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Microsoft and an army of tiny telecoms are part of a plan to wire rural America
- ToFab123 5y agohttps://archive.is/YnlwF https://archive.is/YnlwF
- iammisc 5y agoHow about we just pay smaller regional companies? I'm like 100% certain the people of the Arkansas delta don't want some company from seattle in their area. Can't we just leave people alone? For example, this wireless technology is not difficult to deploy and maintain. By allying with large companies, we're just contributing to wealth inequality. Instead, develop community college programs in these areas to encourage technological development. Recruit microsoft et al as training partners, not owners, and let people start their own ISPs. Why is it that the moment government subsidizes big business in the name of social welfare, everyone fawns over it? EDIT: All this is is a wealth transfer from government to companies (that conveniently tend to support the party currently in charge!... how nice) to own yet more infrastructure in a place that predominantly votes against the incumbency. No wonder no one likes the federal government.
- RandallBrown 5y ago>How about we just pay smaller regional companies? I believe that's what the article is about.
- rgrieselhuber 5y ago> Can't we just leave people alone? Evangelicalism comes in all shapes and sizes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 5y agoYou must have missed the “army of tiny telecoms” in the headline.
- iammisc 5y agoConveniently beholden to Microsoft.
- CyanLite2 5y agoSo much apparent bias in this article (from telecom vendors). >Bowles says a fiber-to-the-home alternative would’ve cost $5.5 million, taken at least four months longer to construct, and covered just over 600 homes. This is the problem. If it was a wealthy neighborhood, no one would blink an eye at spending $5.5 million of government funding to string fiber to 600+ homes. But if it's rural people, especially the black or brown ones, then it's a questionable decision, and they should just get shoddy CBRS-based Internet instead at a $2m cost instead.
- reportingsjr 5y agoThis is a horse crap take. People in rural areas get an insane amount of subsidization for infrastructure. And for what reason? Why does their incredibly energy intensive, land intensive lifestyle deserve to get subsidized? This is yet another take that money deserves to get sucked out of cities and pushed to car dependent, unsustainable areas. The city where I live had a good, commercially successful fiber roll out going. The ISP literally stopped the progress of the roll out in the city for a couple of years, where it was actually affordable and paying for itself, because they got a massive government "grant" to put up fiber in a rural area just to the south. If people want to live in rural areas and then shit on people living in dense areas, where quality infrastructure is actually possible for a reasonable price, let them pay for it!
- rat9988 5y ago> because they got a massive government "grant" It means they had money to fiber the rural area AND the city. They just chose not to.
- reportingsjr 5y agoNo, because they weren't going to hire and train an excessively large infrastructure crew when they'd have to fire most of them as soon as the subsidy ran out. They just shifted all of their people from the urban area to these exurbs to do the build out.
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- madengr 5y agoIf there is an electric/telephone pole, put fiber on it. I don’t see what the hell the problem is. Power and telephone were run before, thus fiber can be run now.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoDiminishing returns? In the '80s half of America was in cities, and the rest rural. But today its more like half are in coastal cities, and most of the rest in cities. Rural folk are a diminishing fraction of America.
- topkai22 5y agoDid you mean the 1880s? The US population has been majority urban / suburban since the 1920s. The rural population is declining, but remains 17% of the population. That's a significant portion of the population and would be incredibly wrong to write off.
- ghaff 5y agoAnd even 17% is deceptive. One of my neighbors has an apple orchard. Another has a Christmas tree farm. We’re next to a bunch of conservation land. We’re urban by census classification.
- shkkmo 5y agoRural is a term that can mean different things to different people. When an Alaska talks about "rural alaska" they mean something very different than when someone else talks about "rural new york".
- ghaff 5y agoParent was presumably using the US Census definition which leads various people to conclude that 80% live in urban areas. I agree with your point though rural NY can be pretty rural too if not in the same category as Alaska and large areas of the West.
