16 ms·

My multi-decade quest for rural broadband

241 points by mad_ned 5y ago

a2tech 5y ago
So after all that, the city paid for new telephone poles out of their own pocket and then Charter was interested in running lines on them and charging the residents. So in the end, the city got the worst of both worlds--they spent a bunch of money on upgrading things only to let a private company become a defacto high speed monopoly in their town.
- gpm 5y ago
  Without the town investing, it appears that wouldn't have happened at all. Without charter, it appears it would have cost the town more money (and money on an ongoing basis too). It's not obvious that this is the worst possible outcome, it's conceivable that it's the best possible outcome.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    Except you are stuck with charter. There is no world in which charter is the best possible outcome. With a bit of luck, though, it is better than a 4g lte mvno
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Charter is better than nothing. In the real world you hardly ever get "best possible" because everyone has a different view on the defintion of that.
      - zdragnar 5y ago
        I have had charter, Comcast and others. Charter takes the cake for terrible service, technical and personal, in my experience. I was actually very pleasantly surprised by what i was able to do with a mvno over cell connection- OS updates and downloading VMs were really the only major pain points. Of course, I have since gotten fiber, which wins hands down.
        throwawayboise 5y ago
        Well don't take "better than nothing" at anything more than face value. I wasn't endorsing Charter.
        bsagdiyev 5y ago
        Anecdotally I just moved from California to North Carolina and Charter (Spectrum now I guess) is actually doing all new builds with fiber, RFoG, out in this area. Seems to be leaps and bounds more reliable. So their reliability might depend on the locale.
- mad_ned 5y ago
  That is a valid way to look at it. I and probably a lot of our former Broadband committee would tend to agree with you. However, the last time I spoke with any of them was spring of 2020, to thank them again for their efforts - because I was thinking about how supremely screwed we all would have been going into Covid without high speed internet in town. I think all things considered now, they were more or less equally happy with our (imperfect) outcome as I.
  - a2tech 5y ago
    Hopefully the city was wise enough to not sign a monopoly agreement with Charter--my city owns our own poles and it allowed us to let in a small fiber ISP who's competing with ATT and Comcast (and I think winning handily). 1gpbs symmetrical Internet access for ~50USD/month. No caps.
    - rayiner 5y ago
      There's no such thing as a "monopoly agreement." Monopoly franchise agreements are banned under federal law. If you read one you'll see a provision that makes clear it's "non-exclusive." Providers end up with de facto monopolies for two reasons: 1) Many places (like the one here) are marginal in terms of whether it's worth building anything at all. A second provider coming in is unattractive. 2) What's legal is build-out requirements, which force a provider to serve every (or nearly every) home in a town. That torpedos competition except in the largest cities, because a second provider can't just wire up the areas where it makes sense to overbuild.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  As long as the city continues to own the polls and they can allow more than just one provider in the future, I think that's a win. They may have a defacto monopoly, but if they charge too much or provide too poor service, then someone else can start competing.
sumanthvepa 5y ago
Here I am in far away India, marvelling at how similar politics is in every place. Local politics at the community level in our town is remarkably similar.
- TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
  Makes sense. Politics is just the study of power and a political system is just a codified process for transferring and leveraging power, but it's all based on human nature which is universal.
raptor99 5y ago
I know this is a tech site, and I am a tech guy. It seems the simple solution that would have avoided this entire story and situation: why didn't this guy just move elsewhere instead of trying to convince/force an entire town in which he never meaningfully contributed anything to pay money for something that most of them didn't really care for or want to begin with? I think the general attitude in the article is sickening.
- gpm 5y ago
  > for something that most of them didn't really care for or want to begin with The evidence in the article seems to support the opposite. The only actual vote (that was discussed in the article) showed that the majority did want it. Moreover your role as an honest politician, is to figure out how to improve the average persons life and advocate for that position. That position is not always (and is in fact frequently not) a position of inaction. I highly doubt that the author (or anyone else, except perhaps someone running a municipal broadband contractor) has gone into municipal politics advocating for municipal broadband with the idea that it's going to be a direct net gain for them. As you suggest, the amount of time you have to put into it far exceeds your personal benefit. People like this almost always do it because they believe that this is the best course of action for the public good, not their own.
  - orzig 5y ago
