FCC to repeal Net Neutrality Bill

[HMS Barham]

Maybe. Is it really that much more expensive to lay wires than to put down thick net of microwave transceivers?

Yes, actually.

Or is it just more regulated? There seem to be plenty of mobile phone companies out there. Which are increasingly becoming competitors to land line internet themselves.

Yes, unfortunately physics is particularly unforgiving on this front. First, mobile phone companies are using radio waves not microwaves (microwaves have other perks and drawbacks).

Microwaves are high frequency radio waves. Cell phone towers operate in the microwave spectrum.

This is why almost all wireless companies have data caps - because physics is unforgiving. And, unlike our technology, physics cannot be fixed, patched, or changed.

There is a literal upper maximum of transmittable data because of the number of available frequencies.

Granting that both land line and wireless data transmission is constrained by the laws of physics, the capabilities of the wireless network have been growing faster for some time. What's more, there is a limit to how much most people actually want. Hard disk sizes have grown notably slowly in the past half decade. Nothing has replaced Blu-ray in the mass market. Indeed, Blu-ray has not really replaced DVD. An unrestricted wireless connection isn't a big competitor to an unrestricted wired connection, but i is a big competitor to a wired connection with a ton of screwy limits.

[Galloism]

Yes, actually.



Yes, unfortunately physics is particularly unforgiving on this front. First, mobile phone companies are using radio waves not microwaves (microwaves have other perks and drawbacks).

Microwaves are high frequency radio waves. Cell phone towers operate in the microwave spectrum.

<looks it up>

Damn. You're right about them being in the microwave spectrum.

This is why almost all wireless companies have data caps - because physics is unforgiving. And, unlike our technology, physics cannot be fixed, patched, or changed.

There is a literal upper maximum of transmittable data because of the number of available frequencies.

Granting that both land line and wireless data transmission is constrained by the laws of physics,

Naturally, but it's a much higher limit. You can double the throughput by doubling the number of wires, and although that is, technically speaking, a physics limit, it is a much higher limited - IE, one limited by physical space itself.

the capabilities of the wireless network have been growing faster for some time.

That growth is not unlimited (or near unlimited as is the case with wired networks). In fact, in many areas, we're already hitting the limits of total wireless capacity because of physics. This is why wireless carriers, even those that offer "unlimited" (with appropriate air quotes) throttle speeds of users who use a lot of data. Wireless data throughput is much more limited than wired.

What's more, there is a limit to how much most people actually want.

I laughed. Technically yes, but not in practical terms.

Hard disk sizes have grown notably slowly in the past half decade. Nothing has replaced Blu-ray in the mass market. Indeed, Blu-ray has not really replaced DVD. An unrestricted wireless connection isn't a big competitor to an unrestricted wired connection, but i is a big competitor to a wired connection with a ton of screwy limits.

Here's the thing, wireless already has a ton of screwy limits (because the FCC allowed it, practically speaking, because even they recognize physics as a legit thing we have to deal with). So you're not talking about "unrestricted wireless connection" being a competitor with "a wired connection with a ton of screwy limits", but "a wireless connection with a ton of screwy limits" competing with "a wired connection with a ton of screwy limits."

[Naval Monte]

More reason to hate Ajit Pai.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSPTnwtxEto

[Vulturret]

More reason to hate Ajit Pai.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSPTnwtxEto

[Naval Monte]

More reason to hate Ajit Pai.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSPTnwtxEto

Just further proof that Ajit Pai can only speak in lies or that he is an idiot.

[Vulturret]

Just further proof that Ajit Pai can only speak in lies or that he is an idiot.

Both?

[United Imperial Systems]

Just further proof that Ajit Pai can only speak in lies or that he is an idiot.

Both?

Obviously both, only a moron can claim the title of "The most hated person in America alive!"

[-Ocelot-]

Just further proof that Ajit Pai can only speak in lies or that he is an idiot.

Both?

Don't call him an idiot. Idiocy implies innocence. Pai is a lawyer so he is very careful with what he is saying every time he speaks for the FCC.

