is overworked and underpaid, same as you, and has no such luxury, nor any real power. It's just not going to scale if every single one of their direct reports, out of dozens, suddenly needs to sign in by hand because the Internet is down. Kafka isn't relegated to Soviet fairy tales, even top performers get dinged for showing up minutes late. Why do you think the "set your own hours" aspect of being an Uber driver is so compelling? It's not because 100% of middle management are nice happy people who love their jobs.
Be glad you've never had to work somewhere where you're disposable, and your boss is forced to fire you for reasons they don't even believe in,
like being mere minutes late. If your shift starts at 7:30 AM, you have to be there at 7:00 AM to be in line to have punched into the time clock before it turns 7:30. Making it to work in time to stand in line for the time clock before 7:30 isn't good enough.
For most of those functions a smart phone or a local library would suffice. I read "can't do our jobs" as being "literally cannot complete work or perform on-paid-time duties".
The entire public library network is closed out where I'm at (save for curbside pickups).
Another kneejerk thought also suggests that whatever few(?) that are open might take on increased traffic, at odds with distancing guidelines/mandates.
The argument you've parroted is against using your personal phone number for work. That's abusive, because it allows the employer to send you work when you're off the clock.
Using your smartphone to log into your payroll site, or as the internet bridge to the company VPN, is not any different from using a broadband line and a laptop to do the same thing. Those systems shouldn't be able to interrupt you when you're not working, but they might still be accessed through a smartphone in lieu of a desktop or laptop.
Parroting implies blind repeating. I honestly believe my statement though. It's not parroting.
> That's abusive, because it allows the employer to send you work when you're off the clock.
No, it's abusive when doing work functions requires the use of my personal phone. Accessing an employer's VPN should not be done using devices or services that are wholly owned and paid for by me.
Allowing my employer to notify me, while I'm off the clock, of any work that's available or scheduling changes or emergencies definitely falls under personal devices can be used.
But when the employer requires you to use your personal devices and personal internet service to actually do any function of that work then that's where you and I clearly disagree.
> Using your smartphone to log into your payroll site
Payroll sites necessarily must be accessible from outside of the work VPN: payroll sites' reporting ability must be accessible after my employment has been terminated.
> or as the internet bridge to the company VPN
Using someone's personal internet service or phone service is unethical. Employers should pay for the internet bridge to the company VPN and all devices and services necessary to connect to it.
> is not any different from using a broadband line and a laptop to do the same thing
Nope, it isn't. Who owns it though?
> Those systems shouldn't be able to interrupt you when you're not working
Indeed.
> but they might still be accessed through a smartphone in lieu of a desktop or laptop.
This is an overly broad statement. Everywhere I've worked where I'm expected to be reachable by phone offered a stipend to pay for the service. And all of them were respectful of my personal time.
An abusive employer is going to make unreasonable demands of you, regardless of whether you use your personal phone for work.
Sure, but... not everywhere has a local library. Parts of Indiana do not, and if you aren't in the library's tax district, you might have to pay to use the library to get a library card, which allows you to use the computers/internet. To make matters worse, in rural areas libraries might be in the next town over and have short hours. In one city, their summer hours were basically 10-3: During the summer, they closed at 6. They had very limited hours on saturday and were always closed on Sunday. You could, quite literally, work most of the time they were open. And for more fun, they only had limited space for computers. If there was a wait, you only had 30 minutes of time.
You should see the library that serves the Las Vegas Strip. I went there to use the wifi last year. It's in a terrible neighborhood. It's smaller than my bedroom. There are four computers, and according to the librarian on duty, they're occupied from open to closing every day, so if you want to use one you have to line up before it opens.
People who say, "Just use the library" are people who have never tried to just use a library.
> Only 30% of Americans have jobs where they can't work from home?
"Only" implies you think 30% is too low? You think more Americans can work without home internet?
I'm surprised it's as high as 30%. I think a lot more Americans can't work without home internet.
> Truck drivers, factory workers, cashiers, taxi drivers, etc all make up less than 30% of America? I dont buy that.
I'm not familiar with truck drivers. But I can easily see that they would need the internet to simply receive a phone call to alert them that a route has been contracted by their contracting company. Or to engage in a route marketplace. That's going to necessitate not only "home" internet, but probably also mobile internet too.
I'm not familiar with factory workers. But I hear they're overworked. And if they don't have home internet that often means they also don't have a way to get in contact with their bosses outside of the factory.
Cashiers need the internet because their employer's scheduling system is available on the internet. Not only that, but their schedules are often produced last-minute. Are you saying that a cashier must go to the retail premise and risk getting infected just to check to see whether they're scheduled for the day?
Taxi drivers... absolutely need the internet to work. Can you imagine being in a taxi today without having the ability to pay via your credit card? That's absurd.
What about emergency services like fire fighters, EMS, doctors ... are you saying that they don't need home internet?
I'm saying you're wrong. The modern world has moved into a place where we're hyper connected. Everyone's employers communicate on the internet. Lack of home internet hinders everyone's ability to work.
There was a time when you paid by credit card using a mechanical copy of the credit card and data was manually entered at the end of the day. It sadly doesn't work well with new style credit cards that don't have raised numbers, but for that you could just take a picture.
It's not ideal, but it can work. The internet has made a lot of things happen smoother or faster, and some things happen in "real time" that previously could not, but as a whole... life without it wasn't horrible.
Kids used to write notes to each other instead of text messages.
Cashiers used to look at a schedule that was manually created and posted on the break room door on sundays. If you weren't working that day, you'd ask a friend to check for you.
But we don't ride horses any more; automobiles are here to stay. Suggesting that transportation isn't necessary for employment disenfranchises millions of people from reaching employment. I believe there's laws (or, at least, certainly ethics) that employers must compensate employees when they use their personal transportation for their employer's purposes. And, good employers offer public or private transportation to their own employees -- in the form of a "company car" or paid public transportation.
Likewise, the internet is here to stay. Suggesting that the internet isn't necessary for employment disenfranchises millions of people from reaching employment. Many lucky ones do have their own personal devices and services they can use. But I am of the opinion that this is unethical and should be more closely related to the "company car" or paid public transportation or compensating employees when they use their personal devices.
Kids do still write notes to each other. Thinking that a text message isn't a valid form of writing notes is ignoring the advancing methods of communication and burying your head in the sand. Kids' notes now include animated pictures, "memes", with whole websites dedicated to finding and creating them. Are you suggesting that these aren't valid forms of communication?
Bosses change schedules often. I've seen schedules be posted on Sunday, changed on Monday, and changed again Tuesday afternoon. And even if that weren't the case, your coworkers aren't friends: in a cutthroat environment your coworker will lie to you, state that you're not scheduled when you are, and your boss will fire you for not showing up. That happens when jobs are scarce. Fortunately, the internet helps to solve that problem by allowing employees to look at the schedule online.
Times change. Having access to the internet wasn't required forty years ago. It is required today.
Please don't misunderstand me; I didn't say anything was invalid, just that all these things existed before the internet, and could exist without it in a less streamlined way.
It's actual somewhat of an interesting topic when you think of it.
Transport went from walking -> riding animals -> driving + flying.