    Agreed - the real mark of leadership (whether heroic or mundane) is when you're pushing to the next cliff's next handhold, not coddling the lowest common denominator. There exist disasters caused by self-dealing dressed up in aspirational language. But too often ignored is the silent, massive, and insidious weight of missed opportunity cause by cowardice dressed up in bureaucratic language.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  He'd lived there for 20 years, that should count for something.
- triceratops 5y ago
  > an entire town in which he never meaningfully contributed FTA: "I had lived in this town for twenty years". That means 20 years' worth property taxes and sales taxes, at the very least. > I think the general attitude in the article is sickening. Of trying to improve the town in which you've lived for 20 years?
dd36 5y ago
That was a well-written, fun read.
burlesona 5y ago
Speaking to US readers: The big takeaway here is how municipal politics works. There’s a tiny number of people - largely volunteers - working on the issues that have a huge impact on everyone’s daily life - and how much they deal with a very motivated and angry opposition all day long. The opposition size is never truly known, and the problem is it usually feels enormous and is actually tiny. It is not unusual for big city projects to be shut down literally by the angry screaming of a dozen people. Lest you think this is just a small town thing, I have first-hand experience working in a local committee when I lived in Houston, and it was basically identical to what this author described. Care about our national housing shortage? In nearly every city there exists a small angry mob that works to block every development project, and this job tends to be loudest and angriest about middle to low income housing and apartments. If you want that to change, the single best thing you can do is show up to local meetings and say “I support this apartment building.” Even better if you can mobilize a few friends. You would be shocked at how little it takes to have a big influence.
- dbingham 5y ago
  Can confirm. I live in a large town/small city (80k people, 140k in the county with 30k commuting in to the city) and this is exactly how every issue goes. I've been organizing around climate and sustainability, housing (affordability and density), economics, you name it and this how it all always goes. It's really hard, as one of those activists, to not burn out and get cynical. Those who have theirs, are quite comfortable with the way things are, and do not want the smallest amount of change are often also retired and have infinite time on their hands - which they can use to great effect to lobby local governments and organize with their friends. It's really hard to effectively organize against that among people who are trying to get themselves established in their careers, or who are starting/raising young families, or who are on the career grind. None of us have the time or energy to stay on a council meeting until 3 am every week. But we've finally gotten fed up to the point where we're starting to put together an organization that looks like a political party with in a political party (our city is a one party town so we have to operate with in that party). It will canvas and organize volunteers and build a database we can use to simply overwhelm that loud minority. It's going to be a fuck ton of work, and it may fall apart before it gets going, but this seems like the only way forward.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
I've worked remotely for 20 years. Fortunately on DSL because I'm within 3 miles of my central office. Also a stockholder in the local phone company providing the service. Get 40MBit when I'm lucky; 1MBit when its busy. But they just buried a fibre optic cable down my gravel road ditch! Heading toward a small rural business that paid ~20K for the cable. And they offered to let me in on it! So fibre here I come. So far a rut next to my driveway and a coil of black plastic 'cable' hung next to my house's service box. But soon!
- crazy1van 5y ago
  Is there a way to search for fiber optic cables nearby? Calling the local telco has always been a dead-end -- I can't get beyond the sales-rep who's computer shows fiber service isn't available at my location.
  - wmil 5y ago
    You'll get better results writing letters. As in actual formally written letters on paper sent in the mail. Written requests for information get handled better. Write to the telco, also write to your municipal and state government. Try to find the relevant office. Someone will get back to you with the info.
  - opwieurposiu 5y ago
    Walk around and look for the junction boxes in alleys and on road easements. Often they will be labeled as to what they contain.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Local permitting / regulator's office should be a good place to start.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    No idea about bigger cities. I'm in a rural community, with 300 subscribers to our local telephone office. We can get service just by calling the manager. My grandfather was an initial stockholder in the company when it was formed. See, back then you bought a share, you got a line run to your farm. He needed the line so when the federal liquor tax man came into town, his friend could call and let him know. He'd throw the still in the wagon and head for the woods until the coast was clear. When I was a kid, we still had a wooden box on the wall with a horn coming out the front (microphone) and a cloth-covered wire to an earpiece hanging on the switchhook out the side. You took the receiver off and rattled the switchhook to get the operator's attention - a little light would flash on her board. Told her who you wanted, she'd plug you to them and operate the ringer crank. It's all automated now, and most of their revenue is cable services and internet. Plus fees for all traffic crossing our territory, which is between several middle-sized communities so that's a big deal. Amounts to some millions a year revenue! But not enough to install fibre until now.