[Vassenor]

Internal FCC Report Shows Republican Net Neutrality Narrative Is False

So today in "shit we knew already but now it's official"...

[Naval Monte]

Internal FCC Report Shows Republican Net Neutrality Narrative Is False

So today in "shit we knew already but now it's official"...

Hopefully Congress will fix this mess but even if the Republicans did listen to us and undo Pai's actions I think at this point the chances of them winning the next election would be low.

[Ainsleyia]

Repealing net neutrality? How cute.
Here in my country (not my made up country), net neutrality isn't even a thing. I need to pay to keep my Wi-fi active and some websites are blocked by the government.

[Salandriagado]

Yes, actually.



Yes, unfortunately physics is particularly unforgiving on this front. First, mobile phone companies are using radio waves not microwaves (microwaves have other perks and drawbacks).

Microwaves are high frequency radio waves. Cell phone towers operate in the microwave spectrum.

This is why almost all wireless companies have data caps - because physics is unforgiving. And, unlike our technology, physics cannot be fixed, patched, or changed.

There is a literal upper maximum of transmittable data because of the number of available frequencies.

Granting that both land line and wireless data transmission is constrained by the laws of physics, the capabilities of the wireless network have been growing faster for some time. What's more, there is a limit to how much most people actually want. Hard disk sizes have grown notably slowly in the past half decade. Nothing has replaced Blu-ray in the mass market. Indeed, Blu-ray has not really replaced DVD. An unrestricted wireless connection isn't a big competitor to an unrestricted wired connection, but i is a big competitor to a wired connection with a ton of screwy limits.

The physical limitations are fucking irrelevant on wired connections. In particular, the standing record for internet speed pushed down bog standard 1980s copper cabling in a commercial setting is somewhere around 1.6 gbps.

[HMS Barham]

Microwaves are high frequency radio waves. Cell phone towers operate in the microwave spectrum.


Granting that both land line and wireless data transmission is constrained by the laws of physics, the capabilities of the wireless network have been growing faster for some time. What's more, there is a limit to how much most people actually want. Hard disk sizes have grown notably slowly in the past half decade. Nothing has replaced Blu-ray in the mass market. Indeed, Blu-ray has not really replaced DVD. An unrestricted wireless connection isn't a big competitor to an unrestricted wired connection, but i is a big competitor to a wired connection with a ton of screwy limits.

The physical limitations are fucking irrelevant on wired connections. In particular, the standing record for internet speed pushed down bog standard 1980s copper cabling in a commercial setting is somewhere around 1.6 gbps.

Which is why everyone has 1.6Gbps uncapped free wired connections today.

[The of Japan]

The physical limitations are fucking irrelevant on wired connections. In particular, the standing record for internet speed pushed down bog standard 1980s copper cabling in a commercial setting is somewhere around 1.6 gbps.

Which is why everyone has 1.6Gbps uncapped free wired connections today.

I have 50 mbps down, and 4 mbps up

[Salandriagado]

The physical limitations are fucking irrelevant on wired connections. In particular, the standing record for internet speed pushed down bog standard 1980s copper cabling in a commercial setting is somewhere around 1.6 gbps.

Which is why everyone has 1.6Gbps uncapped free wired connections today.

No, people don't because monopolies have no incentive to do so.

[HMS Barham]

Which is why everyone has 1.6Gbps uncapped free wired connections today.

No, people don't because monopolies have no incentive to do so.

Which is why my internet connection is the same as it was in 2005.

[The Flutterlands]

I really hope that this gets struck down in court, especially the state preemption part of the repeal, because fuck that shit. Still think states should make their own Net Neutrality laws even in contempt of the courts should it get to that. No corporation or government should have unregulated control over what we do on the internet.

If not, I hope the republicans pay dearly for their sins in 2018.

[Soldati Senza Confini]

Which is why everyone has 1.6Gbps uncapped free wired connections today.

No, people don't because monopolies have no incentive to do so.