Communication went from talking -> moving physical messages -> radio -> telephone -> internet
I wish hackernews forums fostered better discussions on topics that are out of date the way reddit might. Unlikely anyone will ever see this reply.
Are there any good books that cover this sort of techno (r)evolution in depth?
You could make the same argument about electricity, or a phone line, or hell, anything except for a roof, food, water, and a mode of transport to work.
The thing is, for modern life, you do need more than basic necessities. You do need electricity, you do need a telephone, and, more and more, you do need the internet.
You don't need these things, at home, to get your actual job done, even if you're a programmer, in most cases. You need them to do all the other things, like pay bills, use bank accounts, and so on.
> At the very least work email can be done on a phone.
The question was whether respondents needed to use the internet at home, not whether they need a physical wire going to their home. Needing LTE/3G at home to do work email = needing a home internet connection.
> Truck drivers, factory workers, cashiers, ...
For all of these, a lot of shift scheduling is done online these days.
Truck Drivers: Many are independent contractors. So, "one-man business owner and also sole employee" might be a better model and makes it abundantly clear that an internet connection is required.
Cashiers: there are vanishingly few people who are full-time cashiers and don't have a second or third job. Possible their other job requires a home internet connection.
Factory work: Most folks I know who work in factories tend to hop from job to job every year or two. In other words, they're constantly in job search mode. Job searches happen online.
Healthcare: Most healthcare professions require CEUs, which can often be done at least partially online and always require a home internet connection if taken seriously.
You’re confusing ”requires internet at home” with ”requires nothing else”. For example nurses have a very hands-on jobs, but have to login to a portal to see their shifts for the coming week
And why would you assume that such jobs don't require internet access? Shift workers are sent their schedules via email. They talk to their bosses after hours via email. Factory workers often complete mandatory training (health/safety certs etc) from home. Just as once upon a time each employee having a phone number was once optional, basic administration of any vocation now requires internet access.
I'd say that monastic orders probably can go without, but I equally assume that there is an abbot out there somewhere staring at a screen and mumbling about how slow the wifi gets on sunday mornings.
>Only 30% of Americans have jobs where they can't work from home?
You're misreading. It's not that 70% can work entirely from home, it's 70% can't never work from home. I don't believe that number either, but that's a different topic.
>At the very least work email can be done on a phone.
So, the internet connection that they use at home is different from "home internet" for the purposes of this article? If you really want to spit that hair, what is the meaningful distinction?
Most minimum wage workers today use scheduling apps for shifts/entering time sheets, have online training, accept job documents/agreements online etc. So having a stable internet connection is absolutely a requirement for these jobs.
> But I still remain skeptical that so many claim they require home internet. At the very least work email can be done on a phone.
The graph says "internet at home", not "home internet". If that is the exact wording of the question asked, then some responders might reasonably interpret that their mobile plan would count.
I admit it is a bit confusing that the article says "home internet connection" in other places. It would be nice if the survey question and article were more specific.
> Truck drivers, factory workers, cashiers, taxi drivers, etc all make up less than 30% of America?
I can easily imagine that all of those could require an Internet connection.
Could be something as simple as getting information crucial for your job exclusively via electronic communication.
- Restaurants and retail businesses also rely heavily on Internet, particularly for handling things like loyalty and credit card processing.
- Since many of those businesses take orders online, they also need an incoming connection in order to receive them. (You can still do this over the phone if it's just takeout, obv, but it doesn't scale nearly as well, especially at peak.)
- Additionally, lots of back-office software for managing them is now cloud-based, which (depending on your scope) can impact basic operational functions like supply chains, scheduling, etc.
My guess would be it's because "Americans Say" and what people SAY in answering these types of things isn't exactly the same as the reality of what they REALLY need.
Yeah. Surely a lot of people who "need" it for incidental tasks like checking their shifts (mentioned already about 5 times by commenters) or a payroll site would adapt if they didn't have home internet or especially, if home internet wasn't a reasonable expectation.
In my last several white-collar jobs I could have got by without home internet with only small inconvenience.
I read it so: of all the people who can work from home at all, 70% require an internet connection.
Factory workers or construction workers can't do any work from home at all. But maybe people who do custom tailoring, or small-scale bakery like custom wedding cakes, can still WFH without a broadband connection being constantly up.
You are mistaking home internet being a _necessity_, with home internet being _sufficient_.
The fact that they need home internet does not mean they can work from home.
Switching shifts with coworkers is so much easier with the internet. I know of a large German company that has a "shift market" where employees can switch shifts as long as certain constraints are fulfilled. You can either switch with coworkers directly or "auction off" your shift by giving a timeframe where you want your new shift to be and select the most convenient from the coworkers that answered.
If I were an employee there, I'd say that I need an internet connection at home.
One of the better ideas to handle "internet as a utility" is actually not to scrap private ISPs, but to give government a monopoly over the physical infrastructure in the "Last Mile" (i.e. fiber from central hub to business/home).
ISPs lease the Last Mile at near cost (to pay for physical maintenance/improvements) and then are responsible for peerage agreements, subscriber management, network equipment, data budgets, plans, customer service, and other services (e.g. VoIP, TV over IP, etc).
Nobody benefits from ten+ different fiber runs from data center to home or business, it is inefficient. So you have to consolidate it and then lease it, that way granting an actual competitive landscape where consumers would get many choices for their ISP (and their ISP is responsible for mediating with the government about physical issues/faults).
Other countries have done this successfully. It also keeps government from being responsible for actually providing internet services, which could have civil rights problems (or politicians trying to decide winners/losers, etc).
While I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of having a single last mile connection to each home, IMHO I think giving the government a role is a really bad idea. As a FTTH engineer that has deployed millions of feet of last mile optical fibers, I can tell you government is clueless as to how best do this (as I might add are the MSO's). The majority of small FTTH ISP's have received funding through the USDA RUS, which has specific engineering requirements. Those requirements are prehistoric and dramatically inflate the cost of deployment. For example, one of the better topologies is to implement fast spanning tree to each home over 2 route-diversified connections back to a municipal ring. This dramatically reduces cost vs a star topology build-out (typically endorsed by RUS), and increases fault tolerance. The RUS estimates cost per home well in excess of $1,800 while it is possible to reduce that to well under $1,000 using appropriate engineering. One of the big problems is that most larger organizations (e.g. MSO's) have separate departments for physical networking (buried/aerial cable) and for Ethernet networking (spanning tree etc). As these departments do not communicate well at the design/planning stage, they do not enjoy engineering economies. The MSO's actually believe quite sincerely that their cost of FTTH is at least an order of magnitude higher than it is - they are just plain wrong.
Dude, I live in the heart of Silicon Valley and have dealt with AT&T and two different offices and my home. And I can tell you that AT&T are both utterly clueless and shameless liars when it comes to FTTH and FTTN installations. You can not imagine the depth of my anger with those clowns.
I have no idea who you work for. But my personal experience with trying to get fiber from AT&T in what is supposed to be one of the most tech-forward regions of the world is laughable. The government may not be better, but at least I know where to aim my pitchforks and torches.