- coding123 5y agoI think you will see that in the next 10 years will be the big return of rural as people want to get away from... other people.
- jjtheblunt 5y agohttps://terragraph.com/ https://terragraph.com/
- scohesc 5y agoSomehow I'd be more comfortable with Microsoft handling my traffic rather than Facebook. I know it's probably misguided, but still.
- ethbr0 5y agoWell, Microsoft spent about 20 years not tracking their users, despite having full control of and an effective monopoly on desktop and laptop operating systems. Facebook... has never not.
- GDC7 5y agoI bet many would be willing to be tracked in exchange for a free desktop/laptop It takes 2 to tango. Always.
- Jtsummers 5y agoThis was done in the past. "Internet appliances", I don't recall any being free but they were inexpensive and paired with free/cheap (for the time) internet service. Netzero was also an ISP that offered free internet funded by ads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_appliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_appliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetZero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetZero
- syntaxing 5y agoWow that was a blast to the past! I remember my dad trying it out because AOL was getting too expensive for us to sustain. Good times!
- ethbr0 5y agoIt's a great point and intersects interestingly with winner-take-all markets (like social networking). If there is likely to be only one social network (broadly speaking), then does that opine on whether that network can choose to be ad+tracking funded and free, or paid? And is it in the best interest of the public to force it to be the other, too?
- jessaustin 5y agoThe Delta is what government officials refer to as a “high-cost area,” a remote spot with a sparse population, high poverty rate, and topography that makes everything complicated. I support more broadband options and in general I like TFA, but this is the sort of thing that undermines the argument. There is no easier "topography" in which to bury lines or over which to beam LOS than completely flat alluvial plain. The lines can be simply plowed into the ground and the antennas only have to clear the treetops.
- fallingknife 5y agoThe rivers that make up a delta deposit a lot of sediment and rapidly switch channels, so I imagine that could actually be a very difficult environment to bury wires in.
- jessaustin 5y agoThis exaggerates the range over which the rivers in question move. They aren't regularly destroying houses and other buildings that need broadband. Rather, they take various paths through low land that is already devoted to the passage of rivers. Rivers on alluvial plains are more movable than rivers in mountain gorges, but they pose no greater threat to cables than they do to other permanent facilities like roads, buildings, power lines, etc. Even in the rare cases when a section of cable must be replaced, it's still just plow it into deep soil rather than bore through rock the whole way.
- cptskippy 5y agoAccording to the article it's $50,000 a mile to run fiber. According to Wikipedia: The Delta has some of the lowest population densities in the American South, sometimes fewer than 1 person per square mile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Delta#Today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Delta#Today
- User23 5y agoThat’s surprisingly high. Surely locals who already have tractors and experience digging trenches would take the job for less? It’s not like unrolling a spool of fiber is rocket science either.
- spa3thyb 5y agoMore terrestrial infrastructure - fiber and radios - is an interesting 'Tech New Deal', but I look at just Starlink (and I hope there are more competitors with customers soon!) and see this area is already covered: https://sebsebmc.github.io/starlink-coverage/index.html https://sebsebmc.github.io/starlink-coverage/index.html If we're gonna spend 65B, could we throw 100M at buying everyone in the delta a dish?
- chollida1 5y agoStarlink has been incredibly unreliable for us in our testing. VPN's dropping alot. I'm sure its great for basic web surfing or things that don't require low latency but it has it issues for sure.
- fallingknife 5y agoTheir constellation is < 10% deployed, though.
- wmf 5y agoStarlink needs to be reliable with just one shell; they can't wait years to become good enough.