For one, speed has nothing to do with bandwidth. Throughput does.

You could have a 100mbps connection all day, but if you have only use for 40mbps on the line to download things, you have 60mbps you're not using. Now that's not a bad thing if you plan on being a small business and need bandwidth to grow, but your bandwidth does jack shit to make things faster at that point. You could downgrade to a 50mbps connection. Now throughput is how much data is actually going through the wire and arriving at its destination. And that depends on a lot more factors like latency (how much time does data take to go from end-to-end), attenuation (how much data is lost in a transmission, eg. you will lose and have to retransmit more data with two computers connected with a crossover cable at 99m of each other than you would with two computers connected with a 5m crossover cable), the kind of protocol being used to transmit data (certain protocols are inherently slower than others) and the size of the data being transmitted per packet (you will receive 64 bit packets faster than 64 kilobit packets).

In other words, your statements of "the physical limitations are irrelevant to wired connections" and "monopolies have no incentive to do anything about internet speeds" are simply not true. There are physical limitations to be aware of, and to account for when talking about them.

Now what you're talking about is monopolies having incentive to do so based on data usage among their customers, in which case there is an argument for the ISPs side that you simply don't need to upgrade infrastructure if your clients don't use more bandwidth than that which they use. If I use 50mbps on the wire overall, why would my ISP feel the need to offer me, or to upgrade their infrastructure so I can take advantage of 1gbps of bandwidth on the line? They might upgrade infrastructure for faster throughput, that being better repeaters along the line and better coaxial cable so I don't suffer from signal loss and reliability issues, or outright upgrade all local infrastructure to fiber-to-the-node like HFC connections do. But they have no need to offer fiber-to-the-premise connections nor high bandwidth numbers if the consumers in a local area don't use all the bandwidth that goes from node to node.

I also looked up your "record", it was passed through the HIPPI protocol in the 80s over 50 twisted-pair cables in full-duplex mode. HIPPI however has a useful limit of up to 10 kilometers, so only useful within LANs and campus LANs. Each connection to a specialized switch for the connections must be at most 25 meters long to be useful at 100% reliability. Also, it uses not just one, but 50 twisted-pair coaxial cables to transmit data. In other words, completely impractical for consumers. Now, you can use SONET and satellite links to send out the data over long distances, but then you have to deal with slower protocols from the endpoint of the HIPPI LAN to the beginning point of the target LAN (HIPPI or non-HIPPI).

So it's not so much a WAN record as much as it is a LAN network, and those are two entirely different fields. Which you would know if you knew anything about networking, which you really don't because your argument really makes no sense when put into context.

[Salandriagado]

No, people don't because monopolies have no incentive to do so.

For one, speed has nothing to do with bandwidth. Throughput does.

You could have a 100mbps connection all day, but if you have only use for 40mbps on the line to download things, you have 60mbps you're not using. Now that's not a bad thing if you plan on being a small business and need bandwidth to grow, but your bandwidth does jack shit to make things faster at that point. You could downgrade to a 50mbps connection. Now throughput is how much data is actually going through the wire and arriving at its destination. And that depends on a lot more factors like latency (how much time does data take to go from end-to-end), attenuation (how much data is lost in a transmission, eg. you will lose and have to retransmit more data with two computers connected with a crossover cable at 99m of each other than you would with two computers connected with a 5m crossover cable), the kind of protocol being used to transmit data (certain protocols are inherently slower than others) and the size of the data being transmitted per packet (you will receive 64 bit packets faster than 64 kilobit packets).

In other words, your statements of "the physical limitations are irrelevant to wired connections" and "monopolies have no incentive to do anything about internet speeds" are simply not true. There are physical limitations to be aware of, and to account for when talking about them.

