If utilities are underground, it can be pretty expensive to install anything. I have an estimate for municipal fiber that's about that much to get fiber a mile or two down the street overhead, and then about that much to go down my driveway underground 400 feet.
It's hard to justify when the local phone company is probably going to roll out fiber in the next few years without a direct charge, at least for the portion on the street. Of course, that'll probably be PPPoE, maybe asymetrical, likely limited to 1G, etc. Comcast won't even quote me to come down my driveway, even though they serve my neighbor across the street from the pole at the corner of my driveway.
Wow, have you considered buying some conduit and renting a trenching machine and giving the driveway portion a go yourself? Might be worth talking over that option with the muni fiber people. Though sounds like the overhead portion would still be $$$.
A friend did this at his farm in central VA, but for power line instead of fiber. It was previously above ground, unsightly, and occasionally damaged by trees. He dug the trench from the road and had the power company lay the wire in it and make connections at each end. I don't remember the total numbers, but he saved thousands by doing the dig himself (with rented equipment) vs paying the power company to manage it.
Of course, this assume you're comfortable with heavy machinery and can work around other utilities (most counties have a "Miss Utility" service that will mark existing services).
Yep, depending on the lay of the land doing the grunt work can save thousands or tens of thousands - if you have the company do it they'll almost certainly bring in a crew of 4 or 5 with a underground "hog" machine that's supposed to work perfectly but doesn't actually so the backhoe appears and then they cut into a buried utility line that was marked but backhoes can't read and then you wait for the power company to come out and then they fight over whose fault it was while the freezer slowly drips onto your floor.
Or you can rent a ditch witch and do it yourself and dig by hand near anything remotely marked by the marking crew.
I've considered it, but I suspect it might end up like bombcar's experience with cutting buried lines. I'm not much of a digger for the manual work either. And there's a seasonal creek to cross which seems like a lot of fun.
I'm not too worried about the overhead portion; in theory, I could group with neighbors and we all pay a share, or I could pay it and consider it a goodwill gesture to my neighbors; they wouldn't need to pay that portion if they wanted to get online (and some of them have overhead drops for electric and what not, so they'd be able to get a cheap drop for fiber, too)
Well, you'd probably start by getting Miss Utility to come out and mark your lines. I think bombcar's point was that you care a lot more about not cutting those than any contractor will, and so you're less likely to do it.
It's funny because he said one of the houses needed 0.5 miles of cable. My jaw dropped when he said it would only be $30K for that.
I'm speaking as someone who has had a few hundred foot trenches dug in my yard for running cable. Extrapolating it to 0.5 miles would come out to a lot more than $30K.
What's the expensive part of a new fibre run? With $30k you could hire an excavator and operator for maybe 15 to 20 weeks straight, but I'm guessing the pits are expensive and dealing with obstacles is hard.
I don't know. I didn't do it. I just know how much money came out of my wallet and how long the trench was. :-)
So that means I paid for labor. But presumably some part of that $30K will be going to labor as well.
Another possibility is that when you get to the scale of 0.5 miles, you start using different tactics or machines than the small little backhoe loader that the guy used in our yard. So, more capital required but overall more efficient.
Anyway, I don't mean to try and offer an accurate accounting of all of this. I mostly just meant to provide a counter-expectation.
There are fixed costs to a job. It doesn't cost much more to dig a bit longer trench. Things like needing to do horizontal boring to cross an intersection would jack up the cost though.
e.g. I used to pay ~$2k for a contractor to come to re-gravel my driveway. Now I own my own excavator and loader and dump trailer it costs me about $200 (plus my time plus equipment depreciation).
Surely with utility plans you can just use a mole? Dig a few trenches and just use a mole to go between them. No need to dig the entire length. I'm pretty sure this is what utility companies use in the Uk if they can't drag the utility through the existing duct/pipe. Imaging installing fibre to a neighbour and having to dig up every single pavement/road to do this.
And you dig smaller trenches with them. Microtrenching digs a foot deep and two inch wide hole for direct bury fiber cable, saving time and money over older techniques.
Only a foot deep? My sprinkler system is deeper than that.
