nanog mailing list archives

Re: New minimum speed for US broadband connections


From: Owen DeLong via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2022 14:10:35 -0800



On Feb 16, 2022, at 13:13, Josh Luthman <josh () imaginenetworksllc com> wrote:


I'll once again please ask for specific examples as I continue to see the generic "it isn't in some parts of San 
Jose".

There are many such parts of San Jose. How specific do you want? Most of the residential areas served by the Evergreen 
central office specific enough for you?

My house specific enough for you? (No, I won’t be posting my address to NANOG). 

On the note of the generic area of San Jose, I'm all but certain this has a lot to do with California and its 
extraordinarily complicated and near impossible accessibility to obtain CLEC status. 

My complaint here is that the ILECs are incentivized by USF$$ to put their resources into rural, ignoring mezzo-urban 
and sub-urban customers. So I don’t think your CLEC rant has much to do with that. 

This makes competition pretty much impossible and makes the costs of operating one extraordinarily high.  I'm 
obviously not going to be one that claims that government is good or bad, just pointing out a certain correlation 
which could potentially be causation.

I won’t deny that it could be a factor in the overall lack of competition and I agree that process is long overdue for 
a tuneup. However, it’s not the root cause of the repatriation of customer dollars from mezzo-urban and sub-urban areas 
into rural infrastructure investment to the exclusion of investment in those areas. 

Frankly, the simple solution to that problem would be to require that any [IC]LEC receiving USF dollars provide a level 
of service to their USF donor customers that is at least on par with the service they provide to their USF beneficiary 
customers. 

Owen


On Wed, Feb 16, 2022 at 12:52 PM Owen DeLong <owen () delong com> wrote:


On Feb 11, 2022, at 13:14 , Josh Luthman <josh () imaginenetworksllc com> wrote:

Because literally every case I've seen along these lines is someone complaining about the coax connection is "only 
100 meg when I pay for 200 meg".  Comcast was the most hated company and yet they factually had better speeds 
(possibly in part to their subjectively terrible customer service) for years.

An apartment building could have cheap 1G fiber and the houses across the street have no option but slow DSL.

Where is this example?  Or is this strictly hypothetical?

There are literally dozens (if not thousands) of such examples in silicon valley alone.

I am not seeing any examples, anywhere, with accurate data, where it's what most consider to be in town/urban and 
poor speeds.  The only one that was close was Jared and I'm pretty sure when I saw the map I wouldn't consider that 
in town (could be wrong) but again, there's gig fiber there now.  I don't remember if he actually got his CLEC, or 
why that matters, but there's fiber there now.

Pretty sure you would have a hard time calling San Jose “not in town”. It’s literally #11 in the largest 200 cities 
in the US with a population of 1,003,120 (954,940 in the 2010 census) and a population density of 5,642 people/sq. 
mile (compare to #4 Houston, TX at 3,632/Sq. Mi.).

Similar conditions exist in parts of Los Angeles, #2 on the same list at 3,985,516 (3,795,512 in 2010 census) and 
8,499/Sq. Mi.

I speak of California because it’s where I have the most information. I’m sure this situation exists in other states 
as well, but I don’t have actual data.

The simple reality is that there are three sets of incentives that utilities tend to chase and neither of them 
provides for the mezzo-urban and sub-urban parts of America…
     1.      USF — Mostly supports rural deployments.
     2.      Extreme High Density — High-Rise apartments in dense arrays, Not areas of town houses, smaller 
apartment complexes, or single family dwellings.
     3.      Neighborhoods full of McMansions — Mostly built very recently and where the developers would literally 
pay the utilities to pre-deploy in order to boost sales prices.

Outside of those incentives, there’s very little actual deployment of broadband improvements, leaving vast 
quantities of average Americans underserved.

Owen




On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 4:05 PM Brandon Svec via NANOG <nanog () nanog org> wrote:
What is the point of these anecdotes? Surely anyone on this list with even a passing knowledge of the broadband 
landscape in the United States knows how hit or miss it can be.  An apartment building could have cheap 1G fiber 
and the houses across the street have no option but slow DSL.  Houses could have reliable high speed cable 
internet, but the office park across the field has no such choice because the buildout cost is prohibitively high 
to get fiber, etc.

There are plenty of places with only one or two choices of provider too.  Of course, this is literally changing by 
the minute as new services are continually being added and upgraded.
Brandon Svec 



On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 12:36 PM Josh Luthman <josh () imaginenetworksllc com> wrote:
OK the one example you provided has gigabit fiber though.

On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 8:41 AM Tom Beecher <beecher () beecher cc> wrote:
Can you provide examples?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo&ab_channel=NANOG

Our good friend Jared could only get 1.5M DSL living just outside Ann Arbor, MI, so he had to start his own 
CLEC. 

I have friends in significantly more rural areas than he lives in ( Niagara and Orleans county NYS , between 
Niagara Falls and Rochester ) who have the same 400Mb package from Spectrum that I do, living in the City of 
Niagara Falls. 

This is not to say that rural America is a mecca of connectivity; there is a long way to go all the way around 
regardless. But it is a direct example as you asked for. 

On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 3:57 PM Josh Luthman <josh () imaginenetworksllc com> wrote:
There are plenty of urban and suburban areas in America that are far worse off from a broadband perspective 
than “rural America”.

Can you provide examples?

On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 3:51 PM Owen DeLong via NANOG <nanog () nanog org> wrote:


On Jun 2, 2021, at 02:10 , Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa> wrote:



On 6/2/21 11:04, Owen DeLong wrote:

I disagree… If it could be forced into a standardized format using a standardized approach to data 
acquisition and reliable comparable results across providers, it could be a very useful adjunct to real 
competition.

If we can't even agree on what "minimum speed for U.S. broadband connections" actually means, fat chance 
having a "nutritional facts" at the back of the "Internet in a tea cup" dropped off at your door step.

I'm not saying it's not useful, I'm just saying that easily goes down the "what color should we use for the 
bike shed" territory, while people in rural America still have no or poor Internet access.

Mark.

ROFLMAO…

People in Rural America seem to be doing just fine. Most of the ones I know at least have GPON or better.

Meanwhile, here in San Jose, a city that bills itself as “The Capital of Silicon Valley”, the best I can get 
is Comcast (which does finally purport to be Gig down), but rarely delivers that.

Yes, anything involving the federal government will get the full bike shed treatment no matter what we do.

There are plenty of urban and suburban areas in America that are far worse off from a broadband perspective 
than “rural America”.

Owen



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