metalman 5y ago
Hey wow and ya. My choices for conectivity are dial up,ok ok,enhanced dial up, satelite which no one has,internet over cell ,via dongle or turbo hub and just a phone with data,which I use and can live with and some sort of wireless rural broadband that can not handle two users in the same house,and the antena looks funny. Litteraly next door is a huge horsey property that was bought site unseen by a sofware engineer startup guy and his young family and then they discovered no internet,could not move in,bad,real bad. Exactly the sort of people who are needed in struggling rural places. We got eagles and whales in the bay ocean front and views for days. They are unrolling the fibre now closer to town,dont think its going to make it this far out,which is fine,data has gotten affordable and having one device or two (phones) is easyer. If they do run the fibre out here I am going to crunch the numbers and see if running a bit miner off solar power and recovering the heat in a hot water pre heat tank can earn its salt.
- EricE 5y ago
  You may have more options you didn't know about: https://members.wispa.org/members/directory/search_bootstrap.php?org_id=WISP https://members.wispa.org/members/directory/search_bootstrap...
joncrane 5y ago
Anyone else find it kind of convenient that the town ended up paying for the upgrade to the telephone poles, which was the prerequisite for private companies to expand into the town, and then all of a sudden ran out of steam, setting up the for-profit cable company to swoop in and reap the benefits? I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist but the story dedicates so much time to the pre-planning, then all of a sudden trails off and glosses over the part where the initiative loses momentum and the private company ends up making money?
- mad_ned 5y ago
  the unevenness of the level of detail in the story, especially the part at the end, is my fault. I did indeed gloss over it. You have in some senses an unreliable narrator, because I was not privy to what went on with the Municipal Light Plant decisions once the Broadband committee was dissolved and so cant go into as much detail. But my best guess here is that we got renewed interest from the cable companies once the poles were done (the poles had to be done, no matter what approach we took), and then when unrelated issues with the chosen build contractor came up, the Municipal Light Plant decided to go the private route. The makeup of that body was different that the Broadband committee, and maybe prioritized the cost/benefit of going the municipal route differently than us.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    I was told that in politics "never write what you can just say, and never say when you can just nod" .. in other words, many deals are certainly and purposefully not what they appear to be from written records. Its like a "first week on the job intro" fact, among political people it seems.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gitowiec 5y ago
It is sad that the author and his family were excluded from the reliable and fast internet connection. Knowing that other places have good internet connection could bring frustration on them. I never was in such situation with the Internet but, I can sympathize. Now I am also in exclusion. In my country there is lack of good quality and performance laptops. I don't understand (it must be money) why only lower end laptops (bad displays, low quality cases, mostly plastic, lower end CPUs) are sold here in Poland. I feel excluded from the tech I always was a geek follower and a user (developer). Companies selling hardware prioritize markets with bigger purchasing powers. But it was not so visible back in the day.
BrandoElFollito 5y ago
in France we solved that problem by requesting anyone laying down fiber to allow any other operator to use it. You get some benefits from laying down the cable (enough to make you want to do that) but then companies compete for the customer. The regulation authority puts a 3 months ban on offers when a cable is available to leave time for the interested companies to provide service. To some extend, the one who lays down the cable has some advantage as their logo is on the cable. They are also the ones who will always give you an offer after the 3 months period. this is how I moved forma a company I liked a lot (Free) to the one who brought the fiber (Orange) because they had an offer immediately. Free and others came 2 YEARS later and now they are surprised that they hardly get customers in the area.
- EricE 5y ago
  Yes, I think this is by far the most equitable solution - for the privilege of getting right of way to lay cable, you should be forced to allow others to leverage the infrastructure too. Which is why so many companies fight it :p
- gjhr 5y ago
  But that wouldn't have helped here. No companies wanted to lay down cable even when they would then get a monopoly on the customers in the town.
  - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
    That was also the case for some remote places in France. The deal was that a company can operate only if they also fiber low density places. This comes from the time where there was a monopoly on wired phones, but everyone was entitled to one, even if you were 10 km away in your house over the cliff.
- robocat 5y ago