I'm sitting here on a Comcast connection that is expensive and AT&T has FTTH in my neighborhood. I just can't seem to pull the trigger on the order because of the horror stories I've heard, and from personal experience. When I had ADSL from AT&T, they absolutely could not give me a connect that didn't drop randomly 2-10 times a day. I had 10+ visits from them over several years and at one point they told me "don't call us anymore" because I was too expensive for them. This, after being told by someone that put a device on my line and found the problem was in the drop cable (from the pole to the house). The new drop cable was ordered and a guy shows up 2 hours later and tells me it's not the drop cable (he didn't measure anything). When pressed, he told me it was too expensive to replace the drop cable. A subsequent tech told me to have a "tree trimming accident" where the drop cable was severed. I was worried I would be charged many thousands of $'s so I didn't do it and just switched to Comcast. (I have had my own issues with Comcast, and I hate them with a passion.)
The situation with home internet is just so shitty.
FWIW, I have had the exact opposite situation in multiple locations across the country -- every DSL (and, once, FTTH) connection I've had has been rock solid -- every Comcast internet connection has been flaky -- in one place, the connection went down every afternoon. Multiple Comcast technicians couldn't figure out the problem.
I so agree with your last statement.
If you're in an area they serve, getting Sonic is much better, BTW. They can operate over AT&T FTTH and DSL. It's a tad more expensive, but the customer service is unbeatable.
Sonic uses AT&T in my area, so I will definitely check them out. Thanks. It's a little annoying I have to get a landline, which basically adds $15-20 to the price. <sigh> I have an asterisk/freepbx system that I will continue to use. I wonder if their TOS require you to hook up a phone. Not looking forward to reading that...
Without debating the technical/cancer type of issues... Isn't 5G supposed to finally make wires obsolete? You'll put a device in your house (from say, Verizon) which speaks 5G on one side, and maybe has an ethernet jack and/or speaks Wi-Fi on the other side.
In this case it'd likely be talking about corrupted, truncated, or otherwise mangled packets. So having to retransmit things. You'd still technically have the same bandwidth and latency on the connection itself even if it's causing all kinds of overhead on upper levels of the stack.
After 6 years of mobile internet with only 1GB per month my ISP basically trained me to not use it for anything unless absolutely necessary. The irony of course is that prices have dropped but I'm not going with a bigger plan. I switched to a "budget plan" and stayed on 1GB per month for which I pay only 5€ per month.
In addressing this at a political/regulatory level it became clear to me that while it is convenient to beat up on Comcast (however deserving they may be of such treatment), the real problem on the east coast corridor are the trade unions. They have raised the cost of doing business by at least an order of magnitude. It is a heartbreak for me personally - my grandfather was highly involved in the labor movement back in his day and today he would roll over in his grave at the rampant corruption.
If you're not looking to spend that much, Comcast gigabit (non-pro) is cheap and gets you 1gbps down, but only 35mbps up. They're annoying to interact with, but once it's set up it's reliable.
Pro-tip: Ignore the Comcast website prices/packages. The only way to work with them is to call and get a friendly sales rep, then ask them to look through their options to find the best gigabit only plan (they have a lot more promotions available than they list online). This might take a few tries if you get someone on the phone that isn't very good. Comcast Twitter support is also pretty helpful.
Wow, this is awful. I live in Portland, and have symmetric gigabit fiber from CenturyLink for $65/mo. Honestly baffling to me that people tolerate the politics of Silicon Valley.
I come from Western New York, where (at the time) 20mbps was the best available option and it was over $100. I hear things are a little better now (though 100mbps may still be the best available), but the options here are way better.
Sure it's a great speed, but $300/mo plus a $2k install just to get a decent upload? Seems like market segmentation where they're basically just ripping anyone off who wants to run a little server or backup their files to the cloud.
Yeah, it'd be nicer to have symmetric gigabit for less, but the gigabit pro is actual fiber to the home (it doesn't run over coax lines).
Comcast includes a Juniper ACX2100 switch for layer 2 and bringing the fiber into the house. I thought that was pretty cool. (Well 'includes', you have to pay to rent it from them.)
I'm in East Bay and also on Comcast gigabit non-pro only (no TV). Signed up at $90 with no contract and so far it's been as stable as I had in Seattle with CenturyLink (fiber to building). I did buy my own DOCSIS modem so that could be part of the equation.
That is not gigabit. That is 35MB. Big difference. Internet MUST be symmetrical. There are too many essential peer-to-peer technologies for it to be anything but symmetrical.
Gigabit Pro is symmetrical, normal Gigabit is not. Gigabit Pro is FTTH (whereas all of Comcast's other plans go over copper/DOCSIS3), and is symmetrical 2Gbps. For $300 per month with a mandatory $2k install, I might add.
to me, a symmetric connection is more of a "nice to have" than a "need". I have something like 400/25 right now. if I had 400/400 or even 1000/1000, I might consider reconfiguring my plex server to stream outside my LAN, but aside from that I can't think of any obvious application. can you list some of these "essential peer-to-peer technologies" that a normal person would be likely to use?
I totally agree. The prevailing perception that Silicon Valley (the original MAE-West) and Virginia's MAE-East are the touchstones of high bandwidth Internet is not true either - while they are the peering points for (inter)national networks, the local access Internet offerings in those regions are indeed laughable. Meanwhile the small rural towns in fly-over country tend to enjoy networks that are gigabit to the home or better for under $100 MRC. I know of businesses in Philadelphia that had to relocate to Winona, Minnesota simply to lower their Internet costs from thousands of dollars per month (with Comcast) to under $200 MRC for a direct gigabit optical Internet connection.
> AT&T are both utterly clueless and shameless liars
Seconded. We had AT&T Fiber a few years ago, and were having techs out just about every week to fix it and were given a nonsense reason like "this cable was loose" each time. Once we got fed up and canceled service, the tech told us that corporate fucked up the install for the whole neighborhood so they'd basically send techs out, tell them to lie, and have them add whatever bandaid was needed to fix it for just a little longer.
The government also has no idea how to build roads or power plants. They contract it out, and then take responsibility for owning and maintaining the infrastructure long term.
Depending on the city and area, opinions would vary if they’re good at maintaining it... but considering the huge amount of space the USA takes up, and the large amount of interstate and highways that criss cross the country generally being quite functional, I think they do a pretty good job.
And this does not work so well either. The problem with many government contracts is not just that they are usually cost plus, but that they do not take the total cost of ownership into account. In your example of roads, if the government put out requests for proposals based on the lowest total cost of ownership of a road over say 100 years, we would have roads engineered to a much higher standard that would not need to be rebuilt at such a high cadence. Whenever government thinks they know how to specify the best engineering method to solve a user requirement, they are generally wrong.
That sounds like a bad solution to a bad problem. The better way to set things up is to devise a process in which the incentives are from the default set up to benefit the most people.
People are upset at what trump is doing in relation to the USPS. Why would we want his administration in charge of broadband as well?
> Whenever government thinks they know how to specify the best engineering method to solve a user requirement, they are generally wrong.
It's not that they're usually wrong, they simply aren't attempting to optimize towards that at all. Most The government tends to make decisions optimized against political merit, not engineering efficacy or solution fit. The reason they generally appear wrong is because generally engineering efficacy and solution fit have little if any positive correlation with political merit.
I wonder if governments should not just find experts to design interfaces / protocols and cheap testing organs, then let competition run wild in these constraints.
>IMHO I think giving the government a role is a really bad idea.
