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Comment by ectospheno | Hacker News Reader

I'm an American and I understand why my internet is slow. So do all of my friends and coworkers. What do you propose we actually do about it?

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Support things like this https://savecompetition.com and similar initiatives that are constantly being brought up. Enable providers like Sonic to survive by telling your representatives.

Vote and encourage others to vote. Also, it’s worth pointing out comparisons to Europe and Japan to help dispel the myth that we are a shining light to the rest of the world and that we are number 1.

As an American I really wish I had enough money to start my own ISP which had ground rules that all it'd ever be is an internet provider with the sole goal of continuously improving internet service.

my cursory research seems to indicate that it's pretty reasonable to start a local wireless ISP, with a lower bound wrt minimum number of clients to make the venture worth it being 50 or so according to someone.

It requires some money and resources obviously, but neither do you need to be Google or a Telco to setup an ISP:

About a year ago, FOA was contacted by Greg Turton of Cordele, GA. who was curious about what was involved in creating a FTTH network. Greg is a real estate developer who also owns several local hotels. Where he lives and builds homes is way outside of a service area that anybody wants to build good broadband, forget FTTH. Cordele itself has a population of only about 15,000 and is one of those small cities along the Interstate highway that are everywhere in the US.

We answered Greg's questions and led him to some of the FOA Guide web pages and YouTube videos about FTTH to get him started. More conversations discussed how to get connections as an ISP, types of components and suppliers, etc. Fortunately the local electrical utility has lots of fiber but they were restricted from building their own FTTH network because Georgia was one of 19 states where lobbyists for the incumbent providers got laws passed restricting their ability to operate a FTTH system themselves. But they were more than willing to lease dark fiber to Greg at really good rates. And there were good choices on getting an Internet connection.

...

http://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/appln/FTTH-DIY.html

You might want to checkout the YC startup Necto[0].

[0]: https://apply.nectolab.io/

Shut down FCC. That's all it would take.

Sure, your FM radio would stop working, but that's a small sacrifice to make, to get actual competition in something as important as telecommunications.

This is the worst solution posed here. If we had no FCC, large companies would be thrown into an arms race to pump as much RF as possible into the air while smaller ones (radio stations, anybody?) would simply be drowned out and crushed.

Just like in the wifi band... oh, wait.

I'm not saying that radio use can't be regulated. I'm saying that FCC is the worst possible organization that could be imagined to do that regulation. To understand that, simply compare Europe to USA.

Shut down FCC. That's all it would take. Sure, your FM radio would stop working, but that's a small sacrifice to make, to get actual competition in something as important as telecommunications.

Good idea, I was just thinking that I hate how emergency services can talk to each other, and my cellphone works. People are so damned soft, they should have to release a homing pigeon if they want to call 911! Sure, a few people might die and life will be a dark and terrible nightmare of RF interference, radio astronomy will end, and modern civilization will grind to a halt, but that’s a small price to pay for my libertarian wet dream.

FCC is uniquely bad among USA government regulatory agencies. I'm fine with EPA, FTC, OSHA, FAA, etc. All of those place reasonable limits on human action. They don't say, "this market will be 40% VZN and 45% ATT!" Any number of other agencies could keep the emergency services bands online. Most of the actual regulation of how devices radiate signals is already controlled by voluntary associations of manufacturers.

Please don't discuss your wet dreams in this forum.

Dunno, having an actor to oversee the behavior of telecoms would be an advantage, not the opposite.

In our neighborhood, we're waiting on Spectrum to finish their infrastructure install. We were initially in talks with AT&T to come in too, but they backed out when we couldn't do community agreements (beyond easement) again and we wouldn't agree to them using the existing infrastructure (which was terrible) from the previous provider below. No other provider, asides from HughesNet, is willing to come in now that there is a non-exclusive agreement with Spectrum for easement access. Moral of the story, companies aren't going to act with consumers' interests at heart. Didn't Charter or someone have some agreement where part of some merger approval required that they built out into rural areas? A requirement they didn't comply with?

The provider we had before was absolutely terrible with $90/month spent on a basic DishTV package + 3Mbps internet. They had an exclusive easement, but due to constant outages because the infrastructure couldn't support the community, we were able to finally get out of it after 6 years and lots of lawyer involvement. FCC wouldn't get involved, but having the government take a more active oversight role would be a good thing, in my experience.

The fact that no provider will serve this neighborhood without exclusivity is contingent upon the woeful state of telecom competition in USA. If it were regulated like e.g. automobiles (basic requirements, but nothing about a particular vendor "owning" some portion of the market or the road), then you'd have a choice of WISPs. You might not get a wired connection, depending on density etc. As you can see from the European contributions to this thread, wireless can actually be very good. If the neighbors wanted to go in together for a really big fat wireless connection in higher portions of the spectrum, the "last block" could still be wired. That would be an easy upgrade to fiber once that made sense. Market forces would still govern that deal, because of those WISPs.

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