  In New Zealand (≈Oregon) the government funded private networks[1], that do not act as ISPs. Any ISP can use the network, and pays the network provider. A similar system is used for power, where there are regional companies owning and maintaining the residential power network assets, but you can choose any power company provider for your power, and a connection fee shows up on your power invoice from them to pay for the poles and maintenance etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Fast_Broadband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Fast_Broadband
EricE 5y ago
https://members.wispa.org/members/directory/search_bootstrap.php?org_id=WISP https://members.wispa.org/members/directory/search_bootstrap... WISPA also has a great advocacy section - if you want to see more choices in broadband support them in any way you can!
bel_marinaio 5y ago
ITT some guy that lives out in the country complaining that he can't get the same amenities as much higher density population areas.
1970-01-01 5y ago
This is exactly why Starlink is poised to become a revolution for rural towns. For decades, just like this story tells, communication conglomerates have mixed with local town idiots to stop infrastructure roll-out. Starlink can expect millions of thirsty subscribers if they can pull off a broadband connection.
- EricE 5y ago
  Starlink's problem is going to be capacity. Price it reasonably and everyone wants on - dial up modem will be speedy by comparison. Price it where you balance supply and demand and you don't get to play up the humanitarian universal access story. Fun times :)
  - linsomniac 5y ago
    Citation for the capacity problem? I'm skeptical because this sounds a lot like the speculation around DSL when it rolled out in my city back in 1997 (IIRC), and the "crosstalk killing throughput of the entire cable bundle" issues never seemed to come about. The real killer to the telco behind DSL seemed to be that they would never deploy DSLAMs in remote terminal boxes, because they didn't want CLECs to come in with their own DSLAMs to serve the rural areas, so if you weren't a couple miles from the fairly rare Central Offices, you were limited to 128Kbps IDSL (ISDN data-only) service. Then the just sat on their copper infrastructure while the world moved on past them with terrestrial wireless and cable modems. Their last gasp was a million dollars spent on advertising to oppose the municipal fiber network, along with the cable company, but the city is installing those lines as we speak, and it's glorious!
  - aantix 5y ago
    Isn't the speed of light their only constraint?
  - BelenusMordred 5y ago
    Given this thread is about rural areas that's not really an issue. Believe they have mentioned it being an issue in dense cities initially at least.
dantheman 5y ago
It's always someone trying to get someone else to subsidize their lifestyle.
hyko 5y ago
Lack of universal infrastructure is an avoidable travesty caused by privatisation. What sort of country would have roads only going up to some select houses? A pretty shabby one.
driverdan 5y ago
Good story, thanks for sharing Ned. What's funny is that I know where this took place because I grew up in a neighboring town. I recognized it by the wind turbines and mountain. My parents still live there and you may have worked with my dad at DEC. We had many of the same problems. Their phone lines run underground and still have terrible noise when it rains. The fastest dialup speeds we could get were in the low 20kbit range. They're too far out to get DSL. Cable was available elsewhere in town but not on their road because the power lines came in from the neighboring town. Eventually enough people built houses on their road to put in poles, cable, and even some pavement. They didn't have to suffer through the issues you had.
imgabe 5y ago
This gave me flashbacks to my own Internet struggles as a teenager in rural Pennsylvania in the 90s. AOL was exciting and new, but the nearest dial-in number was in the large town ~30 miles away, which meant it was a "long-distance" phone call. My parents were not happy with that $700 phone bill. Internet was carefully rationed after that, at least until our small town got its own local ISP.
milankragujevic 5y ago
This post sounds so much like my situation, but just offset by 2 decades. After suffering with LTE, xDSL, I bought myself an uplink connection in the city and put an antenna on a building there that sends me 100 Mbps wirelessly to an antenna on my house. My situation isn't that bad as 'Mad Ned' had experienced, as most people have 8 Mbps ADSL2+, but it cuts out during rain because underground cables get wet at the points they were cut and rewired back together, and it causes bad connections. Meanwhile my connection handles rain and snow without problems, and ping is 1ms from my house to the router on the other side. The rest is out of my hands and handled by the uplink provider, but it is usually around 10ms in total. Ironically after me putting up my antenna here, because LTE was oversubscribed to the point of falling down to 1-2 Mbps every evening and 100ms+ ping, the carrier put a whole base station on the roof of the same building that I have my PtP link antenna on. As expected, it did not improve the situation as the base station is very short range and cannot be reached from my village.
Zababa 5y ago
> We passed the bottle around, and it was naturally awful, because it was moonshine. I've made moonshine once with water, sugar, lemon juice and tomato paste, distilled with a homemade pot-still (the base was an ikea pot, with a few copper tubes and plumbing connectors) and it was the best vodka equivalent I've ever drunk.

