A new report has found that 26 states now either restrict or outright prohibit towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Quite often the laws are directly written by the telecom sector, and in some instances ban towns and cities from building their own broadband networks—even if the local ISP refuses to provide service.
Everything about this is disgusting. It goes to show corporatism and unfettered capitalism are cancers upon out society that must be exterminated.
I think laws that are sponsored by monopolies to prevent competition, represent crony capitalism. It’s fettered.
Thom Holwerda,
I agree, but it’s easier said than done. It’d be possible to fix if we had more honest people in charge, but the problem with corruption is that so many of the very people who are in position to fix it are themselves in on it and actively stonewall all attempts to get rid of corruption.
US founders understood the harmful effects of corruption, after all they witnessed the corrupt powers wielded by the church and they defend against it in the constitution. That was good, we can & should thank them for not allowing the church to have it’s way with the government, however the constitution leaves us woefully under-equipped for fighting equally powerful non-church entities. Perhaps they didn’t conceive of a scenario where the church wouldn’t be the most powerful entity fighting to take government control simply because that was what they were witnessing at the time, however in hindsight separation of church and state statues were too confined in regards to similar abuses that can (and ultimately did) happen once private corporations became sufficiently powerful. We’ve been suffering the consequences of inadequate separation between corporations and state for a long time, both at state and federal levels. It’s gotten particularly egregious with the current administration specifically hiring the industry’s own representatives to run the government themselves.
The government is meant to exist for the people, it has no business serving the interests of private corporations and ideally the constitution could be amended to have a separation of corporations and state akin to the separation of church and state. Alas, it brings up the conundrum, how do we solve the corruption problem with so many policy-makers are themselves corrupt?
I live in one of the states in the article, and furthermore, banded together with like minded individuals to try and overturn an earlier law the cable companies had written. That law was about making it a felony to violate their TOS. Our point is the state was committing to using public resources to enforce a private business model. We had newspaper articles, internet posts, letter writing campaigns direct to legislators both democrat and republican to no effect. State legislatures like to pass model legislation. It’s a cozy and long standing relationship, and you cannot make enough people care to change the dynamic. If we had NRA type power where real money and election losing bloc of votes were in play, maybe we would’ve been heard. Good luck folks, I have no ideas…lol
Anyway one last point…we all know, choose your words carefully, most people only read headlines. We have a problem with “corrupt democracy”. A corrupt democracy that refuses to protect capitalism by demanding a competitive and non monopolistic playing field. This is the tip of the iceberg. All over the place are protected monopoly. Where I live, you cannot install a cat scanner, without License that won’t be issued unless you prove it doesn’t create competition. In medicine, it doesn’t get mire corrupt. It hasn’t been competitive for decades, but people still describe the problem as capitalism…strange word to use for monopoly, but make it clear, you mean non competition….free markets that are actually free, do create downwards pressure on prices via competition. What we have is cronyism.
Alfman, separation of church and state in the US also often seems kinda only on paper, anyways… elected officials sure seem to frequently reference gods (even… Shuttle pilot/commander in a short speech right after last landing [/shakes head] …science brought you up and down, not gods; oh well, as I understand it the Air Force, from which many/most cosmonauts come, is a hotbet of ~Evangelicanism…); and isn’t a tribute to some deity even on money?
It’s hard to see how authorities can restrict simple mesh networks, the hardware is too cheap, easily configured and very widely available. Further, add a handful of inexpensive LoRaWan access points to a mesh and even a relative remote municipality can be on the WAN for almost negligible cost!
cpcf,
You’d have to read the specific laws to be sure. You’re probably fine for private use, it’s public networks that are offered to everyone that they’re fighting.
I looked up lorawan access points expecting something different, but it seems to be more of a wireless IOT access point gateway for existing ethernet / LTE internet service. While gateways like this may play a role in connecting your devices to a mesh network, it doesn’t provide the backbone as far as I can tell.
https://www.multitech.com/brands/multiconnect-conduit-ap
While I am curious about the prospects of having backbone internet provided by consumer mesh networks, my gut feeling is that it’s filled with problems. Consider that the cellular model works because 1) telcos own rights to install access points at elevated towers/locations, 2) these are typically connected with wires/fiber, 3) they’re assigned licenses granting them exclusive access to their radio frequencies. I think the cellular design works pretty well, but I feel it would be difficult & expensive for amateurs to come anywhere close the reliability, coverage, and performance using amateur mesh network tech..
1) Access point location.
Enough property owners are needed to install access points where the network actually needs it. If there’s too great a coverage gap, internet access could be severed. All sites need reliable power sources. Towers might be necessary for better range and obstacle avoidance.
