10 ms·

Rural America Is Building Its Own Internet Because No One Else Will

135 points by leotravis10 9y ago

kevin_b_er 9y ago
Frankly, what this article tells me is that the ISP conglomerates haven't yet bribed the state officials of Kentucky or Ohio to ban or minefield local governments from being involved in broadband initiatives.
- r00fus 9y ago
  For more read here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-already-won-limits-on-public-broadband-in-20-states/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al...
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Well, in actual rural places, as in not dense enough for any particular road's worth of internet connection to matter, there are point to point radio ISPs (built off stuff like what Ubiquiti networks makes), and sometimes just a verbal agreement to beam a network over a distance.
- bsder 9y ago
  What this article tells me is that these areas are so unprofitable that the telcos don't actually care. I can tell you that they know exactly which areas can be profitable, and if one of those areas suddenly decides to try to do something on their own, all of a sudden lots of obstacles magically appear.
  - PaulHoule 9y ago
    Actually, Frontier charges $90 a month for 1 Mbps DSL. The problem is not that they could not afford to offer me a gigabit at $120 a month, but that they can't afford to give up $90 a month that they get without investing in their networks. In the case of Frontier, it pays a dividend greater than earnings. It even pays a dividend in quarters where earnings are negative! It is not a "profitable" phone company, it is a company that is bleeding a copper network dry.
rootsudo 9y ago
If you search HN, you'll see successful ISP stories. Essentially being a rural ISP/WISP is no easy task.
jraines 9y ago
In the early days of the telegraph, farmers bootstrapped their own networks with fence wire (source - James Gleik's excellent The Information)
justinmk 9y ago
That is how things are supposed to work. Communities and individuals should not expect "someone else" to manage their affairs.
- denzil_correa 9y ago
  I'd like to understand more. Are you saying that communities and individuals should also manage communication platforms, public transport, law and order themselves?
  - swsieber 9y ago
    Well, most do manage public transport and law and order themselves.
    - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
      Individuals managing their own law and order is strongly frowned upon in most cultures. Communities may provide their own training and personnel, but they're generally subject to the laws of their state/nation/etc.
      - swsieber 9y ago
        That's a good point. I was thinking on a community level, and expanding the group size as necessary in order to provide these things... but it does tend to be a bottom up type of thing (as opposed to top down). Law creation is probably the biggest outlier though
      - zanny 9y ago
        Local municipalities pass their own ordinances, laws, regulations, etc all the time. They just cannot contradict the laws of the state / federal. That is absolutely communities managing their own affairs, writing their own local policy.
  - prophesi 9y ago
    Those services turn out better when managed by the city compared to when it's managed at the state or federal level. The problem is that rural towns usually don't have the resources to pull it off.
vinayan3 9y ago
In the UK farmers are laying their own fiber. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37974267 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37974267
- goodcanadian 9y ago
  To be fair, distances in rural Britain are much shorter than distances in rural America. That said, I applaud them for doing it, and I have occasionally thought about pursuing a project like that myself.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Another anecdote, I paid for DSL to be brought to my area. A neighbor chipped in and bought an extra mile to be upgraded. It was costly but worth it. I pretty much considered it a cost of having my house where it is.
    - r3dey3 9y ago
      How much did that cost? and how far are you from wherever it had to be run?
      - KGIII 9y ago
        About $36,000 and I am about seven miles from where they installed some new equipment in a large box on a pad. I don't actually know what is in the box. I think it might be called a DSLAM?
        toomuchtodo 9y ago
        Correct. That's the DSLAM (most likely with fiver backhaul to the central office).
        KGIII 9y ago
        I believe I only paid for the equipment and Fairpoint paid the installation expenses. This was about nine years ago and I didn't pay as much attention to it as I should. I was pretty occupied. There are only six residencies in my unincorporated township. All but one have DSL, now. The one that doesn't have it, doesn't want it. They live beyond where the power and phone lines stop, anyhow. Anyhow, they are all pretty happy and grateful. As I was moving into the area, this was a good ice breaker. I'd say that I definitely got good value for the money. I get ~12 Mbps down. More importantly, a neighbor brought me some Piccadilly, just today. Worth every penny.