ATT recently did fiber by my house with some kind of machine. It did some kind of U shaped trench, where it drilled down (not sure how deep), then over about 200 feet, and back up. So you only see a hole every 200 or so feet, vs a solid trench. Let them go under driveways and all of that.
A team of 4 guys was able to do my entire neighborhood in a day. Still waiting for ATT to actually wire up the fiber, until them I am stuck with comcast cable (which is fine ,except the data cap doesn't scale with speed, so the faster connections cap cap you out in like 15 minutes).
It isn't, but that's the norm for all internet infrastructure, both last-mile and backbone.
Since time immemorial, the gap between the amortized cost of building it, and anyone's willingness to pay for transport or transit, has been a) huge (that is, commercially insurmountable), and b) traditionally covered by one of two means:
1. Government subsidy, or
2. Attempting to offer services at the high prices necessary to recoup the investment, consequently going bust due to low volumes, selling the infrastructure for a pittance in a fire sale, and the next owner gets to offer services for prices the market is willing to tolerate. With this approach, it merely remains to find some VCs to sucker for the build phase.
It was also possible, back in the day, to run tunnels across your peers since they would announce the IXP networks at each end into their IGP, but folks got wise to that scam.
There is a variation on (2) involving anti-trust laws during M&A but it amounts to the same thing.
Depends on the area. Wireless won't work well in the mountains, and I assume weather could affect some wireless technologies as well.
I live in a mountainous area and we have a local ISP that provides fiber to our entire county. Which is weird, because I recently lived in a major city and couldn't get fiber.
It's way easier to push fiber through the ground in rural areas where there's basically nothing than it is in major cities where there are tons of things and already some form of wired internet.
And if you're within a mile of the destination, that last mile isn't actually that terribly expensive, especially if it's literally rural and that mile is on the property owner's land. They can figure out how to get to the box at the road.
Agreed - that much money could put in a computer lab in a local library for everyone to use. I’m very supportive of rural people and the life they choose to live, but you are right - they should understand the drawbacks.
Its more than he personally was willing to pay ;-)
>Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house—and that he would have gone with Comcast if they only wanted $10,000.
Im guessing being a nerd working at akamai he wont be the one spending ~1-2 days on a Ditch Witch/trencher to make those. He probably wont even hire anyone to work a rental from United Rentals. He will subcontract to same company that does trenches for Comcast.
This is literally how societies function - you contribute a small amount to the general pool, you use small amounts from the general pool. In some cases bigger chunks go for bigger works like ISPs or bridges. I certainly hope you don't want a world where every road, bridge and traffic light is independently owned.
Sounds more like how crony politics for personal gain works. Alternatively, you could finance the hospital, fire depart, or whatever without an middle man siphoning off "their fair share"
So if you want to see this theory in action go to developing countries with an elite ruling class where they don't disperse funds to social works and see how nice it is, behold their lame GDP, etc.
The country I live in SE Asia is a good example. It's quite libertarian out here and yeah being able to pay for private hospitals is nice, but generally speaking your quality of life is lower, quality of goods is lower, average person is less educated, traffic is a crippling problem due to poor planning, it goes on and on. And despite labor being super cheap, roads are a mess, sidewalks are few and far between and if you do get one it's crowded with junk.. Only 10% of the country pays taxes, the inequality with the rich is massive, and if you're not in the top 1% you're basically a poor.
I recommend everyone in a rich english speaking country spending at least a year or two living in a developing country to get some perspective
Coordination games and public goods games (which arguably model insurance) work best when people don’t adversely self-select, but coordinate around the social optimum (for insurance, when the risk pool is as large as possible). Whatever can orchestrate such coordination adds value. If people do it on their own, great, but some problems have characteristics like time horizons such that the coordination doesn’t happen without an authority. Yes, this brings in other public choice problems, but the trade-off is not necessarily bad.
Alternatively, you could finance the hospital, fire depart, or whatever without an middle man siphoning off "their fair share"
This has already been tried. People used to subscribe to fire service, or ambulance service. It doesn't work, and is also bad for society.