241 points by mad_ned 5y ago

So after all that, the city paid for new telephone poles out of their own pocket and then Charter was interested in running lines on them and charging the residents. So in the end, the city got the worst of both worlds--they spent a bunch of money on upgrading things only to let a private company become a defacto high speed monopoly in their town.

gpm 5y ago
Without the town investing, it appears that wouldn't have happened at all. Without charter, it appears it would have cost the town more money (and money on an ongoing basis too). It's not obvious that this is the worst possible outcome, it's conceivable that it's the best possible outcome.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Except you are stuck with charter. There is no world in which charter is the best possible outcome. With a bit of luck, though, it is better than a 4g lte mvno
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Charter is better than nothing. In the real world you hardly ever get "best possible" because everyone has a different view on the defintion of that.
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      I have had charter, Comcast and others. Charter takes the cake for terrible service, technical and personal, in my experience. I was actually very pleasantly surprised by what i was able to do with a mvno over cell connection- OS updates and downloading VMs were really the only major pain points. Of course, I have since gotten fiber, which wins hands down.
      - throwawayboise 5y ago
        Well don't take "better than nothing" at anything more than face value. I wasn't endorsing Charter.
      - bsagdiyev 5y ago
        Anecdotally I just moved from California to North Carolina and Charter (Spectrum now I guess) is actually doing all new builds with fiber, RFoG, out in this area. Seems to be leaps and bounds more reliable. So their reliability might depend on the locale.
mad_ned 5y ago
That is a valid way to look at it. I and probably a lot of our former Broadband committee would tend to agree with you. However, the last time I spoke with any of them was spring of 2020, to thank them again for their efforts - because I was thinking about how supremely screwed we all would have been going into Covid without high speed internet in town. I think all things considered now, they were more or less equally happy with our (imperfect) outcome as I.
- a2tech 5y ago
  Hopefully the city was wise enough to not sign a monopoly agreement with Charter--my city owns our own poles and it allowed us to let in a small fiber ISP who's competing with ATT and Comcast (and I think winning handily). 1gpbs symmetrical Internet access for ~50USD/month. No caps.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    There's no such thing as a "monopoly agreement." Monopoly franchise agreements are banned under federal law. If you read one you'll see a provision that makes clear it's "non-exclusive." Providers end up with de facto monopolies for two reasons: 1) Many places (like the one here) are marginal in terms of whether it's worth building anything at all. A second provider coming in is unattractive. 2) What's legal is build-out requirements, which force a provider to serve every (or nearly every) home in a town. That torpedos competition except in the largest cities, because a second provider can't just wire up the areas where it makes sense to overbuild.
jjeaff 5y ago
As long as the city continues to own the polls and they can allow more than just one provider in the future, I think that's a win. They may have a defacto monopoly, but if they charge too much or provide too poor service, then someone else can start competing.

sumanthvepa 5y ago

Here I am in far away India, marvelling at how similar politics is in every place. Local politics at the community level in our town is remarkably similar.

TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
Makes sense. Politics is just the study of power and a political system is just a codified process for transferring and leveraging power, but it's all based on human nature which is universal.

raptor99 5y ago

I know this is a tech site, and I am a tech guy. It seems the simple solution that would have avoided this entire story and situation: why didn't this guy just move elsewhere instead of trying to convince/force an entire town in which he never meaningfully contributed anything to pay money for something that most of them didn't really care for or want to begin with? I think the general attitude in the article is sickening.

gpm 5y ago
> for something that most of them didn't really care for or want to begin with The evidence in the article seems to support the opposite. The only actual vote (that was discussed in the article) showed that the majority did want it. Moreover your role as an honest politician, is to figure out how to improve the average persons life and advocate for that position. That position is not always (and is in fact frequently not) a position of inaction. I highly doubt that the author (or anyone else, except perhaps someone running a municipal broadband contractor) has gone into municipal politics advocating for municipal broadband with the idea that it's going to be a direct net gain for them. As you suggest, the amount of time you have to put into it far exceeds your personal benefit. People like this almost always do it because they believe that this is the best course of action for the public good, not their own.
- orzig 5y ago
  Agreed - the real mark of leadership (whether heroic or mundane) is when you're pushing to the next cliff's next handhold, not coddling the lowest common denominator. There exist disasters caused by self-dealing dressed up in aspirational language. But too often ignored is the silent, massive, and insidious weight of missed opportunity cause by cowardice dressed up in bureaucratic language.
bigbillheck 5y ago
He'd lived there for 20 years, that should count for something.
triceratops 5y ago
> an entire town in which he never meaningfully contributed FTA: "I had lived in this town for twenty years". That means 20 years' worth property taxes and sales taxes, at the very least. > I think the general attitude in the article is sickening. Of trying to improve the town in which you've lived for 20 years?