esaym 9y ago
Sadly I've never had a good experience with "wireless" internet. I've looked into building a WISP a few times but the cost of hardware and no guarantee of actual data throughput or quality keeps me away. Most hardware for WISPs have back haul throughput rates advertised at 100-400 mbs, yet most end points at the customer premise will see data rates of 6 - 20mbs. Including the bad jitter, packet loss, and burstyness, and you've got something that is only good for browsing facebook. All the hardware I am aware of still uses the old RTS/CTS methods for media access borrowed from the wifi protocol. Which works fine for 100 end points all within 100ft of each other... But stick 100 end points in a 5 miles radius all trying to get a "clear to send" ack and your in a world of hurt. Yes I know... some tuning will go along way, but at least with the Motorola canopy family, they defaulted to supporting a 15 mile (or was it 20?) radius. And with the WISP's network admin (which is normally always the CEO's young nephew) never changing the defaults because it "just works". This puts a ton of latency on the network since everything is assuming to be waiting on hearing from the node 15 miles away (that may or may not be there). There are some newer systems out now that use TDMA for media access, but from the reviews I see, still getting more than 20mbs to a CPE is unlikely. You best bet would be a gigabit back haul with some p2p access points covering no more than a mile or 2 each, but that means many more antennas and no place to put them. I've seen many WISPs "cover" 100+ square miles with just two access points. It just doesn't work.
- goodcanadian 9y ago
  This seems like a pessimistic assessment to me. Both my brother and my parents are on rural wireless networks, and they seem to get good service, though I can't say with certainty what technology is used or what bandwidth they get. Skype calls work fine. They don't stream movies due to data caps, however.
  - esaym 9y ago
    It is not "pessimistic". It is my actual experience both as an end consumer and a (potential) WISP admin. And please don't mention "works fine" and "has data caps" in the same sentence...
sunflowerfly 9y ago
I am not old enough to know the history of electrification, but it was completed thoughouly into rural America. Other utilities did not. Here in rural Kansas many households were still using wells or hauling water from cities, until they banded together and laid their own water pipes.
- MaysonL 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cmurf 9y ago
Rural America votes red, which got them this kind of policy for broadband: https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15106850/fcc-lifeline-program-reverse-federal-oversight-ajit-pai https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15106850/fcc-lifeline-pro... Instead of the kind of policy they had with telephones, with the Universal Service Fund, and the like, to subsidize the massively higher deployment cost. It's not just in the middle of nowhere, the run length are vastly longer. Of course it's going to cost more money. Electrical lines, water and sewer do too.
- djrogers 9y ago
  I don' think you read that link you posted properly. The proposed expansion of Lifeline to broadband was tied up in court because it was entirely Federally decreed, whereas the actual law passed by congress said that it had to be handled by the states. Pai pulled it back from the courts, and determined that following the law as written was a better idea. Go ahead and kick the FCC and Pai around for screwing up net neutrality, but the Obama-era ULS expansion thing was never going to happen the way the FCC had written those regulations.
gormo2 9y ago
"pretty much the opposite of Cape Cod." What did the author mean by this? It was said in reference to Garrett county, Maryland. Was the author confused? Cape Cod is far to the north in Massachusetts.
rayiner 9y ago
> We view it as the next economic revolution for coal towns," said Harry Collins, the chairman of the Letcher County Broadband Board, which formed late last year. "The majority of our railroad tracks are ripped up now—that revolution has played out. We feel that this [digital] revolution is just as game changing and life changing as those railroad tracks were in the 20s and 30s." It's sad, but this is wishful thinking. If anything, tech-related jobs are more concentrated in urban areas than other service industries. These places have no economic viability outside the specific circumstances (coal mining, farming) that caused people to move there in the first place.
- hayksaakian 9y ago
  The internet and tech related jobs are the best opportunity to work remotely that anyone living in a dying coal town will have. An online freelancer with a low cost of living can live decently.
  - adventured 9y ago