2) Since we’re talking about amateur mesh networks, the network will have few if any dedicated back-haul wires to an internet backbone. All traffic will need to be routed over the network wirelessly. Every packet on the network will have to be broadcast over numerous access point routers within the mesh network before reaching an internet backbone. This could be dozens of hops per mile. This may work ok on limited scales, but if we scale it up to thousands of users trying to watch youtube simultaneously it seems more critical routes to the backbone within the mesh network could become hopelessly oversubscribed.
3) Not having access to licensed frequencies means amateur mesh networks are not only constrained to legal power limits, but also end up sharing the bandwidth with consumer gear (802.11g/ac/n/…). The mesh network we want to use to implement a WAN may end up competing for bandwidth with residential LAN deployments (ie wifi security cameras).
So can amateurs successfully build a widescale mesh network? I have my doubts. A well organized municipality or WISP can likely overcome these problems for reasonably cheap compared to our ISP monopolies, but the costs for planning/site surveys/tech are not going to be “negligible”.
I’d like to hear from those who actually have experience doing this sort of thing!
Hm, not sure if “typically”, quite a few of them have dishes for point-to-point wireless connections to the next tower, especially in the province; but I will take note of any passing towers in my 20k city in the coming days. 😛
zima,
That’s a good point, I’ve seen those too on some towers. although around here most cell towers don’t have them.
Parabolic dish antennas are viable for permanently connecting towsers, although you need line of sight and I assume you need government approval. My guess is that in the short term, running a cable with many fibers costs more up front, but operating costs of high power antennas is greater. I imagine a cable full of fibers offers much more bandwidth too.
For an amateur network, I suspect both approaches would incur the red tape from one or more government agencies, they won’t want you running wires or putting up antenna towers without their approval. IMHO an ISP that is loosing customers to a local amateur network would be very likely to bring them to court. This is just speculation though, I’m not aware of a case where this has happened.
I found an interesting story of an individual who put up their own radio antenna on their property. It gives insight into the process.
https://www.antennazoning.com/docs/Tower-Lindholm-CQ-June-2008.pdf
Allright, so I took note of passing towers; there were 3 nearby each other (within 100 m or so…) close to city centre, one large estate, right next to Kaufland supermarket and shopping gallery. And… neither had moderately large dishes (well, I always thought they were dishes, enclosed…) that I remembered, so they probably all had wired connections. However, one of them had around 10 very small I-think-dishes (but as I said, enclosed), and another one 2 or 3; looking too small to provide network connections to other towers further away from the city, but who knows…
Keep in mind LoRaWan is about ultra low bitrate and transfer cost, say 1% ratio per hour, 200 bytes takes 2s, no downlink unless uplink, etc. This is no WiFi at all. It’s all about IoT uploading some sensors’ data.
Yes, I hadn’t considered LoRaWan as viable but last year quite a few papers were published, I believe in the US there is a University campus running a LoRaWan as it’s backbone part of a academic exercise. It’s likely the future of IoT and IIoT will encompass thousands of sensors that are most under-utilised, each with communications range measured in kilometres. The proposal was that a network of 12000 solar powered LoRaWan devices in a typical cell tower footprint can act as a viable backup / replacement for the tower in times of emergency. Apparently the results are very promising, but don’t ask me I have no idea how it works! By the sound of it performance was equivalent to a traditional 2.5GHz WiFi network, if you are in a no-service area that seems more than viable!
cpcf,
Can you post a link to the paper? I don’t question that a university has deployed it as you say, but I just question the “backbone” part. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t sound like a backbone technology, rather the opposite. What I’ve read about lorawan so far doesn’t match up with backbone use cases, but low power IOT use cases instead.
Again, I’m ignorant of lorawan’s capabilities. I know that 2.4GHz wifi can easily be a bottleneck for a single residency with high speed internet. They’ll likely need a 2.4+5GHz access point to actually max out their internet service and if your fortunate enough to have 100mhz+ internet speeds then wifi can still be a bottleneck.
While I don’t consider 2.4GHz wifi bad, if you had to share it with a hundred or more users on a campus, then it would be bad if everyone was trying to use it simultaneously. You may recall that’s pretty much what happened in the steve jobs demo where he begged attendees to turn off wifi devices so that he could get onto wifi to show off the iphone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znxQOPFg2mo
A mesh network amplifies this problem since packets have to be rebroadcast over and over to traverse the network. So while adding more channels will help, there’s a lot of implicit overhead in this approach.
I’m glad you brought it up and I’d like to learn more about the technology (good candidate for an osnews article), however I’m not yet convinced it’s the right technology to bring high speed internet to a municipality.
Hm, about that Steve Jobs’ demo fail, they kinda brought this upon themselves – it’s supposedly a phone, could have relied on cellular connection for presentation… 😛
Disgusting is right.