dd36 5y ago

That was a well-written, fun read.

burlesona 5y ago

Speaking to US readers: The big takeaway here is how municipal politics works. There’s a tiny number of people - largely volunteers - working on the issues that have a huge impact on everyone’s daily life - and how much they deal with a very motivated and angry opposition all day long. The opposition size is never truly known, and the problem is it usually feels enormous and is actually tiny. It is not unusual for big city projects to be shut down literally by the angry screaming of a dozen people. Lest you think this is just a small town thing, I have first-hand experience working in a local committee when I lived in Houston, and it was basically identical to what this author described. Care about our national housing shortage? In nearly every city there exists a small angry mob that works to block every development project, and this job tends to be loudest and angriest about middle to low income housing and apartments. If you want that to change, the single best thing you can do is show up to local meetings and say “I support this apartment building.” Even better if you can mobilize a few friends. You would be shocked at how little it takes to have a big influence.

dbingham 5y ago
Can confirm. I live in a large town/small city (80k people, 140k in the county with 30k commuting in to the city) and this is exactly how every issue goes. I've been organizing around climate and sustainability, housing (affordability and density), economics, you name it and this how it all always goes. It's really hard, as one of those activists, to not burn out and get cynical. Those who have theirs, are quite comfortable with the way things are, and do not want the smallest amount of change are often also retired and have infinite time on their hands - which they can use to great effect to lobby local governments and organize with their friends. It's really hard to effectively organize against that among people who are trying to get themselves established in their careers, or who are starting/raising young families, or who are on the career grind. None of us have the time or energy to stay on a council meeting until 3 am every week. But we've finally gotten fed up to the point where we're starting to put together an organization that looks like a political party with in a political party (our city is a one party town so we have to operate with in that party). It will canvas and organize volunteers and build a database we can use to simply overwhelm that loud minority. It's going to be a fuck ton of work, and it may fall apart before it gets going, but this seems like the only way forward.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

I've worked remotely for 20 years. Fortunately on DSL because I'm within 3 miles of my central office. Also a stockholder in the local phone company providing the service. Get 40MBit when I'm lucky; 1MBit when its busy. But they just buried a fibre optic cable down my gravel road ditch! Heading toward a small rural business that paid ~20K for the cable. And they offered to let me in on it! So fibre here I come. So far a rut next to my driveway and a coil of black plastic 'cable' hung next to my house's service box. But soon!

crazy1van 5y ago
Is there a way to search for fiber optic cables nearby? Calling the local telco has always been a dead-end -- I can't get beyond the sales-rep who's computer shows fiber service isn't available at my location.
- wmil 5y ago
  You'll get better results writing letters. As in actual formally written letters on paper sent in the mail. Written requests for information get handled better. Write to the telco, also write to your municipal and state government. Try to find the relevant office. Someone will get back to you with the info.
- opwieurposiu 5y ago
  Walk around and look for the junction boxes in alleys and on road easements. Often they will be labeled as to what they contain.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Local permitting / regulator's office should be a good place to start.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  No idea about bigger cities. I'm in a rural community, with 300 subscribers to our local telephone office. We can get service just by calling the manager. My grandfather was an initial stockholder in the company when it was formed. See, back then you bought a share, you got a line run to your farm. He needed the line so when the federal liquor tax man came into town, his friend could call and let him know. He'd throw the still in the wagon and head for the woods until the coast was clear. When I was a kid, we still had a wooden box on the wall with a horn coming out the front (microphone) and a cloth-covered wire to an earpiece hanging on the switchhook out the side. You took the receiver off and rattled the switchhook to get the operator's attention - a little light would flash on her board. Told her who you wanted, she'd plug you to them and operate the ringer crank. It's all automated now, and most of their revenue is cable services and internet. Plus fees for all traffic crossing our territory, which is between several middle-sized communities so that's a big deal. Amounts to some millions a year revenue! But not enough to install fibre until now.