    In almost all of eg Appalachia, a 35-40 hour per week, $15 per hour online job (doing anything), is a good job for the majority of people versus the alternatives available. There's no question it can make a meaningful difference near-term. The obvious long-term solution is further urbanization or near-urbanization, convincing people to leave those dying regions for greater opportunity.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      What are these $15/hour 40 hour a week remote jobs? How many of them are there?
      - meric 9y ago
        Call centres? They have an advantage over foreign call centres operators (more fluent in the language), some companies might pay for it. Also, this idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136091
derwiki 9y ago
Back in 2002 when I was in high school in Coshocton I worked for the local internet service provider, CloverNet. It was mainly mundane tech support and computer repair, but every now and then I got to help with an AirClover installation. AirClover was the medium-distance (3-5mi?) broadband solution that we set up with on-the-roof directional antennas and Cisco 802.11b cards. Really excited to hear that Coshocton is still working on solutions like this.
X86BSD 9y ago
I was just this evening going through the "what if I started a wisp? How many pops? How much bandwidth? What would it take?" I've done this off and on since 1990 when breezecom was around. Getting access to rooftops is infinitely easier than trenching fiber. Can you scale wireless in a modest city like KC? At what CIR? You would have to make use of extensive caching. Even the best hardware like ubiquity tops out for backhaul at 2Gb. That's always been the problem is wireless can't scale with speed. At least not in any spectrum us mortals can use.
client4 9y ago
Per usual on ISP topics popping into hacker news, I implore anyone considering starting an ISP to jump into the ISPSchool Slack channel. PM me or send an email to staff@tsi.io and we will add you. TL;DNR Montana probably has faster internet than you. http://tsi.io http://tsi.io
- MaymayMaster 9y ago
  >on website it says, "...and if you look closely, those numbers are Megabytes-per-second..." when referring to their speeds >is actually megabits-per-second D R O P P E D
- 20after4 9y ago
  email sent :)
INTPenis 9y ago
Speaking from a strange perspective perhaps but here in Sweden (the land of broadband) there was a little rural town in the south that couldn't wait to get fibre so the locals organized all the necessary things to start a town fibre grid themselves. And now every house has 10Gbps with free choice of operator. Normally what most communities do is wait for one of the big fibre operators to reach them and start digging. But these locals did all the practical stuff like digging, laying fibre and building the actual grid themselves by hiring their own contractors. Larger communities, towns and cities, usually have a city wide fibre grid managed perhaps by the local energy company or by the municipality. They in turn might out-source the fibre digging but they still manage the grid and determine what operators are offered to the citizens. In big cities (we have three of those) you can find multiple city wide fibre grids. One managed by the municipality/city and some y large property owners that take it upon themselves to equip their buildings with fibre. Regarding the wireless setups in the article I am very skeptical because this was a trend 10 years back in Sweden and a lot of people lost money by investing in it when they could have just waited a few years and had real fibre. But the US is special because of its size. So wireless might be all they can get for many years.
- PaulHoule 9y ago
  Fixed Wireless has been a marginal player almost everywhere it has been tried. If you are in a place with favorable geography it can sorta kinda work. If you are in the Appalachian mountains, on the other hand, you are in a dissected plateau and most people live in valleys that are overlooked by a single ridge. You have to build a road over the ridge, run electricity, maybe run fiber, and with a really tall tower (remember we have trees on the East Coast!) you might look into the valleys on each side, and if you are really lucky, another valley over. The kicker is that most of the places which are favorable for wireless already have cable. So the addressable market is this tiny sliver which can be served with fixed wireless and can't get cable.
- legulere 9y ago
  > But the US is special because of its size. The US has a population density of 35.0/km², while Sweden has one of 22.0/km². So it shouldn't really be bigger problem in the US because of geography.
pls2halp 9y ago
The most interesting part of the article for me was that it mentioned 5G wireless signals. I was under the impression that the standard(is that the right word?) was still being developed.
- tpxl 9y ago
  I was under the impression that refers to the frequency, eg 5GHz as opposed to 2.4GHz
jiggunjer 9y ago
The title made me click because "wow, their own internet". Oh, just infrastructure, I should have known ;D