You've described why the government shouldn't be the entity making sole architectural decisions - you haven't explained why the government shouldn't own and fund the last-mile fiber.
My county "owns" all the roads around me - city employees aren't building the roads and more often than not aren't the ones architecting them either (slope, water mitigation, etc). They do maintain them after they're in place (plowing the roads/mowing the ditches).
Why would fiber need to be any different? I don't think anyone expects city employees to actually trench the fiber, that would all be outsourced. If they're a large enough entity they could very easily train and hire some fiber splicers to fix cut lines.
I've got no problem with government owning and funding the Last Mile. The problem arises when government demands they specify the network design because of that ownership and funding. They are not qualified to make that decision, and usually senior telecommunications engineers are not qualified either. There is simply too much controversy over what is optimal. If the government could simply specify that a network needs to deliver 10Gbps per customer, then that would work, but when they specify HOW those packets need to be delivered then that is when things become non-competitive. There is a huge difference in cost between trenching from a central office to every home in a star topology vs trenching from a municipal network (already paid for by schools, hospitals, large business etc) to homes in a fast spanning tree ring. At least an order of magnitude difference in cost.
In my (limited) experience, that fear is unfounded. I work with about a dozen local government entities and every last one of them reaches out to consultants when making architecture decisions. I've never once run across one that pulls the "it has to be this way because we say so" in the tech realm. They'll absolutely provide requirements, but they won't dictate how those requirements are met.
I guess I would be shocked to find out there is any significant number of local governments out there that demand to dictate architecture of something they have no expertise in. If ANYTHING, the times I see them get out over their ski's is when they trust a vendor consultant TOO much. See: every Oracle implementation ever.
Comcast in Seattle came out to fix a signal issue at my apartment and ended up possibly needing to redo a rats nest of cables chained together just to find the line running to my place. Maybe the connection to the building was good, but the infrastructure inside (all Comcast built) was 12-15 years old and flaky at best.
At least with federal ownership we can mandate maintenance and repair requirements or timetables along with budgeting to do so in a timely manner. Or at least stop passing free money to ISP CEOs by giving millions of taxpayer dollars to them for upgrades and expansions that never come. I'd rather give a billion dollars to the Army CoE or a similar group to get things installed and maintained instead of profit to an ISP and at best slow expansion and data caps.
Thanks for sharing the knowledge here. It's not clear to me how the MSOs misunderstanding of FTTH/Last Mile costs means government can't do the job. I read this as what we have right now isn't working, which to me suggests we should try something new.
LOL because the MSO's own the government. One of the most powerful lobbying forces in the US. They control the FCC. Under the current administration they have finally overthrown net neutrality - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#United_States
The key thing is ownership. I was part of a large government network buildout a long time ago that was like an ISP for state/local that also provided secure connectivity.
We owned lots of fiber, which was managed by third parties. The downstream customers benefited from better terms and buildout of the last mile infrastructure before private entities were doing it.
If we had the political environment that allowed for old style utility regulation, I would agree that commercial utilities would be better - the old dial up ISP market demonstrated how robust and effective competitive market prices were. But we do not have that environment today.
Interesting comment! I think you’re describing a surmountable barrier.
If local governments can own the roads and power utilities are forced to share power infrastructure there is no reason municipalities shouldn’t be able to own their last mile installation.
If local government put a contract out to tender for implementing last mile so that small companies could bid on it then the $1k company would win over the $1,800 company. This is how most things should work in local government (corruption aside) .
A competitive market with a relatively low barrier to entry for last mile cable would benefit everybody. Everybody except AT&T and Comcast that is (& their millionaire shareholders in congress).
Even a nationally owned and run last mile would be better than what we have now though.
I don't know about the US, but in the EU a tender has requirements. The topology of a network is a perfectly reasonable requirement so they couldn't compete on that (even if it's wrong)
A tender for a brick house is, rightly, not going to be won by a wooden house proposal, even if it's cheaper and the company argues it's just as good.
We have a similar system for electrical distribution; per area a single organisation has sole responsibility for the physical infrastructure and they bill your energy company of choice. That means that on your invoice you have a fixed amount of infrastructure cost as a component, and your service/usage fee from the energy company. Same for gas.
This is probably common (or at least more common than internet-infra-as-a-utility), but the concept of doing the same for data would benefit a lot of people. We had that for POTS/PSTN and Coaxical data (CATV/cable/whateveryoucallit) as well, which was privatised and now opened up again so you get your infrastructure component as a national fixed fee and you simply pay your provider of choice for the actual service.
I found this terminology confusing for many years, hope this clarification is helpful:
- “Coaxial” refers to the design of the physical cable (Wikipedia has a better explanation than I can offer)
- CATV refers to “Community Antenna Television”, the first cable systems in the USA, which fed the signal from a shared “community antenna” to homes in areas with poor broadcast reception.
- “Cable” is the generic term for pay-TV and ISP services over coaxial cable
Yeah, the problem is indeed that everyone points to the same general concept but isn't using the same terms which adds to the confusion.
Technically you are using a DOCSIS connection which happens to use a coaxial cable. But not the same cable one as you'd have with CATV because that one didn't have the same ratings. There is also a difference with one-way broadcast and two-way communication where you also need a CMTS for that purpose. And to make it worse, sometime EOC is used which in itself is Ethernet, but not over CAT5/6/7 cables.
However, all of those words are better than people calling it 'the internet wire'.
Is the US government at all capable of taking on this role though? They apparently already wasted $400 Billion in contracting out broadband upgrades to telecom companies who pocketed the money and never delivered, and then everyone just forgot about it and moved on.
I try to be an optimistic person, but years and decades of gridlock and getting nothing done in the US is definitely wearing on me. There are so many things in this same category, of "We have Big Problem X", here's what research has shown works and doesn't work, here's how other countries are doing it more successfully, here's a very clear solution - but no, we'll just talk about it on and off every few months or years and then let inertia win and never actually do anything.
Why would the US government be doing this? Surely local government is better suited to these decisions?
> I try to be an optimistic person, but years and decades of gridlock and getting nothing done in the US is definitely wearing on me.
That's just like, your opinion.
We do a lot of things well in this country, you just have to be willing to look. Public infrastructure like roads and power seem like they have plenty of examples of what works to get this built out.
I don't see why any other utility model needs to change significantly for last mile.
Some states have regulated so municipal ISPs can't start up or have no control. I haven't read an article saying Municipal ISPs are any worse than commercial and often cheaper and less hostile too. Funny how that happens when the profit motivator is taken away.
I'd argue that ISPs end up using infrastructure that is common (think tragedy of the commons) like a water pipe or power line and should be open or publicly owned/maintained. By exploiting exclusive ownership of a common resource, ISPs become rent seeking and suck cash from both customers and taxpayers. As long as they hold ownership of the lines, they can charge what they want or you have to pay a huge cost for a new fiber line or have no access.
So seize the lines, just like water and power, and allow well regulated companies to facilitate the utility like many states do for power. Allow cities to push for municipal control and management (ex taking over line maintenance in exchange for providing services. Force it into a system where it pays for its own upgrades vs millions to execs and share holders, just like health insurance in many countries.