Now what you're talking about is monopolies having incentive to do so based on data usage among their customers, in which case there is an argument for the ISPs side that you simply don't need to upgrade infrastructure if your clients don't use more bandwidth than that which they use. If I use 50mbps on the wire overall, why would my ISP feel the need to offer me, or to upgrade their infrastructure so I can take advantage of 1gbps of bandwidth on the line? They might upgrade infrastructure for faster throughput, that being better repeaters along the line and better coaxial cable so I don't suffer from signal loss and reliability issues, or outright upgrade all local infrastructure to fiber-to-the-node like HFC connections do. But they have no need to offer fiber-to-the-premise connections nor high bandwidth numbers if the consumers in a local area don't use all the bandwidth that goes from node to node.

I also looked up your "record", it was passed through the HIPPI protocol in the 80s over 50 twisted-pair cables in full-duplex mode. HIPPI however has a useful limit of up to 10 kilometers, so only useful within LANs and campus LANs. Each connection to a specialized switch for the connections must be at most 25 meters long to be useful at 100% reliability. Also, it uses not just one, but 50 twisted-pair coaxial cables to transmit data. In other words, completely impractical for consumers. Now, you can use SONET and satellite links to send out the data over long distances, but then you have to deal with slower protocols from the endpoint of the HIPPI LAN to the beginning point of the target LAN (HIPPI or non-HIPPI).

So it's not so much a WAN record as much as it is a LAN network, and those are two entirely different fields. Which you would know if you knew anything about networking, which you really don't because your argument really makes no sense when put into context.

Throughout, I, along with the rest of the English-speaking world, am using the word "speed" to mean "bandwidth".

And I wasn't aware of the HIPPI version, actually: this is being done right now in a city in Canada (I want to say Toronto, but I don't recall exactly), for actual consumers in an actual commercial setting.

[Soldati Senza Confini]

Throughout, I, along with the rest of the English-speaking world, am using the word "speed" to mean "bandwidth".

And I wasn't aware of the HIPPI version, actually: this is being done right now in a city in Canada (I want to say Toronto, but I don't recall exactly), for actual consumers in an actual commercial setting.

I understand a lot of laypeople use "speed" to mean "bandwidth", that doesn't mean it's not wrong if you know what you're talking about.

Now the problem with your Toronto example is that now you're not exactly talking about coaxial cable or twisted pairs on telephone lines, you're talking about connections in general. I'm checking most of the offerings in Toronto and most of them deal with fiber-to-the-premise to deliver that data, nothing like what you're claiming can be done on a single standard telephone wire that's actually meaningful to anyone.

[Salandriagado]

Throughout, I, along with the rest of the English-speaking world, am using the word "speed" to mean "bandwidth".

And I wasn't aware of the HIPPI version, actually: this is being done right now in a city in Canada (I want to say Toronto, but I don't recall exactly), for actual consumers in an actual commercial setting.

I understand a lot of laypeople use "speed" to mean "bandwidth", that doesn't mean it's not wrong if you know what you're talking about.

Now the problem with your Toronto example is that now you're not exactly talking about coaxial cable or twisted pairs on telephone lines. I'm checking most of the offerings in Toronto and most of them deal with fiber-to-the-premise to deliver that data, nothing like what you're claiming can be done on a single standard telephone wire that's actually meaningful to anyone.

Could be wrong with Toronto. Give me a minute, I'm trying to dig up the report.


EDIT: Found some reddit posts from one of their employees about it, here and here (read comments too).

[Soldati Senza Confini]

I understand a lot of laypeople use "speed" to mean "bandwidth", that doesn't mean it's not wrong if you know what you're talking about.

Now the problem with your Toronto example is that now you're not exactly talking about coaxial cable or twisted pairs on telephone lines. I'm checking most of the offerings in Toronto and most of them deal with fiber-to-the-premise to deliver that data, nothing like what you're claiming can be done on a single standard telephone wire that's actually meaningful to anyone.

Could be wrong with Toronto. Give me a minute, I'm trying to dig up the report.


EDIT: Found some reddit posts from one of their employees about it, here and here (read comments too).

I see the engineering behind it, somewhat. What's about to follow is a long and complicated analysis of their situation as best as I can describe it.