135 points by leotravis10 9y ago

Frankly, what this article tells me is that the ISP conglomerates haven't yet bribed the state officials of Kentucky or Ohio to ban or minefield local governments from being involved in broadband initiatives.

r00fus 9y ago
For more read here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-already-won-limits-on-public-broadband-in-20-states/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al...
microcolonel 9y ago
Well, in actual rural places, as in not dense enough for any particular road's worth of internet connection to matter, there are point to point radio ISPs (built off stuff like what Ubiquiti networks makes), and sometimes just a verbal agreement to beam a network over a distance.
bsder 9y ago
What this article tells me is that these areas are so unprofitable that the telcos don't actually care. I can tell you that they know exactly which areas can be profitable, and if one of those areas suddenly decides to try to do something on their own, all of a sudden lots of obstacles magically appear.
- PaulHoule 9y ago
  Actually, Frontier charges $90 a month for 1 Mbps DSL. The problem is not that they could not afford to offer me a gigabit at $120 a month, but that they can't afford to give up $90 a month that they get without investing in their networks. In the case of Frontier, it pays a dividend greater than earnings. It even pays a dividend in quarters where earnings are negative! It is not a "profitable" phone company, it is a company that is bleeding a copper network dry.

rootsudo 9y ago

If you search HN, you'll see successful ISP stories. Essentially being a rural ISP/WISP is no easy task.

jraines 9y ago

In the early days of the telegraph, farmers bootstrapped their own networks with fence wire (source - James Gleik's excellent The Information)

justinmk 9y ago

That is how things are supposed to work. Communities and individuals should not expect "someone else" to manage their affairs.

denzil_correa 9y ago
I'd like to understand more. Are you saying that communities and individuals should also manage communication platforms, public transport, law and order themselves?
- swsieber 9y ago
  Well, most do manage public transport and law and order themselves.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    Individuals managing their own law and order is strongly frowned upon in most cultures. Communities may provide their own training and personnel, but they're generally subject to the laws of their state/nation/etc.
    - swsieber 9y ago
      That's a good point. I was thinking on a community level, and expanding the group size as necessary in order to provide these things... but it does tend to be a bottom up type of thing (as opposed to top down). Law creation is probably the biggest outlier though
    - zanny 9y ago
      Local municipalities pass their own ordinances, laws, regulations, etc all the time. They just cannot contradict the laws of the state / federal. That is absolutely communities managing their own affairs, writing their own local policy.
- prophesi 9y ago
  Those services turn out better when managed by the city compared to when it's managed at the state or federal level. The problem is that rural towns usually don't have the resources to pull it off.

vinayan3 9y ago

In the UK farmers are laying their own fiber. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37974267 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37974267

goodcanadian 9y ago
To be fair, distances in rural Britain are much shorter than distances in rural America. That said, I applaud them for doing it, and I have occasionally thought about pursuing a project like that myself.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Another anecdote, I paid for DSL to be brought to my area. A neighbor chipped in and bought an extra mile to be upgraded. It was costly but worth it. I pretty much considered it a cost of having my house where it is.
  - r3dey3 9y ago
    How much did that cost? and how far are you from wherever it had to be run?
    - KGIII 9y ago
      About $36,000 and I am about seven miles from where they installed some new equipment in a large box on a pad. I don't actually know what is in the box. I think it might be called a DSLAM?
      - toomuchtodo 9y ago
        Correct. That's the DSLAM (most likely with fiver backhaul to the central office).
        KGIII 9y ago
        I believe I only paid for the equipment and Fairpoint paid the installation expenses. This was about nine years ago and I didn't pay as much attention to it as I should. I was pretty occupied. There are only six residencies in my unincorporated township. All but one have DSL, now. The one that doesn't have it, doesn't want it. They live beyond where the power and phone lines stop, anyhow. Anyhow, they are all pretty happy and grateful. As I was moving into the area, this was a good ice breaker. I'd say that I definitely got good value for the money. I get ~12 Mbps down. More importantly, a neighbor brought me some Piccadilly, just today. Worth every penny.