If you want people to only use the things they directly pay for, and not pay for shared things through taxes, then only drive on your own driveway. Don't drive on any roads outside of your cul-de-sac. Don't get your Amazon order delivered on state and federally-funded highways. Don't fly out of any big airport in America. Don't fly on any commercial airline, since they have all received taxpayer bailouts in the past. Don't use a bank. Don't use money. Hire a security guard to protect your property, and another one to follow you around every day. Get your water from a well on your own property.
For an 88-day-old account to be this stunningly obtuse, I'm going with "troll," rather than "genuinely completely oblivious to how the world works."
I've lived in areas with volunteer fire departments that paid for their operations primarily with "fire dues" for most of my life. As far as I know, most volunteer departments operate like that.
I had no idea they didn't work. I wonder if anyone has told them?
Subscription fire departments and volunteer fire departments aren't the same thing. I know all about volunteer fire departments, and have worked with them in the past.
Subscription fire departments were commercial entities, sometimes run by insurance companies, to which you paid a regular subscription fee. If you house was on fire, they'd extinguish the flames. If your neighbor's house was on fire, and they didn't subscribe, then they let it burn.
Citing a completely different thing does not refute what I wrote. It just illustrates that you don't fully understand the issue.
That’s literally how it works in much of the rural South. You pay fire dues, or they will only act to save human life. Otherwise they’ll watch your house burn to the ground with you.
In this case the "middle man" is literally doing the work. Money doesn't build things. It goes to entities so that they can build things. I suspect you know this, but it _seems_ like you don't.
Ah! - so the next neighborhood over has all-private roads, and the homeowners association there (not the government) pays for all snow plowing, crack & pothole patching, repaving, storm sewer work, etc. that might be needed?
Ah yes, the HOA. A group of elected people that can compel you to do things with your property, require you to pay a share every year or they take your home, and have the ability to fine you if you don't comply with the majority opinion. Very much not a government in any way!
In my corner of Michigan, there seems to be a very clear dichotomy on this:
- Private developer builds a sprawling subdivision with plenty of nice wide roads and lots. (So a very large area of pavement per tax-paying property.) And turns the whole thing over to the city/village/township, to be their public road budget black hole forever more.
- Private developer builds a very compact little development, with houses (or condo's) packed in like sardines along a rather narrow and minimalist Private Road.
This is also why USPS is crucial for rural areas. The Government should be subsidizing this work because if they don't people in rural areas are left behind.
Inflation isn't at 10% but it seems like investing in infrastructure is a good idea. If we needed to pinch pennies we could start at the bloated military budget
Sure, they're helping an ally in a De facto war against Russia, but currently the us spends more on "defense" than both Russia and China combined, when it is technically at peace. In case of a war with China, are you expecting the military budget to not increase at all?
Say it this way. Tomorrow if the american security /defence budget was cut to 0, do you think the rest of the world will storm/attack Americans because they have an eternal blood thirst for them? Don't they have their own problems to deal with?
This is the problem with mitary and security infra of any country. They keep the bogeyman alive because their paychecks depend on it.
How does spending a lot of government money make goods and service more expensive?
EDIT: At least here in Western Europe, we mostly have a supply side inflation, because energy got a lot more expensive, not because the government has been "printing" a lot of money. I suspect it's the same in the US.
Yes, inflation is currently a world-wide issue, and explanations at the world level lead somewhat obviously to the pandemic and Russia's invasion of the Ukraine.
But here in the USA, people like to believe it must be political and local, completely unrelated to the totally-coincidental worldwide issue that happens to be very similar.
It does not unless that money is spent competing with businesses and citizens for resources. However, in this case the money had already been earmarked for rural internet service and is not being used to purchase goods and services that citizens would be buying instead.
Actually Europe has been printing a lot of money by having less than 0% interest rate for loan.
Current inflation is due to many factor, some estimate it has been slowly growing since 2008, plus covid where we printed money to just to keep business alive, plus negative interest rate that allowed countries to loan too much, etc...
But I suspect that subsidies for infrastructure is one of the least impactful factor for inflation.