- smoldesu 5y agoStarlink is quite good. I've been using them for a few months now after switching from a more traditional, smaller WISP (and before that, godforsaken Hughesnet). It's really hard to beat Starlink, especially at the price. Unless you have a local telecom willing to run CAT6 out to your house, you can't really find speeds like it. Latency is low enough to game on, bandwidth is zippy (and unlimited), and the uptime puts 4G hotspots to shame. If I had one complaint with it, it's probably the hardware itself. For $500, the installation kit is fairly barebones. On top of that, the router is pretty obviously "beta hardware" too, as well as the software and even parts of the dish itself. I'd be a little disappointed if I opened a Comcast installation kit with the same trappings, but I'll give Starlink some credit for pulling together such an impressive infrastructure/consumer hardware product at a non-alienating price.
- adolph 5y agoTo augment coverage, Aristotle [a company profiled in article] is turning increasingly to Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), a wireless spectrum historically used by U.S. Navy aircraft carriers for radar transmissions. In recent years the Federal Communications Commission has opened a slice of this spectrum for commercial use, enabling Aristotle to beam broadband as far as 6 miles to distant Arkansans over signal stations—installed atop cell towers, barns, even a prison—that are sort of like massive Wi-Fi routers. What is CBRS? On January 27, 2020, the FCC authorized full use of the CBRS band for wireless service provider commercialization without the restrictions to prevent interference with military use of the spectrum. Under the new rules, wireless carriers using CBRS might be able to deploy 5G mobile networks without having to acquire spectrum licenses. [0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Broadband_Radio_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Broadband_Radio_Servi...
- mistrial9 5y ago"army" ?
- Jtsummers 5y agoAre you asking what it means? Or questioning the use of a term commonly associated with a military? Because, in English, it has another very commonly used meaning: > a large number of people or things, typically formed or organized for a particular purpose.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mdasen 5y agoI do applaud wireless internet companies that are fighting the good fight today. However, I feel like the big three wireless companies (Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T) are likely going to eclipse them in the near future. When dealing with wireless home internet, a lot of it is going to depend on the amount of spectrum you have, how much that spectrum can cover (lower frequencies travel farther), and how much resources you have to deploy it. I think that the big three wireless companies are going to win on those fronts. Aristotle has 40MHz of CBRS (3.5GHz) spectrum and can also use up to 80MHz more of unlicensed spectrum (though that could suffer interference problems from basically anyone else that wants to use the unlicensed portion). The big three companies have more spectrum - T-Mobile has 335MHz, AT&T 246MHz, and Verizon 290MHz. Not only that, it's across more frequency bands which has implications for coverage. Low-band (below 1GHz) spectrum will travel farther and be less susceptible to disruption. AWS/PCS spectrum from 1.7GHz to 2.1GHz and 2.5GHz BRS/EBS spectrum will travel farther than 3.5GHz spectrum. And yes, the big three also have CBRS/C-Band 3.5/3.7GHz spectrum. These companies are going to have an army of wireless technicians, a lot more spectrum, and the money to invest in deploying it. T-Mobile already has 30M eligible households for their home internet (around 20-25% of US households) and I'm sure it isn't perfect, but it will be improving rapidly over the next few years as they bring lots more spectrum online. Verizon has announced home internet plans as well (I think hitting 30M by the end of 2023 and 75M by the end of 2024 or 2025, but this is from memory here). To make a simple comparison, Verizon is going to be averaging 174MHz of 3.5/3.7GHz spectrum vs Aristotle with 40MHz. To me, it seems like Verizon is going to be able to deploy a better home internet service. However, rural wireless carriers have put up a good fight in the past and often serve areas where the big three don't. Aristotle might also invest in equipment that simply works better for what their customers want. For example, T-Mobile's home internet service just uses a router/modem that's the size of a WiFi router. There's no fancy large antenna or anything. Aristotle might work with their customers to install high-gain directional antennas much like rural people are used to installing for terrestrial or satellite TV. Localities might be more willing to give a small, local company like Aristotle access to their water towers in a way that they wouldn't give the big three access. Aristotle might also be better able to find a report with customers about the trade-offs of adding more capacity, cost, traffic management, etc. But T-Mobile could copy that playbook in the coming years. T-Mobile has talked a lot on investor calls about seeing rural customers as one of their big growth areas over the next 5 years. If Aristotle can make it work with 3.5GHz spectrum, T-Mobile's 2.5GHz spectrum has better coverage and they have more of it. I'm probably being overly pessimistic, but it just seems hard to compete with the big three wireless companies.