esaym 9y ago

Sadly I've never had a good experience with "wireless" internet. I've looked into building a WISP a few times but the cost of hardware and no guarantee of actual data throughput or quality keeps me away. Most hardware for WISPs have back haul throughput rates advertised at 100-400 mbs, yet most end points at the customer premise will see data rates of 6 - 20mbs. Including the bad jitter, packet loss, and burstyness, and you've got something that is only good for browsing facebook. All the hardware I am aware of still uses the old RTS/CTS methods for media access borrowed from the wifi protocol. Which works fine for 100 end points all within 100ft of each other... But stick 100 end points in a 5 miles radius all trying to get a "clear to send" ack and your in a world of hurt. Yes I know... some tuning will go along way, but at least with the Motorola canopy family, they defaulted to supporting a 15 mile (or was it 20?) radius. And with the WISP's network admin (which is normally always the CEO's young nephew) never changing the defaults because it "just works". This puts a ton of latency on the network since everything is assuming to be waiting on hearing from the node 15 miles away (that may or may not be there). There are some newer systems out now that use TDMA for media access, but from the reviews I see, still getting more than 20mbs to a CPE is unlikely. You best bet would be a gigabit back haul with some p2p access points covering no more than a mile or 2 each, but that means many more antennas and no place to put them. I've seen many WISPs "cover" 100+ square miles with just two access points. It just doesn't work.

goodcanadian 9y ago
This seems like a pessimistic assessment to me. Both my brother and my parents are on rural wireless networks, and they seem to get good service, though I can't say with certainty what technology is used or what bandwidth they get. Skype calls work fine. They don't stream movies due to data caps, however.
- esaym 9y ago
  It is not "pessimistic". It is my actual experience both as an end consumer and a (potential) WISP admin. And please don't mention "works fine" and "has data caps" in the same sentence...

sunflowerfly 9y ago

I am not old enough to know the history of electrification, but it was completed thoughouly into rural America. Other utilities did not. Here in rural Kansas many households were still using wells or hauling water from cities, until they banded together and laid their own water pipes.

MaysonL 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

cmurf 9y ago

Rural America votes red, which got them this kind of policy for broadband: https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15106850/fcc-lifeline-program-reverse-federal-oversight-ajit-pai https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15106850/fcc-lifeline-pro... Instead of the kind of policy they had with telephones, with the Universal Service Fund, and the like, to subsidize the massively higher deployment cost. It's not just in the middle of nowhere, the run length are vastly longer. Of course it's going to cost more money. Electrical lines, water and sewer do too.

djrogers 9y ago
I don' think you read that link you posted properly. The proposed expansion of Lifeline to broadband was tied up in court because it was entirely Federally decreed, whereas the actual law passed by congress said that it had to be handled by the states. Pai pulled it back from the courts, and determined that following the law as written was a better idea. Go ahead and kick the FCC and Pai around for screwing up net neutrality, but the Obama-era ULS expansion thing was never going to happen the way the FCC had written those regulations.

gormo2 9y ago

"pretty much the opposite of Cape Cod." What did the author mean by this? It was said in reference to Garrett county, Maryland. Was the author confused? Cape Cod is far to the north in Massachusetts.

rayiner 9y ago

> We view it as the next economic revolution for coal towns," said Harry Collins, the chairman of the Letcher County Broadband Board, which formed late last year. "The majority of our railroad tracks are ripped up now—that revolution has played out. We feel that this [digital] revolution is just as game changing and life changing as those railroad tracks were in the 20s and 30s." It's sad, but this is wishful thinking. If anything, tech-related jobs are more concentrated in urban areas than other service industries. These places have no economic viability outside the specific circumstances (coal mining, farming) that caused people to move there in the first place.