In most locations in the US any entity can hang wire on utility poles (the poles are often owned by the city, with an open access policy -- this is how CATV and PSTN wires are up there on poles, and more recently 5GUWB base stations). There are certain requirements (e.g. insurance, you have to have assets on hand to repair your cable when someone drives into a pole, you need workers who are certified to work near high tension wires, etc). Usually you can outsource that stuff, for a price, possibly to the same contracting company who does the same work for Comcast.
Friend of mine needed to run fiber across the street. They had to dig up the road. Cost was $50k. This was in a city where there aren’t large pools of money from the government to get people decent Internet address.
You are a private person and you choose to live deep in the country-side / on a desert / on an island / remote location / deep in the forest.
Who should pay for your road, your electricity, your water, your internet connection when you are the one mostly benefiting from it ?
Taxes have to be used primarily with the goal to maximize public interest, not the interests of single private persons.
Perhaps a Starlink connection would have been enough for them and perfectly fine if it's a single family.
Could there have been alternatives that maximize coverage ? For example, by supporting deployment of 5G antennas as public infrastructure (thus, benefiting the whole area).
This family doesn't necessarily need a single fiber cable to reach their house.
> Perhaps a Starlink connection would have been enough for them and perfectly fine if it's a single family.
Oh the irony... Starlink is also tapping (federal) government subsidies to provide internet service to rural areas. Tapping government subsidies is a very important part of Starlink's plan to become profitable.
The difference is that those investments will be usable by anyone who wants the service and can setup the antenna. Where-as a half mile fiber run to your house in the boonies can only ever be useful to you.
The subsidy is for the company though and not this specific fiber run, which was a sort of worst-case. The company is quite limited in geographical scope, so they got a fairly small subsidy, while Starlink is much larger in scope and thus got a larger one.
Also that fiber run will remain useful for far longer than the Starlink satellites.
It's pretty much a one-time cost with negligible operating cost, whereas Starlink will have to continuously keep launching satellites to keep it running.
One way or another, tax payers spent $30K on a fiber run to one house. Yes, they spent less on some other ones too. The indirection just increases cost insensitivity.
It's all about averages though. Some people will be cheap to connect, while others will be expensive to connect. And the subsidies are most likely written in a way, such that the ISPs can't only go for the low-hanging fruit.
Same with Starlink on a bigger scale. Some ground station will have more people near them than others (absent satellite to satellite comms). Some orbits will be used by more people than others..
I don't understand this comment. There are a lot of places in the country where a majority pays for the minority when it comes to infrastructure. Case in point NYC or Chicago, whose populations and tax bases make up a majority of the state, yet their taxes still go to maintaining the state infrastructure as a whole. The state, in order to function, needs some kind of continuity and predictability to plan for population dynamics and spread out taxes accordingly.
Even beyond helping the state as a whole, they are also helping themselves. Good luck getting anything into or out of Chicago or New York without rail, roads, locks, dams, and airports. Infrastructure that connects to nothing isn't all that useful. All that downstate Illinois roadway, railway, navigable rivers, and smaller airports have their uses for Chicago, too. That's what networks - like the Internet - do.
5G base stations have a range on the order of 1000 feet, and need to be connected to a high-speed backbone to function.
In rural areas, a 1000 foot radius doesn't get you very many people, and since you ran fiber all the way to that antenna, you might as well run fiber the rest of the way.
Well it's not a stupid idea at all, that when you pay taxes, you could vote for the 3 or 4 topics that you want support in priority, and they get allocated a more budget in proportion or something like that.
This could even increase support of people to pay taxes (reducing fraud) as the taxpayers would know they would be supporting projects in line with their vision and lifestyle.
I get the idea, but this is basically just admitting that our representative form of government doesn't work. Ostensibly we control our taxes already by who we vote for.
Rural sprawl significantly increases overall infrastructure costs. Their taxes are already being subsidized by more urban tax payers. Those rural areas can't afford to maintain what they have.
Further, they should be forcibly blocked from using any services they refused to pay taxes for. No highways, flood protection, low food prices, or access to the global trade network for you!
Except if they purchase a subscription to these benefits through one of the two companies (same parent company) that provide them. The subscriptions are of course competitively priced, since they only have the best interest of their customers at heart.
