[GRLUG] Google and Kansas City

Thu Mar 31 00:00:32 EDT 2011

I'm one of those people who thinks government generally makes things worse.

As far as a solution...I'm not convinced ISDN isn't at least part of the
solution. That gets you 112Kb/s up and down over the same copper that
struggles to get you a stable 33.6Kb/s otherwise.

Another part of the solution is likely to be wireless mesh with a mix of
high and low-power nodes. A 4W on an
omni is visible from a long ways, and a cantenna on a rotor would improve
that. Get cheap mesh repeaters incorporated in rural street light fixtures,
and you've got a layer-2 mesh backbone ISPs can provide pay gateways on.

It won't be as nice as cable or DSL, but you can't force the installation
and maintenance of those without the money coming from SOMEWHERE, and you
better value urban-equivalent broadband for rural customers more than the
vendors to whatever spending entity you took the money from.
On Mar 30, 2011 11:08 PM, "Chase Bolen" <chase.bolen at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm one of those people who live in the boonies. We're maybe twenty
> minutes from downtown GR. When we moved here, we were under the
> impression that there WERE faster wires here, but it turned out that
> "here" according to the ISPs was "in our zipcode".
>
> We have satellite internet, and it's NOT a broadband replacement. Three
> to six second round-trip packet times make anything media related either
> unusable or nearly so (youtube, pandora, hulu). Sites using ajax barely
> work, and often time out. Anything real time is pretty much out of the
> question (Skype, online gaming). Even if those DID work, though, the
> bandwidth caps would get hit pretty quickly. On top of this, the
> service is way more expensive than most other "broadband" choices, and
> wouldn't be an option for a lot of people.
>
> I just heard a story about local governments posting notices on the web
> instead of in newspapers, and I don't think this trend is going to slow
> down in the near future. Commercial ISPs aren't going to willingly lose
> money to wire sparsely populated rural areas. Just like electrification
> in the 20th century, real broadband isn't going to reach the rest of us
> without government intervention.
>
> On Wed, 2011-03-30 at 21:54 -0400, Bob Kline wrote:
>> That's basically it. More performance,
>> in the most general sense, will cost more,
>> but it's up to the individual to decide what
>> they want to spend their money on. It's
>> no different than how people decide what
>> kind of car to drive, or how big a TV they
>> have to have.
>>
>>
>> For those in the boonies, some chose to
>> live where it's not economic to run the
>> faster wires. But there's still HughesNet.
>>
>>
>> -- Bob
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 9:32 PM, Joseph McLaughlin <jwm8351 at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>> Are you advocating Government involvement?
>> Should the market place relegate this fair city to the bottom
>> of the heap?
>> And why do cows need high speed Internet?
>>
>> There is still a bug in the program must use RAID!
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ______________________________________________________________
>> From: Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com>
>> To: "Mailing List for LUG in greater Grand Rapids, MI area."
>> <grlug at grlug.org>
>> Sent: Wed, March 30, 2011 9:10:56 PM
>> Subject: Re: [GRLUG] Google and Kansas City
>>
>>
>> I have a real, genuine fear that we're going about this with a
>> *severe* case of myopia.
>>
>> I had difficulty navigating the web in 2007 on dial-up, with
>> image
>> bugs, large banner ads, huge JavaScript loads, large CSS
>> loads,
>> fifteen 5k or so avatar images whenever you visit a forum
>> thread--even
>> auto-play video video advertisements...Imagine how bad it is
>> now.
>> There are places within twenty miles of here which can't get
>> cable,
>> DSL, or even a reliable cell signal.
>>
>> Those involved in designing web services purchase very
>> high-end
>> network connections, get accustomed to those connections, and
>> then
>> *design* for those connections. It's a really bad
>> self-reinforcing
>> loop. Much like how software got slower as computers got
>> faster, but
>> it's much harder to raise the median Internet connection speed
>> than it
>> is to raise the median computer speed.
>>
>> There is a not-insignificant fraction of the population in
>> America
>> itself which is still going to be completely out of reach of
>> even
>> 10Mb/s Internet commercial services in ten years, and people
>> gripe
>> that our municipality isn't acting like those which take out a
>> 25-year
>> mortgage on their own essential services infrastructure to
>> "give" us
>> access to gigabit broadband connections below cost.
>>
>> I can't be the only one who's noticing this. In order for a
>> bound-to-the-Internet economy to be sustainable, Internet
>> services
>> need to be virtually ubiquitous, and essential activities need
>> to be
>> manageable on lower-end Internet connections.
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 9:46 PM, Bob Kline
>> <bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>>
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/google-bestows-1gbps-fiber-network-on-kansas-city-kansas.ars
>> > This gives a good summary about
>> > why Google is doing this. It thinks
>> > it needs higher speeds to support
>> > future projects. And it clearly sees
>> > that the existing big providers are
>> > digging in, not providing higher speeds,
>> > and not above not letting others do
>> > it either.
>> > It will be interesting to see how this
>> > plays out. Chattanooga, TN, already
>> > has a 1Gbps system.
>> > -- Bob
>> > --
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>>
>>
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