- fidesomnes 5y agoI stop reading when it says microsoft. That is my rule.
- hardwaregeek 5y agoI can't help but draw a comparison to Rural Electrification in the 30's. Companies in the 30's refused to build electricity to rural areas because they weren't confident that farmers would buy the electricity and because spending a lot of money for a few dozen customers is pretty bad business. Rural electrification only happened with government intervention and farmer-owned collectives who sold the electricity to the rural areas. Utilities are not a business that work in the favor of the consumer. And yes, internet is a utility. I'm amazed that's even a stance at this point.
- rsj_hn 5y ago> Rural electrification only happened with government intervention and farmer-owned collectives who sold the electricity to the rural areas. That's a bit of revisionist history. Putting things into perspective, in the great depression there was a general banking collapse, cutting off credit to all businesses. But especially hard-hit were businesses trying to bring electricity to rural areas. Whereas credit in the late 20s was quite cheap, the spigot had been cutoff by the 30s, when rural electrification was just getting started. One of the Roosevelt era projects was to extend government loans to support rural eletrification -- and this program was a great success. But the reason it was a success was not because "companies in the 30s refused to build electricity" but because banks were refusing to lend money to companies to building electricity infrastructure. And this was because the banks were extremely risk-averse after the banking crisis. Whereas the government could step in and make risk free loans (guaranteed with the full faith and credit of the taxpayer) to rural electrification. Moreover the reason there were farmers collectives was because these were required by the government in order to get the loan! So that's a pretty strong incentive. Therefore it's not that private businesses didn't want to service rural areas, but the banking system collapsed (in large part due to federal policies) and then the federal government stepped in and provided a lending program that locked out private businesses from participating in it. Fortunately by 1944, the requirement of only lending to cooperatives was lifted and that was when rural electrificaiton really took off. You can read the act here: https://www.rd.usda.gov/files/UEP_IP_100-1.pdf https://www.rd.usda.gov/files/UEP_IP_100-1.pdf
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- rossjudson 5y agoI think we should take all the $$ collected by the big telecom companies to "improve" these services and just allocate them fairly across the providers who actually implement a real service for rural addresses...and we should do this retroactively.
- abdel_nasser 5y agofor middle america, 5G will take care of areas that have shitty service because of widespread stupidity and ignorance that is typical of the midwest. starlink will take care of areas that have shitty service because they are very rural or remote.
- zw123456 5y agoIf you have every played around with a spectrum analyzer, it is pretty fascinating to scan the airwaves. You can google it, there are tons of sites on how to turn an rpi or latop into a spectrum analyzer using an inexpensive USB device (HackRF etc.) But what amazes me is how much of the RF spectrum is seemingly unused, 100's of Mhz scan by with scant detection of any sort of signal. Checking online often you are in huge swaths of spectrum reserved for the military or Satellite or something but when you scan it there's nothing there. You scan the commercial broadcast bands AM/FM/TV and the cellular bands, police fire, air and they are jam packed with activity. Most of the spectrum is not really being used. I applaud the CRBS move by the FCC, it's the first time I have seen them pry some spectrum out of the hands of the DoD. But it's a tiny slice of what they and others are just sitting on. The reason I bring this up, is there was a quote in the article " "stringing lines across telephone poles is risky with storms an ever-present threat. He needs to include fixed wireless as an alternative when considering how to budget for connecting the entire state" The problem there is that with CBRS or other bands available now, is that you still need fiber, the 5G Signal only travels so far, you need a huge fiber backbone network to connect all the cell sites together. There is really no way to have it all wireless, there's just not enough spectrum. But... if say there were more. Well, then it is conceivable one could chain together cell sites using 5G IAB, but you would need probably 10 times more spectrum that what is available with CBRS now to have any kind of bandwidth that one would consider broadband. Just an observation that I think gets sort of overlooked sometimes because it is based on technical knowledge of how wireless networks work. The reason there are really only the big 3 is because it is incredibly capital intensive to build out a network due to the number of cell sites you have to build in order to get the frequency reuse necessary to have broadband wireless and a huge fiber backbone network to connect all those cell sites back to an MTSO. If anyone is serious about having rural broadband in a country as vast as the US, in my view, the only practical was would be with much larger amounts of spectrum allocated to the effort. Which could be done in a similar arrangement as CBRS with a military preemption arrangement.