I find it's helpful to create a monopoly on purpose, and then give that monopoly for a service an additional monopoly on violence. Then, if someone doesn't want to use the monopoly, they can just send men with weapons of war to force them to fund the monopoly at gunpoint.
It's pretty widely accepted that the government will help people gain and maintain access to infrastructure, even (especially?) in rural areas. Ever heard of the Rural Electrification Administration[0]? The Tennessee Valley Authority[1]? Despite the fact that it is not considered a _necessary_ utility de jure, internet access is hugely important in our modern society and economy. These areas have post offices, electricity, trash service, etc., so why shouldn't they also have access to internet? Those other utilities cost money to install as well.
You should look up the area that Jared is building his fiber network. These homes are probably 10 minutes from the University of Michigan. It's not a remote country-side, it's just far enough out of reach of Comcast that they won't build out. I understand your point if someone decides to build their house on 20 acres of forest, but this is not that. That's why we need these programs.
Some people are farmers. Everyone benefits if there is Internet in remote places in order to help people stay and live where the farming is going to happen.
You are thinking of 5G mmwave which trades off better range for better speed and latency. For maximizing coverage you are looking at something that looks like 4G.
As a general principle it's fine. The issue is a combination of:
* Providing infrastructure and services for rural areas like this is inherently monumentally expensive.
* For most people, rural living is some kind of choice: most could likely move to a cheap suburb that could be served much more easily, but don't want to.
* Far from having more money to fund things like this, rural areas are actually much less economically productive per person, on average. Of course you need some people to farm, but in practice you have many more people than that.
Essentially, society is providing a heavy subsidy for a lifestyle choice for most people, with no compelling government interest there.
While I do think we should make a goal of hooking everyone up to decent internet, any sensible plan has to look at how we can do this efficiently. Absolutely bare minimum, we should be superceding local zoning laws and similar that often make it illegal for people to build more densely in these areas (small town city centers), such that people can individually choose to live in a more efficient way in the same general area if they want. Not talking about skyscrapers obviously, but traditional, walkable downtowns with townhomes or duplexes would be a great thing.
Some Americans may scoff at this, but you don't need large numbers of people to get walkable neighborhoods. I've been through Bavarian villages of a few hundred people that were more walkable than US cities 100x their size.
It's especially nonsensical that we'd heavily subsidize super low density living when that's basically always gonna be worse for the environment. It means you need much more land per person, obviously, so you gotta cut into nature more, plus higher energy requirements.
He's actually connecting hundreds of people that otherwise wouldn't have such access to fiber. The big ISPs took WAY more money [0] and delivered less.
The point of taxes is to provide collective goods, such as infrastructure, defense, education.
One of the first thing the US's founders did was create the postal service, which was to provide mail service to everyone, regardless of location; it literally costs the same to mail a letter across the street as to send it to some house in Whoknowswhere, Alaska. This provides a minimum communications infrastructure.
One of the best things that were done in the New Deal was the Rural Electrification Act, which ensured that electrical service was provided to everyone, providing a minimum availability of a critical energy source.
Also essential was the initial telecommunications acts, which required providing telephone service at the same rates to all addresses. Again, providing this service universally ensures that the entire country has a baseline communications infrastructure.
This is why the telecomm companies have been aggressively stripping copper telephone wires from their system and replacing everything with fiber or coax — because the laws requiring universal service are tied to phone service and copper wires. This is why we wind up with companies like Comcast saying "F*$k-You - $50,000 for 500m of wire" to to everyone that isn't instantly profitable.
These universal service mandates are not to benefit each individual living on some remote farm or homestead, or just more remote suburbs/exurbs.
They are to benefit THE ENTIRE NATION. Everyone benefits from infrastructure, and benefits most when the infrastructure is more universal, when everyone can has power, can communicate and can transport goods.
You live in an advanced society with advanced infrastructure. When that infrastructure gets built out, perhaps notice that it is a good thing, instead of thinking of only your own petty concerns.
Or, go find someplace where there are no taxes and you get to do everything yourself (hey, if you want it done right, do it yourself, right?) - see what you can find and how well you can live with no roads, comms, power, security, etc. Report back.