metalman 5y ago

Hey wow and ya. My choices for conectivity are dial up,ok ok,enhanced dial up, satelite which no one has,internet over cell ,via dongle or turbo hub and just a phone with data,which I use and can live with and some sort of wireless rural broadband that can not handle two users in the same house,and the antena looks funny. Litteraly next door is a huge horsey property that was bought site unseen by a sofware engineer startup guy and his young family and then they discovered no internet,could not move in,bad,real bad. Exactly the sort of people who are needed in struggling rural places. We got eagles and whales in the bay ocean front and views for days. They are unrolling the fibre now closer to town,dont think its going to make it this far out,which is fine,data has gotten affordable and having one device or two (phones) is easyer. If they do run the fibre out here I am going to crunch the numbers and see if running a bit miner off solar power and recovering the heat in a hot water pre heat tank can earn its salt.

EricE 5y ago
You may have more options you didn't know about: https://members.wispa.org/members/directory/search_bootstrap.php?org_id=WISP https://members.wispa.org/members/directory/search_bootstrap...

joncrane 5y ago

Anyone else find it kind of convenient that the town ended up paying for the upgrade to the telephone poles, which was the prerequisite for private companies to expand into the town, and then all of a sudden ran out of steam, setting up the for-profit cable company to swoop in and reap the benefits? I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist but the story dedicates so much time to the pre-planning, then all of a sudden trails off and glosses over the part where the initiative loses momentum and the private company ends up making money?

mad_ned 5y ago
the unevenness of the level of detail in the story, especially the part at the end, is my fault. I did indeed gloss over it. You have in some senses an unreliable narrator, because I was not privy to what went on with the Municipal Light Plant decisions once the Broadband committee was dissolved and so cant go into as much detail. But my best guess here is that we got renewed interest from the cable companies once the poles were done (the poles had to be done, no matter what approach we took), and then when unrelated issues with the chosen build contractor came up, the Municipal Light Plant decided to go the private route. The makeup of that body was different that the Broadband committee, and maybe prioritized the cost/benefit of going the municipal route differently than us.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  I was told that in politics "never write what you can just say, and never say when you can just nod" .. in other words, many deals are certainly and purposefully not what they appear to be from written records. Its like a "first week on the job intro" fact, among political people it seems.

deleted 5y ago

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gitowiec 5y ago

It is sad that the author and his family were excluded from the reliable and fast internet connection. Knowing that other places have good internet connection could bring frustration on them. I never was in such situation with the Internet but, I can sympathize. Now I am also in exclusion. In my country there is lack of good quality and performance laptops. I don't understand (it must be money) why only lower end laptops (bad displays, low quality cases, mostly plastic, lower end CPUs) are sold here in Poland. I feel excluded from the tech I always was a geek follower and a user (developer). Companies selling hardware prioritize markets with bigger purchasing powers. But it was not so visible back in the day.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

in France we solved that problem by requesting anyone laying down fiber to allow any other operator to use it. You get some benefits from laying down the cable (enough to make you want to do that) but then companies compete for the customer. The regulation authority puts a 3 months ban on offers when a cable is available to leave time for the interested companies to provide service. To some extend, the one who lays down the cable has some advantage as their logo is on the cable. They are also the ones who will always give you an offer after the 3 months period. this is how I moved forma a company I liked a lot (Free) to the one who brought the fiber (Orange) because they had an offer immediately. Free and others came 2 YEARS later and now they are surprised that they hardly get customers in the area.

EricE 5y ago
Yes, I think this is by far the most equitable solution - for the privilege of getting right of way to lay cable, you should be forced to allow others to leverage the infrastructure too. Which is why so many companies fight it :p
gjhr 5y ago
But that wouldn't have helped here. No companies wanted to lay down cable even when they would then get a monopoly on the customers in the town.
- BrandoElFollito 5y ago
  That was also the case for some remote places in France. The deal was that a company can operate only if they also fiber low density places. This comes from the time where there was a monopoly on wired phones, but everyone was entitled to one, even if you were 10 km away in your house over the cliff.
robocat 5y ago
In New Zealand (≈Oregon) the government funded private networks[1], that do not act as ISPs. Any ISP can use the network, and pays the network provider. A similar system is used for power, where there are regional companies owning and maintaining the residential power network assets, but you can choose any power company provider for your power, and a connection fee shows up on your power invoice from them to pay for the poles and maintenance etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Fast_Broadband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Fast_Broadband

EricE 5y ago

https://members.wispa.org/members/directory/search_bootstrap.php?org_id=WISP https://members.wispa.org/members/directory/search_bootstrap... WISPA also has a great advocacy section - if you want to see more choices in broadband support them in any way you can!

bel_marinaio 5y ago

ITT some guy that lives out in the country complaining that he can't get the same amenities as much higher density population areas.