Power is a nightmare! We just precariously string up more high voltage lines on poles because we can't figure out how to do street construction at a reasonable cost or on budget. These now cause massive wildfires every summer, as well as frequent outages from random things like balloons hitting the lines.
San Francisco had a plan and still has a tax in place to bury power lines, but they pre-spent all the money in 2007, made much less progress than expected, and haven't made any additional progress on it since.
More generally, infrastructure like trains and bridges are incredibly difficult, unpredictable, and expensive to build now. The California high-speed rail and Caltrain extension are effectively indefinitely postponed at this point. It's a perfect example of exactly what I was saying - it's a problem that has been solvable in the past, there are examples of other countries doing a much better job of it, but the US is completely unable to do it.
Where exactly do you look at infrastructure projects in the US in the past 2 or 3 decades and see this success story you're talking about?
You don't need to give the government a monopoly on the last mile, you just need to allow them to compete on it.
As a Swede living in Japan, that system has worked well in both countries. In Japan you have the former telco monopoly NTT with its national flets network and competition in the private au, Sony NURO and various local networks. In Sweden you have many local municipality-owned companies as well as national competition fighting over customers.
It seems like Americans are always see options as black and white. The same thinking is reflected in your politics
For Japan, Flets (NTT) service is top and widest area FTTH service and it runs on NTT's own fiber. au Hikari (KDDI) is 2nd major service and it uses KDDI's own fiber and partially NTT's dark fiber. Nuro (So-net) is relatively small provider (due to limited area) it uses mainly NTT's dark fiber and AFAIK no own fiber. Other players like eo (K-opticom) are mainly by power company and area is limited.
Separating last mile ownership from ISPs was how it worked around the turn of the century with DSL in Seattle.
US West owned the lines to your home. Your DSL modem communicated with the DSLAM at a US West switching center, and US West relayed raw bits between you and your chosen ISP over something lower level than internet (ATM?).
US West essentially provided an unstructured dedicate virtual circuit bit stream between your DSL modem and your ISP, and your ISP provided internet on top of that.
Your ISP charged you for providing internet access, and US West charged you a fee for using their line.
I learned just the other day that a group of Utah cities have banded together to create such a network. It's called Utopia Fiber - https://www.utopiafiber.com/about-us/
They are also avoiding the GPON approach and running fiber direct from "fiber huts" to homes so that they can simply use standard networking equipment to service customers.
At this point, are the ISPs adding a significant amount of value? How much work does it really take to set up peering agreements?
I am absolutely ready to be convinced otherwise, but my gut reaction to this strategy is that it sounds like a needless carve out for private industry. If 98% of a project is taxpayer funded, private companies shouldn't be able to charge whatever they like for the final 2%. Maybe competition would stop that from happening, but why take that risk? What is the benefit?
You can achieve the same or better result but simply mandating that the same company can't own the fiber AND provide service. The electricity grid in Europe is run the same way.
I don't understand why you want to preserve these monopolies. They're already non-competitive. How on earth does granting private monopolies do anything other than give away free money to unaccountable executives? It's already clear, based on this suggestion, that the private "market" has failed so the government needs to step in. Just take these guys over and run them publicly.
The problem is that not all bits are the same, even in the last mile.
There is still significant improvement in last mile delivery, where different technologies enable different layouts and possibly different cost structures.
There isn't even a safety reason to make this a monopoly.
The monopoly in Internet provision is in the right of way. If new providers were able to construct their own last mile networks, then we would see more providers.
Something similar is done where I live, except the last mile is not owned by the government but by a commercial corporation. The government basically states open-access and a level playing field for costs as a requirement for giving the necessary permissions to dig and install fiber.
The last mile is an outdated notion. Many people would have mobile internet these days and not really need a separate connection at home. Where I live (Berlin, Germany), 5G connections are actually faster than anything I can get to my house at the moment. And I can only get it from the same provider responsible for deploying fiber optic as well (just not to my house). Which of course would be the local state backed monopolist Deutsche Telekom; better known as t-mobile in the US.
Many developing nations never had any last mile to begin with and probably will never have any. There are more phones than people in this world. Multiple companies are bootstrapping satellite networks to serve internet all over the planet. Going forward, the only reason to have a wired connection into your house would be monopolist telcos hogging the locally available radio-spectrum backed by lots of government protection.
So, instead of governing the status quo of 15 years ago, governments should focus on ensuring there are no infrastructure monopolies on mobile internet. That means ensuring multiple providers are active and that no barriers exist for customers to switch provider. This drives them to compete on quality rather than luring in customers to years long contracts and lots of hurdles to get out of those; which sadly is the status quo in many countries.
The only reason sim cards still exist is because they are a key control mechanism. Soft sims were proposed early this century already and the only reason for sim cards to continue to exist is that it 'solidifies' your relation ship to your local telco monopolist. It's the same reason they make you obsess over owning a phone number, which is an ancient relic from the last century.
I strongly disagree with this push to abandon hard-wired internet. I have never found wireless internet to be fast or reliable. My parents had it for years, and then the trees became too tall, and it stopped working. I live in the middle of the city, and yet I don't get LTE service in the back of my house for some reason. Even when I do get it elsewhere, it's slow as shit 50% of the time. I'll keep my gigabit fiber, thanks.
That's a weird take on SIM cards. I used to work in the wireless industry and the primary benefit was that you could easily swap carriers by swapping out your sim, but you could keep your phone. Software based SIMs sound like a security risk to me.
I live in semi-rural California. It would be a great place for SV tech to live - great schools, affordable (for CA) houses, awesome nature access, and you could drive to the Bay for a really important meeting. The problem is there are only pockets of cable internet and most places are lucky to get 2 bars of cellular. There is fiber running down the two major highways. The reasons why we are so disconnected are many and complicated, but the only real solution is that access should be driven top down as a public utility - just like power.
Oh, and while they are at it, I shouldn't have to worry about my internet utility stealing my data. They have a monopoly and so I am forced to accept whatever they put in my contract. If I could negotiate, I'd charge these leaches billions for my data...
There is a frenzy of people buying houses in Tahoe right now so they can work from there, but many will be disappointed to find that the internet service available will not allow them to work successfully. We have a cabin in a neighborhood that ostensibly has decent DSL, but AT&T will not allow new signups and the the bandwidth drops to 500 kbps between noon and 3PM on weekdays since the Pandemic started. Oddly it is fine in the evening (when my internet often stops working in the Bay Area). I'm wondering if internet quality should be part of the real estate disclosure process.
Rural Canada is a big problem for ISPs or so they say. Vast distances and little profit. Often the people who live in rural areas do so because it's cheaper to live there. Many may not be able to afford $200 Internet or maybe even $20 is too much. I know some rural folks who live on $6,000 per year.
My province is small but even here in the rural areas ISPs balk at having to run fiber down a side road off the main highway. Even with money thrown at them from various governments over the last two decades they still won't budge.
The places that do have DSL or wireless are often stuck in the "up to" scenario. Sure it's supposed to be 1.5Mbps but it's up to 1.5Mbps.
Many people here are waiting for Starlink but I don't think that will be as good as promised. If the cost is low that will help but the dish will be a problem. Rural areas tend to have a lot of trees and here we also have snow 1/2 the year.