My parents currently have four options for Internet access. One is only on their phones with no tethering. The other is to dial in over a landline at 33.6k if they can find an ISP that still offers that. There's existing satellite, which is 512k down and like 25k up for hundreds a month. Or there's a wireless 256k plan that costs $2000 to install.
There's no ISDN, no DSL, no Starlink yet, no 5G fixed, no 4G fixed, no power-line Internet. They are not watching any Netflix, and things like Social Security and Medicare are increasingly accessed through poorly performing, bloated websites. They paid taxes more than five decades of full-time work. There's fiber within two miles of them, but nobody's used it to extend what's becoming a modern necessity to their house.
If they lived on the other side of the road, they'd have the area's rural electric cooperative. Then they could get at least 10 Mbps over the power lines. However, they're on a corporate power provider that has 4 to 12 hour outages 3 to 4 times a year besides not offering similar additional services.
With the right negotiations and a few hundred thousand dollars, their moderately densely populated unincorporated area could serve hundreds of homes with broadband. The cable and phone companies were given millions upon millions of subsidies every month for decades now for rural phone and Internet access, but have not served this area. It's time something else is done in these areas to give them the same access to the modern marketplace and to government services as everyone else.
On top of that, Starlink was just adjudged to NOT QUALIFY for this type of service. [1]
You cannot simply assume as you stated, that just because something looks like a viable solution, it is.
Again, the people that decided are doing the WORK of figuring out how to make the system work, in contrast to taking random potshots in an internet forum.
From the article:
>> The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rejected Starlink's application to receive $885.51 million in broadband funding
>>The FCC said that both Starlink and LTD "failed to meet program requirements," submitted "risky proposals," and that their "applications failed to demonstrate that the providers could deliver the promised service."
If multiple and more reliable than Starlink existed, maybe.
The point of universal access is just that - UNIVERSAL access.
We are already failing this massively with laws granting territorial monopolies to companies like Comcast AT&T, Verizon, etc., enabling them to give the worst possible service at globally awful prices. Granting another effective monopoly to Starlink is not the solution, UNLESS we are going to regulate all of this like a utility - actual regulated standards of service, by companies with a large in-state business nexus, cost-plus rates approved by regulatory body, etc.
Using Starlink seems fine, but Starlink has effectively zero skin in the game, no in-state nexux. If it is convenient for them to shut off or downgrade service to these houses for some reason, there is essentially zero recourse for these customers or the state to exercise any leverage to cause Starlink to resume service.
This is actually an excellent solution, with a local vendor with skin in the game, providing solid fiber infrastructure.
You really seem to entirely miss the point of UNIVERSAL SERVICE. Yes, the local post office makes a wild profit on delivering a $0.60 1-ounce first-class envelope to a PO box in the same post office, and loses an insane amount delivering the same letter to/from Wherethafakawe, Alaska by bush planes. I'm sure they could be more efficient scanning the letter and sending an email to/from Alaska, but that won't get grandma's fabric sample to her grandkid, or my high-performance sample to my customer. The point is that the same service level everywhere has it's own benefits, and those benefits are to the entire nation, not only to some.
With every general solution, you can point out individual point inefficiencies. What you are failing to notice is that if you optimize for every one of those point inefficiencies, you effectively de-scale the system.
You lose ALL the benefits of a consistent system, as well as losing most of the economies of scale. This is why companies repeatedly go on binges to reduce their supply chain vendor count - sure, some of those suppliers are lower cost at that point, but the overhead of managing many redundant suppliers outweighs the cost.
And you are looking at only one point of the costs, getting bent out of shape, and trowing out a generic "taxes bad" comment. Yes, it looks like a clueless anti-government political comment.
It might even be the case that in some circumstances, a Starlink solution could be best. But you have done none of the analysis to establish that claim, and other people, who are actually 'in the arena' have found a different solution is better. If you want to challenge them, do so with something better than "ugh, taxes and spending bad".
Snark aside, I spent years being angry about every government subsidy until I learned that some subsidies are pork barrel spending and some are just the normal allocations required by a functioning government to maintain the expected standard of living.
This doesn't seem very efficient to me.