1970-01-01 5y ago

This is exactly why Starlink is poised to become a revolution for rural towns. For decades, just like this story tells, communication conglomerates have mixed with local town idiots to stop infrastructure roll-out. Starlink can expect millions of thirsty subscribers if they can pull off a broadband connection.

EricE 5y ago
Starlink's problem is going to be capacity. Price it reasonably and everyone wants on - dial up modem will be speedy by comparison. Price it where you balance supply and demand and you don't get to play up the humanitarian universal access story. Fun times :)
- linsomniac 5y ago
  Citation for the capacity problem? I'm skeptical because this sounds a lot like the speculation around DSL when it rolled out in my city back in 1997 (IIRC), and the "crosstalk killing throughput of the entire cable bundle" issues never seemed to come about. The real killer to the telco behind DSL seemed to be that they would never deploy DSLAMs in remote terminal boxes, because they didn't want CLECs to come in with their own DSLAMs to serve the rural areas, so if you weren't a couple miles from the fairly rare Central Offices, you were limited to 128Kbps IDSL (ISDN data-only) service. Then the just sat on their copper infrastructure while the world moved on past them with terrestrial wireless and cable modems. Their last gasp was a million dollars spent on advertising to oppose the municipal fiber network, along with the cable company, but the city is installing those lines as we speak, and it's glorious!
- aantix 5y ago
  Isn't the speed of light their only constraint?
- BelenusMordred 5y ago
  Given this thread is about rural areas that's not really an issue. Believe they have mentioned it being an issue in dense cities initially at least.

dantheman 5y ago

It's always someone trying to get someone else to subsidize their lifestyle.

hyko 5y ago

Lack of universal infrastructure is an avoidable travesty caused by privatisation. What sort of country would have roads only going up to some select houses? A pretty shabby one.

driverdan 5y ago

Good story, thanks for sharing Ned. What's funny is that I know where this took place because I grew up in a neighboring town. I recognized it by the wind turbines and mountain. My parents still live there and you may have worked with my dad at DEC. We had many of the same problems. Their phone lines run underground and still have terrible noise when it rains. The fastest dialup speeds we could get were in the low 20kbit range. They're too far out to get DSL. Cable was available elsewhere in town but not on their road because the power lines came in from the neighboring town. Eventually enough people built houses on their road to put in poles, cable, and even some pavement. They didn't have to suffer through the issues you had.

imgabe 5y ago

This gave me flashbacks to my own Internet struggles as a teenager in rural Pennsylvania in the 90s. AOL was exciting and new, but the nearest dial-in number was in the large town ~30 miles away, which meant it was a "long-distance" phone call. My parents were not happy with that $700 phone bill. Internet was carefully rationed after that, at least until our small town got its own local ISP.

milankragujevic 5y ago

This post sounds so much like my situation, but just offset by 2 decades. After suffering with LTE, xDSL, I bought myself an uplink connection in the city and put an antenna on a building there that sends me 100 Mbps wirelessly to an antenna on my house. My situation isn't that bad as 'Mad Ned' had experienced, as most people have 8 Mbps ADSL2+, but it cuts out during rain because underground cables get wet at the points they were cut and rewired back together, and it causes bad connections. Meanwhile my connection handles rain and snow without problems, and ping is 1ms from my house to the router on the other side. The rest is out of my hands and handled by the uplink provider, but it is usually around 10ms in total. Ironically after me putting up my antenna here, because LTE was oversubscribed to the point of falling down to 1-2 Mbps every evening and 100ms+ ping, the carrier put a whole base station on the roof of the same building that I have my PtP link antenna on. As expected, it did not improve the situation as the base station is very short range and cannot be reached from my village.

Zababa 5y ago

> We passed the bottle around, and it was naturally awful, because it was moonshine. I've made moonshine once with water, sugar, lemon juice and tomato paste, distilled with a homemade pot-still (the base was an ikea pot, with a few copper tubes and plumbing connectors) and it was the best vodka equivalent I've ever drunk.