- sandworm101 5y agoRadio is not a reasonable solution. No matter the frequency, the amount of data that can be transmitted over the air is very finite. Any solution today will not be able to handle tomorrow's bandwidth needs. The only real solution is physical connections, wire or fiber cables, traveling along conduits.
- KingMachiavelli 5y agoUsing lasers we can transmit at lot higher bandwidths even through air. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/alphabets-laser-internet-system-has-sent-700tb-of-data-with-99-9-uptime/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/alphabets-laser-inte...
- georgyo 5y agoRadio waves can easily hit miles of coverage. The alignment of highly directional radio antennas can be very difficult. When it rains (or even just windy) performance can vary dramatically. Lasers are even more directional, which is good for reducing noisy neighbors. But the farther the range the more difficult it is to hit a target. At a mile away it would be extremely difficult. In rural areas, we are often talking miles between farmers, let alone to internet POC.
- vegetablepotpie 5y agoWhile that's technically true, this is a last mile problem and wireless can get into some of the more hard to reach, expensive, low profit places that large institutions won't bother with. Wireless can be an interim solution until a customer base can be proven, which will lend its self to future investment.
- adam_klein 5y agoI would expect that satellite internet (Starlink, OneWeb) is the perfect solution to this problem.
- m0zg 5y agoWhy "wire" it at all? Within a few years we will have not one, but _two_ satellite Internet companies able to deliver copious bandwidth anywhere on the globe, for less than $100/mo.
- xyzzy21 5y agoProbably New York State's model is required: 1. Spectrum/Viacom contracts with NYS to install internet for all rural NYS citizens 2. Spectrum/Viacom committed Über-Fraud by taking the money and running while making only "token" installation that weren't even rural (e.g. some "installed" rutal locations ended up being in urban Brooklynn and this was published to the state) 3. The state discovers this fraud and prosecutes resulting in Spectrum/Viacom being "permabanned" from doing business in NYS forever (one of the ONLY things Cuomo did right). 4. Spectrum/Viacom cries like the weak corrupt bitch that they are but Cuomo tells them to suck eggs. Unless they pay a massive billion dollar fine. They crawl back and pay the fine. 5. Cuomo then takes the money and pays Spectrum's competitors (and Spectrum in a highly restricted set of regions) to install "Fiber EVERYWHERE!" Now on nursing homes, getting fresh with his female staff and biggest of all, the SAFE act, Cuomo himself should be perma-banned from politics forever. But on this one did the right thing - once, only once. One out of a dozen bad acts is not enough to redeem him. Now I have multi-GB/s fiber - better than what I could get in Silicon Valley. Though I still have ZERO cellular - I literally have to drive 10 miles for marginal LTE (1 bar service) and 40 miles to get 5G. But that's OK. Thankfully that also means there will not be any self-driving EVs near me any time soon (the technology is unviable right now without a data-center connection with better than 10 ms latency which is only possible with 5G - LTE can never do better than 30 ms).
- inshadows 5y ago> “The first customer we turned on in the county was the county judge,” Hales recalls. “His wife called and said, ‘Rick, Netflix is running good!’ ” Critical infrastructure indeed.