What they're really saying is something completely different from what you're saying. All they're doing is converting the entire analog signal to digital which gives them more bandwidth to work with (which is true, coaxial cable can send a lot of data and I believe they were predicting 100gbps by 2013), which you will never, ever see at the premise; but a lot of it was used by cable companies to send out TV signal uncompressed, which they then set up to the node, and they distribute that entire bandwidth to the local area.

Now what that means is not what you think it means either. They're talking about speeds to the node, not to the premise. People still have to deal with the "last mile" which is where all the segmentation happens. So customers will never see 1.2gbps on their lines unless you have the entire line dedicated to them. They will see an upgrade, a significant upgrade, but they won't see much in the way of getting all 1.2gbps on their lines. As you can see from your examples most people get only up to 200/20 lines distributed to them with a shiny new DOCSIS 3.1 modem. The other issue is that 1.2gbps, while achievable, that's all that's running to the node, so there is something to be said about that.

What happens at the node is that you have multiple cables coming to the node, which is what provides all the speed. If you notice they talk about bonding 32QAMs, which is certainly achievable, but it's not without having to go through some engineering hoops (I am not an expert on coax cable, so how they are managing to bond 32QAMs to send 1.2gbps through the wire is beyond my expertise with telecommunications equipment). Now the problem with that is that while you are probably talking about just one wire, that one wire has to go through a node, and that node has to provide internet for more than one person on provisioning. So you don't end up seeing that 1gbps unless you use the entire node yourself, this doesn't happen as often as you think. You are probably sharing a node with other people in your local area, with lines distributed to the node via fiber optic cable. So unless you have commercial leased lines you will never own a 1.2gbps connection with the setup this company you linked to is using. It doesn't mean you won't have fast internet, it just means that the offering is not exactly 1gbps to everyone once you consider what 1.2gbps to the node actually means in practice.

The other thing is what I talked about there being physical limitations to be aware of, and to account for when talking about them. Down your threads the poster specifically says that there was a lot of modernization going on in that particular test node he was working with, which makes sense. Your copper cable might not be damaged, and if it was they replaced a lot of it, but they still had to upgrade their equipment to deal with the load. As much as I'd like not to mention this, coaxial lines are not just a straight shot from the central office to the premise, there's a lot of equipment in between. So this makes far more sense than the initial claim of "the standing record of internet pushed down shitty 80s copper cabling".

In other words, none of this came without their engineering caveats. And it is understandable, you're not a networking or telecom guy. Which is why I had to pitch in. But, your claim that the physical limitations are irrelevant is kind of flimsy under the considerations of the project you linked. It certainly had physical limitations, from hardware, to frequency bonding. It's not as simple as you made it sound with your flat out statement that the physical limitations are irrelevant. Now, I would certainly agree with you that the physical limitations are irrelevant for fast internet provisioning under certain systems, but then that depends on which telecom system of provisioning you're talking about specifically.

[The Flutterlands]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastco ... ality-laws

Good. They should rebel against the FCC and if the Courts rule against the states, rhey should continue enforcing net neutrality. We have an obligation to break unjust laws.

[Independant Nations and Guilds]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/40510095/snubbing-fcc-states-are-writing-their-own-net-neutrality-laws

Good. They should rebel against the FCC and if the Courts rule against the states, rhey should continue enforcing net neutrality. We have an obligation to break unjust laws.

Good to see you again.

There's also the fact that it is being taken both to legislation, where at the very least, a stop-gap can be created, and to the courts, where the Pai and the FCC can be sued for every penny.

[The Flutterlands]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/40510095/snubbing-fcc-states-are-writing-their-own-net-neutrality-laws

Good. They should rebel against the FCC and if the Courts rule against the states, rhey should continue enforcing net neutrality. We have an obligation to break unjust laws.

Good to see you again.

There's also the fact that it is being taken both to legislation, where at the very least, a stop-gap can be created, and to the courts, where the Pai and the FCC can be sued for every penny.

That is also good news. I'm just taking the bad outcome into consideration...