Absent StarLink, the higher price on rural areas sends inherent. The only way around this seems to be to subsidize it in some way. Should we really make everyone else pay so that some people can save money by living in a rural area? Why not then just straight up give them the cash and leave the rural area to nature?
Forget semi-rural. I'm in the middle of Silicon Valley and I had 10,000ms+ ping and 95%+ packet drops for a month during work hours at the beginning of the lockdown.
Note that this is a survey of Americans who are currently employed. It should be '70% of all currently employed Americans require home internet'.
This statistic is likely inflated by the currently high unemployment numbers in sectors that cannot work remotely, and it overlooks the large portion of the populace that is not part of the work force.
So I had this thought the other day while talking to a friend that works at an electrical utility, the thought is naive so I'd love to hear some thoughts from people in the ISP game.
My friend and I calculated that it takes about $1 worth of electricity per year to keep your smartphone charged, we have cheap power so let's say $1-3, but even on a very cheap MVNO it costs at least $360 per year to provide cell service to that same phone.
There are a lot of assumptions here, I pay ~$30/month for 12GB of data, for a lot of people that's too little, for some more than enough, but its the orders of magnitude that are important, is it just the case that providing cell service is 100x to 300x harder than providing electricity? I'm curious to hear the answer from people in the field, because for my friend who works in power generation, electricity generation doesn't seem 100x easier than providing data service, no coal had to be mined or water reservoirs had to be created in order to send cat videos, his words lol.
> that providing cell service is 100x to 300x harder than providing electricity?
Yes, unfortunately. It's at least that much harder. For a similar comparison think of traditional radio - you buy the radio, and that's it. You might wonder how that's possible when it costs so much to beam data to your phone wirelessly? It's a complex question with a lot of nuance, but there are two important reasons that float to the top:
First, Internet requires reliable two way communication. Neither radio or electricity require that. These means economies of scales work in favor of electricity generation and radio transmission - they can put up a huge plant or radio tower, crank the power up, and serve a lot of customers far away. The customer's device doesn't have to talk back. Imagine if each home had to have a mini generator to send electricity back to the power plant - that would cost a lot!
Second, Internet service requires much, much more precise electronics than power or radio transmission. The Ethernet port on your laptop can understand signalling at (at least) 1gbps (1 billion bits per second, more or less). And that's not even that much - large networks today are doing 100 of times that on single physical connections, with electronics on both sides both modulating and demodulating those signals simultaneously. All that expensive (both to design and to manufacture) electronics adds up, and is accounted for in the cost of getting those bits to you.
I worked for a North American Telco in IT, and I like everything about your answer.
I will also add that Telcos are wickedly inefficient. Multi-million dollar projects just to update a public website, tens of millions in advertising, more PMs and Business Analysts and Middle Managers than people doing actual work, etc. etc.
This doesn't really make sense to me. The big difference I see is the cost to buy spectrum and the inherent geographic monopoly of owning it. Transformers and switchcraft are heavy-iron things which cost a lot because they're safety-rated and built with a large amount of actual matter. Transceivers and antennas are comparatively cheap to manufacture (but with higher margins) and generally don't incinerate things if they fail.
In my area the cost to deploy service seems to be primarily driven by the cost of labor to bury things. That impacts electricity more than cell data, as you actually have to physically reach every one of your customers.
Also your meter is two-way. It's just sending your usage data back, not power.
> Also your meter is two-way. It's just sending your usage data back, not power.
This is actually a pretty good illustration of what I'm talking about - sending a few bytes a month for power usage data is much different than maintaining a constant bit rate of >0mbps from each customer. It's the difference between broadcasting 40 channels to everyone and reserving 1 channel for a bit of upload (fairly easy with old technology) and giving everyone their own channel for upload (much more difficult).
You're not wrong that a huge portion of the costs is putting things in the ground, though. The advantage that power companies have is that a lot of that work has already been done, and they don't have to upgrade as often because power usage requirements aren't changing as rapidly as bandwidth requirements. They also have the (arguable) advantage of usually being a government granted monopoly, so they don't have to worry about building something out and then being undercut by a competitor.
There is a lot to dig in to here, but consider this from a different perspective - there is actually quite a bit of competition among mobile providers, and yet prices aren't dropping very quickly. You could argue that that's because of corruption and collusion (in some cases it probably is) but also consider that any one of those companies would absolutely love to take market share from the cable companies. If Verizon could undercut Comcast and give you Internet and TV at home over their wireless network they would do that in a heartbeat. The only reason they're not doing it is because it would be too expensive. Or, more precisely, they are trying to do it, that's what 5G is, and it's costing them a fortune.
EDIT: Also consider another perspective - the power companies themselves would love to provide Internet service! On paper they are in a great position to be able to do that. They already have infrastructure, technicians, billing platforms, captive customers, etc. The reason they're not doing it is because their infrastructure doesn't support it, and couldn't really be made to do it without spending so much money on it that they could not be cost-competitive with existing products.
Personally I think mobile is tolerably (but not ideally) competitive. I think the costs are driven by the high costs of spectrum and marketing/customer acquisition. And the product is reasonably high-value, so prices _can_ be high.
A useful comparison is the cost of fixed wireless internet service vs mobile service. The price/GB of the former is usually far lower than the latter despite running on exactly the same infrastructure.
I merely point out that I struggle to believe that the physical infrastructure costs are large components of the cost of service. Unlike power delivery, where the physical distribution infrastructure seems to be the majority share. Or at least it is if my bill breakdown is to be believed.
> A useful comparison is the cost of fixed wireless internet service vs mobile service. The price/GB of the former is usually far lower than the latter despite running on exactly the same infrastructure.
Glad you brought this up, fixed wireless is my career so this is something I've thought about a lot over the last 15 years or so. I would argue that the difference in pricing between fixed wireless and mobile is actually almost entirely driven by the 'fixed' qualifier - it's just much easier and cheaper to deliver Internet service to a fixed point where you can put a high gain antenna (like a rooftop) than it is to deliver to a cell phone in someone's pocket inside a building.
Of course the next question is why don't the mobile operators do home service with a fixed antenna on the rooftop like fixed wireless operators do, but using their massive spectrum and tower footprint advantages? I don't really know the answer to that. There have been a lot of efforts to do this, actually - the earliest one I know of was Sprint putting up these diamond shape antennas on rooftops back in the late 90s / early 00s. I think at least part of it is that it's hard to have high-gain antennas on rooftops coexist with low-gain antennas in cell phone on the same medium, and another part is that it's hard to hire and train and manage folks to do the home installs. I do believe that part of the push to 5G is to enable this type of service, though.
I don't know the answer, but one part of it might be that electricity is a "commodity" that you can effectively buy from anywhere in the country, or perhaps anywhere in the world, via the power grid. Whereas for cell service you're effectively buying from one of three companies, I think. So way less competition.
I'm sorry, but you think you can buy electricity from anywhere in the world? in any american city, you have one choice where to buy it from. 3 companies can put up their antennas on a tower. 3 companies cannot dig trenches through chicago to every house to run wires.
there are some small exceptions where it was traded on the power grid with deregulation. it caused the enron scandal. do you remember enron?
the issue is we have limited frequencies to use for cell phones. any time you have another player, you are wasting that bandwidth by splitting it up more. we should have 1 cell phone provider for each area of the country, and it should be regulated like a utility. that is what will make cost lower, not more competition. there are things that are physically limited, so running it capitalist style is not appropriate because of high barrier to entry. capitalism only works well with low startup costs.
i like how most of europe has internet for dirt cheap. it's public land, it's public cables. all an isp does is lease cables and provide service with their equipment connected.
