Forgotten by the Future, Some Take the Internet Into Their Own Hands | Hacker News Reader

Forgotten by the Future, Some Take the Internet Into Their Own Hands

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75 pointsseanmb20 comments

All we had to do was begin building a WISP, sign 3 customers and put out some flyers and Comcast (who'd previously, perpetually said they'd service the area in 4 years time) rushed in and within about 6 weeks had service to everyone.

This is nothing new....

Here in barcelona, spain, there is a project called guifi.net which started out as a open wifi network and now also has private fiber installed. There are over 20000 nodes connected to the guifi.net network now.

http://guifi.net/en/ (sorry for the bad translations on some parts of the page. We are working with getting them fixed.

Very interesting to see. I had no idea there were so many community-owned providers. That begs the question: Would community providers do deep-packet inspection and send out copyright notices like the big telcos do? Or would they, as community-owned enterprises, be more dumb-pipe-ish? If so, maybe fighting anti-community-telco laws is the place to look for helping secure internet freedom in the future.

They would be likely to do what the record companies ask. They are small and don't have a lot of money to fight it with legal strength. They'll fold.

IANAL, but it seems to me that government-owned networks would be required to adhere to the Fourth Amendment.

Well. The old rural electrification coop is back in the 21st. How about that?

They mixed up megabyte and megabit. I highly doubt the FCC defines broadband as above 32Mbps, as very few people in the US get such speeds (unfortunately).

Can we also get something like this going in urban and suburban areas where cable/dsl ISP's underserve and overcharge for their broadband internet. Let's just take these government-backed monopolist corporations out of the loop entirely and treat internet communcations the same way as municipal electrical lines, sewers, and roads.

It's kind of tough to just start digging in the city. You'll probably hit an existing pipe / line. Permits, etc..

Twenty years later....

Can we get private enterprise to take this broadband service out of the hands of this stupid, inefficient, underperforming, lowest-bidder government monopoly? Private enterprise can do it so much better! Capitalism! Why do my property taxes keep rising and my broadband isn't getting any faster?!?

Except you don't typically hear that about public utilities. Have you ever heard someone argue that their sewers should be sold to private corporations to operate because that would be cheaper?

    Private enterprise can do it so much better! Capitalism!
    Why do my property taxes keep rising and my broadband
    isn't getting any faster?!?

But my cable internet bill already does go up every few months without any improvement to my bandwidth cap, or speed.

In South Africa we have a government-run telco monopoly. We also have some of the shittiest, most expensive internet in the world.

At least with private enterprise you can choose the least bad option.

Well, not usually in the US. The big internet providers usually section off areas, and they don't compete. So we get the worst of both worlds - a private (ie, unaccountable) monopoly.

Here in Chattanooga, EPB were the first in the US (even received NYT recognition for it) to deliver gigabit service to residential customers. Pricing is definitely competitive, and unlike Comcast, et al., it doesn't change every six months. A couple months ago, every customer had their data speeds doubled without an increase in monthly cost. I now pay my same $70/mo for 50Mbps, but receive 100Mbps. Comcast wants me to shell out $90/mo for this for the first six months. Three years ago, 50Mbps service from EPB cost $140/mo. It's now half that price for twice the speed, and nobody here deals with throttling or data caps or any of that crap.

I know a lot of people at EPB personally, and even used to work there myself. There is nobody who wants to be inefficient, underperforming, or go-with-the-lowest-bidder types. I've experienced this as a department manager and as an external vendor. I've seen projects lost to higher bidders. I've seen those higher bidders take way longer to deliver than they promised. I've seen low-bid projects succeed wildly (and even built several of them or managed them myself). Maybe EPB is a rarity of trying to do things right. Everyone I know in the company is focused entirely on the goal of trying to take care of the city/county and beat the pants off of Comcast. And they've had to deal with court battles with Comcast throughout the process of building up a great service for the community.

Capitalism is a shitty answer for every problem. Sometimes capitalism is just an excuse to fuck everyone over. In contrast, I like knowing that every time I call up customer service, I get a local person who I know is making a decent living wage, even for operating phones; those higher up are paid very competitive salaries for their position; the company employs every employee full-time and offers them what may be the best benefits and liberal vacation time of any company I know of in the area. I'm not an employee there anymore (was a vendor, became an employee, went back to being a vendor), but I think it'd pretty much take a complete loss of vision and a drastic change to abysmal service and performance before anyone in this community would want to see EPB replaced by yet another private enterprise, capitalism, and going back to the days of dealing with Comcast.

I hope this works - I'm sure plenty of people in Manchester would be prepared to get rid of their existing provider if this succeeds elsewhere in the county.

Mm resurrect Poptel then :-)

For you younguns Poptel was a cooperative and an early ISP in the UK.

If there's a place for co-operative energy, there's a place for co-operative ISPs... the idealist in me really wants to see that.

Farmers are awesome.

They are the ox where the homestone rests. (I guess not much people will get this reference)

I literally got this reference thanks to Mystery Science Theater 3000. It contains culture. Who knew?

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