hayksaakian 9y ago
The internet and tech related jobs are the best opportunity to work remotely that anyone living in a dying coal town will have. An online freelancer with a low cost of living can live decently.
- adventured 9y ago
  In almost all of eg Appalachia, a 35-40 hour per week, $15 per hour online job (doing anything), is a good job for the majority of people versus the alternatives available. There's no question it can make a meaningful difference near-term. The obvious long-term solution is further urbanization or near-urbanization, convincing people to leave those dying regions for greater opportunity.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    What are these $15/hour 40 hour a week remote jobs? How many of them are there?
    - meric 9y ago
      Call centres? They have an advantage over foreign call centres operators (more fluent in the language), some companies might pay for it. Also, this idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136091

derwiki 9y ago

Back in 2002 when I was in high school in Coshocton I worked for the local internet service provider, CloverNet. It was mainly mundane tech support and computer repair, but every now and then I got to help with an AirClover installation. AirClover was the medium-distance (3-5mi?) broadband solution that we set up with on-the-roof directional antennas and Cisco 802.11b cards. Really excited to hear that Coshocton is still working on solutions like this.

X86BSD 9y ago

I was just this evening going through the "what if I started a wisp? How many pops? How much bandwidth? What would it take?" I've done this off and on since 1990 when breezecom was around. Getting access to rooftops is infinitely easier than trenching fiber. Can you scale wireless in a modest city like KC? At what CIR? You would have to make use of extensive caching. Even the best hardware like ubiquity tops out for backhaul at 2Gb. That's always been the problem is wireless can't scale with speed. At least not in any spectrum us mortals can use.

client4 9y ago

Per usual on ISP topics popping into hacker news, I implore anyone considering starting an ISP to jump into the ISPSchool Slack channel. PM me or send an email to staff@tsi.io and we will add you. TL;DNR Montana probably has faster internet than you. http://tsi.io http://tsi.io

MaymayMaster 9y ago
>on website it says, "...and if you look closely, those numbers are Megabytes-per-second..." when referring to their speeds >is actually megabits-per-second D R O P P E D
20after4 9y ago
email sent :)

INTPenis 9y ago

Speaking from a strange perspective perhaps but here in Sweden (the land of broadband) there was a little rural town in the south that couldn't wait to get fibre so the locals organized all the necessary things to start a town fibre grid themselves. And now every house has 10Gbps with free choice of operator. Normally what most communities do is wait for one of the big fibre operators to reach them and start digging. But these locals did all the practical stuff like digging, laying fibre and building the actual grid themselves by hiring their own contractors. Larger communities, towns and cities, usually have a city wide fibre grid managed perhaps by the local energy company or by the municipality. They in turn might out-source the fibre digging but they still manage the grid and determine what operators are offered to the citizens. In big cities (we have three of those) you can find multiple city wide fibre grids. One managed by the municipality/city and some y large property owners that take it upon themselves to equip their buildings with fibre. Regarding the wireless setups in the article I am very skeptical because this was a trend 10 years back in Sweden and a lot of people lost money by investing in it when they could have just waited a few years and had real fibre. But the US is special because of its size. So wireless might be all they can get for many years.

PaulHoule 9y ago
Fixed Wireless has been a marginal player almost everywhere it has been tried. If you are in a place with favorable geography it can sorta kinda work. If you are in the Appalachian mountains, on the other hand, you are in a dissected plateau and most people live in valleys that are overlooked by a single ridge. You have to build a road over the ridge, run electricity, maybe run fiber, and with a really tall tower (remember we have trees on the East Coast!) you might look into the valleys on each side, and if you are really lucky, another valley over. The kicker is that most of the places which are favorable for wireless already have cable. So the addressable market is this tiny sliver which can be served with fixed wireless and can't get cable.
legulere 9y ago
> But the US is special because of its size. The US has a population density of 35.0/km², while Sweden has one of 22.0/km². So it shouldn't really be bigger problem in the US because of geography.

pls2halp 9y ago

The most interesting part of the article for me was that it mentioned 5G wireless signals. I was under the impression that the standard(is that the right word?) was still being developed.

tpxl 9y ago
I was under the impression that refers to the frequency, eg 5GHz as opposed to 2.4GHz

jiggunjer 9y ago

The title made me click because "wow, their own internet". Oh, just infrastructure, I should have known ;D