Providing cell service takes at least the cost of electricity to run them. They're literally both electricity going down a wire. So yes, coal has to be mined and water reservoirs have to be created. You also have to build the equipment, and I imagine paying off that equipment's cost is more than the cost of electricity. That has to be mined, smelted, processed, worked, and assembled.
Watt-Hours and Gigabytes are fundamentally different units, so comparing the marginal cost of electricity and data is non-sensical.
In terms of the fixed costs. For electricity, the price you pay powering your phone is subsidized by the price you pay powering your HVAC. The portion of the electricity infrastructure that powers phones is negligable.
In contrasts, the cellular networks exist almost entirely to run phones; so the cost phone users pay needs to be enough to maintain the entire network.
To be a fair comparison, you would need to imagine a world where phones were the primary consumers of the electric grid. In such a world, I would expect to see electricity prices rise significantly
Electricity has economies of scale at play there. It wouldn’t be economical at the normal prices per kw if people were only charging phones.
Even ignoring that bit, electricity has different scaling considerations. Everyone’s computers don’t need access to special Youtube electricity and Twitter electricity. It all just comes from a localized grid and can come from any standard generation source.
Internet access would certainly be way cheaper if it didn’t provide global connectivity.
Another interesting point of comparison is that data limits on a VPS like DigitalOcean are $5/month/terabyte, and this includes all other aspects of renting the VPS as well. There are also MVNOs that cost less than $15/month with 1GB data caps. So keeping high bandwidth traffic to a VPS with a low bandwidth cell connection like a terminal emulator could potentially allow someone to access large amounts of data much more efficiently.
Land leases are expensive for tower placement, and they need electricity and a backup generator, to power the comm. equipment and the air conditioning.
Don't the utility companies have the same issues with infrastructure placement and land though? Or is there some eminent domain thing for power utilities that doesn't apply to telecom?
Well, in the US, electric and telephone have more rights and regulations, compared to cable television.
So, as a telecom, it is better to go in under the guise of a CATV company and use a franchise agreement, then as a phone company that also offers TV, and internet.
Also, if the poles are already there (usually phone or power), the new entrant is able to lease a portion of the pole to string infrastructure.
Sometimes the municipality owns the power company.
Cellular providers lease tower space from private companies that negotiate the tower placement with private land owners.
What finally convinced some of my family members of that was that internet access is required in order to apply for housing. The last two times I moved, all rental applications were online only, without a physical form as a backup. Having a roof over your head requires not only having internet access, but having secure internet connection. I wouldn't trust putting personal details in on a library computer, for example.
It's definitely changing. Even a decade ago, I was seeing home-grown leases, including some with clauses of questionable legality.
Now, a lot of the rental complexes either have their own online system (if they're owned by a big management company), or they use something like Avail if they're a one-off.
How does the logic work? There are many necessities you pay for that aren't a public utility. The necessity of a resource doesn't seem to dictate the government should take care of it. A government monopoly is most effective when the cost of infrastructure dictates the inefficiency of a monopoly is a better alternative than a duopoly or competitive market no?
I think the logic works in exactly the same way as with roads, power, sewer, water, etc., Just because the mode of access is intangible does not depreciate the importance of the resource.
Do you feel there is justification for our roadways being classified as a public utility? How does that logic work?
I feel the analogy of calling the internet an "information superhighway" is extremely apt here.
Saying something should be run by the government because it's important seems like backwards logic to me. Should the government manage the production and distribution of food as well? Should all housing be government housing projects? Basic food and shelter are far more important than internet access.
The US government pours tens of billions into food production.[0] Direct subsidies account for 15% of agribusiness ("farm") revenues and the US government both underwrites and pays 63% of the costs of crop price insurance.
Every developed country subsidizes their food industry to some extent or other. In the EU, the Common Agricultural Policy is the largest item in the EU budget.
Food subsidies seem to be economically essential for a stable food supply, and politically essential to ensure stability in rural areas.
Shelter, for its part, is heavily subsidized through the GSE[1] system. The GSEs underwrite mortgages, lowering interest rates for homebuyers, and stabilize the mortgage system by allowing mortgage issuing banks to offload the costs of internal failures onto the public instead of locking up the mortgage lending system.
Tighter government regulation of internet availability, including public or quasi-public ownership, would be far from exceptional given the degree of government involvement in other essential economic areas including food and housing.
I don't see a meaningful distinction between "control" and the existence of selective subsidies. The US government directs agribusiness to produce specific crops by giving the industry more money to produce those crops congress wants. This is "control." Food safety rules are also "control" of the market.
As far as housing is concerned, GSE preferences (combined with additional support like the mortgage interest tax credit) distort the housing market by supporting owner-occupied housing, which is abnormal by global standards. This is deliberate shaping of the market, or "control" by most definitions.
Also with regard to housing, the market is directly controlled through zoning laws and building codes. Zoning controls housing availability to artificially inflate prices, and building codes theoretically control construction quality.
The government does not have a monopoly on the production and distribution of food or housing. They may use taxpayer dollars to induce supply in this respect or that, but they are not the sole provider.
Which could have adverse results in that most every utility has metered rates. far too many assume utility means high speed and limit free connectivity where it really means you are just guaranteed access
Hey really like your site. If I could add any suggestions, it would be -
1) use of an address picker/dropdown, though honestly I haven't run into issues, it just seems cleaner.
2) link to the companies listed? I see some odd names when I searched my old address that I couldn't even find in Google.
Where do you get your data? If you look at any UTOPIA city, e.g. Layton, Utah, it shows it as symettrical gigabit as the max speed. They actually offer 10 Gbps residential plans.
If you take a look at their 'about us' page and some of their other articles, it becomes pretty clear that this organization is a paid lobbying/PR firm for ISPs.
Kinda calls into question their methodology and intent...
Early in the epidemic, someone posted pictures of a schoolbus parked near an area with poor internet service.
You see, in this school district, the buses have wifi. So they were using this to tether some of the kids with no internet access to the school. I guess they have some way of leaving the wifi on with the bus turned off, and since they weren't using the buses anyway...
It is still one of the classiest things I've seen come out of the quarantine. Unfortunately.
The funny thing that in the us it's easier to raise money and get permits to develop electric and autonomous cars and to start a space exploration business than to develop a business in cheap, fast and reliable internet connections.
Those other businesses have an opportunity for profits though. If you build a nice car, you can sell them at a premium price and the big automakers aren't going to compete until your unit numbers are big. If you make autonomous cars, that could certainly make money, and you get R&D tax incentives in the meantime. If you make cheaper space transport, the competition is still locked into their high cost systems.
If you wire up a rural area, there's not a lot of customers and probably they won't be willing to pay premium prices. If you overbuild an existing area, you usually have to compete with the incumbent telco and cableco and both of them can use other areas to subsidize network upgrades and price drops, so you can't charge a premium price.
I wish these sorts of insta-surveys would disclose more about how the polling was done. The cheapest way to do polling is via a pop-up notifcation on a heavily trafficked digital property, with online button-clicking to follow.
But then you aren't really getting data on all Americans. You're getting data on people who happened to be hanging out on cnn.com, smokinggun.com or whatever. And that's going to skew quite severely to people who have above average digital activity.
Same problem if they're using a ready-built panel of people who like to take online polls.
They might be surveying differently, and spending more money. But given that the publishing organization, decisiondata.org, is in the business of guiding people on their ISP choices, I don't think this is likely to be a demographically balanced phone survey, let alone Census-grade field work.
Sure, lots of us do rely on home internet to do a lot of work, especially now. But any effort to quantify this really ought to avoid big-time sampling problems.
It’s a bit offputting to have a site called “decisiondata” giving basically no info on their data retrieval procedure or caveats that should be applied on their methodology.
We don’t know much about who they polled, when or how they polled them, and of course no sample questions. Their citation of the BBC result have more info than their own.
In this day and age I would have expected most people to be fine with just their cellular connection. Heck, I had a coworker working from home at the peak of the crisis only using their 4G data.
Who is thinking of getting a second internet connection?
I live in a place where I can get two connections over two different technologies (cable TV and fiber optic), and there are some cheap and lower bandwidth (~10MiB/s) options that make sense for a backup connection. I think it's better to avoid having 4G as your backup since if there's any wired connections outage your local mobile frequencies will very quickly get saturated.
I have two connections, a business-class DSL connection (100/10) and a residential cable connection (1000/50). Both ISPs in my area have random issues, and I really can not afford to have my service go down for hours at a time.
It costs me a pretty penny ($135+$65/mo), but I have much better reliability and can balance traffic between them when they are both up (my home lab runs off the DSL connection as it has a static IP, but will fail over to the cable connection if it goes down. My personal systems, game console, etc. are the opposite).
Well that sample size would give an 95% confidence interval of ~ 2.8%. I don't think '68% of Americans' changes the story here.
The main methodological problem is that only sampled employed Americans (Labor Force participation is ~60%), so it should really read '70% of American Workers'.
This means that 70% of people are doing BS jobs (including me). Basically we've made information access and curation a full time job for 70% of the population. INFORMATION CURATION!
The other 30% is doing all the hard work of keeping people fed or in support roles of transportation and construction for the information curators.
That quite a leap. Even ignoring other potentially beneficial jobs, do you really think that modern supply chains ("support roles of transportation” of food) can function without the internet?
At first I thought "How are 70% of Americans tied to the internet? What about taxis, factory workers, truckers, some brick and mortar?" Then I remembered that most of these jobs require some form of internet to gain key inputs to work. Truckers may need GPS and connection to HQ, brick&mortar is interwoven with procurement and operations, factory workers may have multiple pieces of equipment that are at least partially tied to the internet, so on and so forth.
My gut feel is that statistic seems high. Maybe there was a sampling error (selection bias?) where they sent a survey via email or asked people to Zoom?
CBS Sunday Morning did a recent segment about this issue [1]. In the video, it's mentioned the FCC estimated ~23M Americans are without broadband internet. Microsoft did another study, and estimates ~162M Americans don't have broadband internet.
> “ Please note that DecisionData does have a paid financial relationship with some of the providers listed. This does not impact which providers are shown, as we show all providers we have data for.”
Well that’s unfortunate because I can’t believe your facts, if they are indeed facts.
The abysmal-yet-totally-American solution: have employers provide your home internet access. I sincerely hope we never end up there, that should be an Onion headline, but stranger (and sadder) things have happened ahem healthcare ahem.
I mean 950 is not a bad sample size (gives a 3% margin of error for populations of millions) the trouble is they don't say where they found these 950 people. So yeah, if it was an email survey or a people-who-answer-telephone-calls-from-strangers-during-the-workday, they may have selected for information workers.
Something I've been wanting to run by the HN community - would you pay anything for a backup home Internet connection? How low do you think the price would have to be to get 50-80% of your neighbors to buy it? Would $20/mo be low enough?
I've spent my career building and maintaining small, regional Internet Service providers. One of the realities of the market is that no matter how good your service is you can't get more than around 15-25% of people in an area to use your service. Most of the companies trying to do this on a large-ish scale (like Starry) are trying to break that barrier by selling wholesale contracts (like exclusive contracts to entire apartments buildings / communities) and/or by piling other services on top of the Internet service and reaching higher and higher speeds.
I have a hypothesis that a company that could go the other direction and provide a really cheap, basic Internet connection (<20$/mo, 30mbps) could gain more market share in an area specifically because it would be cheap enough to be used as a secondary Internet connection. I'm thinking of three types of customer here:
1) Very price sensitive customers who just want the cheapest thing they can get that's still usable. Maybe they have Internet access at work and use satellite TV at home and are OK with very basic Internet service at home.
2) Customers who use the service as their primary connection and it saves them enough money to add tethering to their phone plan, so if the service is unreliable they can switch to tethering.
3) Customers who have cable TV and Internet and can switch over to this service when their cable Internet is slow or down.
I'm thinking of two types of plans, one for $20/mo and one for 10$/mo + 1$/day that the service is used. These numbers mostly work out on paper as long as >60% of the homes in a community sign up to use the service and it's understood that support is going to be slow. Like, no phone support (email/text only), response times in 1-2 business days, and it might take a week to send someone out if your service is down (but we won't charge you for the time it was down.) Obviously this class of service only works if it's redundant with something else. I'm kind of thinking about it as the 'MagicJack' of Internet service - as home phone service started to become less essential (due to the redundancy of having a phone in your pocket) it became possible for a very low cost and not particularly reliable service to have a place in the market. They would not have had the strict geographic customer density constraint, though.
The cool thing is that once you get to that 60-80% market penetration you can start offering really great plans at really great prices. Like 1gbps symmetrical for $50-60/mo, 10G symmetrical for ~$250/mo.
If anyone is interested in chatting about this my email is in my profile. I'm not quite committed to pursuing it, but it's something I think about a lot and would love to get some outside perspective.
What? I always wonder where they get this data. I'm a software dev for two companies. I moved 1900 miles this summer. I'm currently outside of city limits using a LTE broadband connection (unlimited phone sim) and things work fine.
Most people don't understand technology!
Edit, looks like I read this incorrectly. I thought it said 70% said their home internet connection wasn't good enough for working from home.
It kind of looks like they are classifying that as
"Mobile (Cell) Internet Providers"
rather than
"Home Internet Providers"
I tried the "About Our Internet Data" form and it wasn't 100% crystal clear, but the results implied they are only considering cable and dsl or whatever to be "home internet".
If you open the page on internet providers in your area, it appears that "home" internet providers are cable, fiber, and dsl. Cellular providers are in a separate category.
That doesn't prove for certain what their methodology was for the main page, but it's sufficient for NDizzle to reasonably assume they are not counting cellular as "home".
Smells like selection bias to me... are they interviewing people already at home because their work allows it?
They do mention -
> There are certainly some folks who work in healthcare, grocery stores, auto shops, etc., where you wouldn't think a strong home internet connection was a requirement.
But I still remain skeptical that so many claim they require home internet. At the very least work email can be done on a phone.