5 ms·

I love how people want to live in rural areas to save money but then the federal government makes up the difference for what would normally be expensive utiliti

I love how people want to live in rural areas to save money but then the federal government makes up the difference for what would normally be expensive utilities. Then those same people crap on those who live in cities.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
matthewfcarlson 4y ago
Right? There was an article here earlier about running fiber in rural Michigan. Kudos to the dude doing it and I agree that internet access is important. But 30k per house seems like a very wonky investment. At 100$ a month that would be 25 years to pay back, which could be feasible depending on what we are doing for internet in 25 years. Still seems ridiculous. If you wanted to pay 30k per household to build super fast internet for everyone in Seattle or Austin, people would laugh you out of the room.
- calgoo 4y ago
  It’s all about where you pass the cables. If you need to dig up the street then 30k is not a lot of money to do the installation. If you can install the cables on already existing poles, then that reduces the cost a lot. It’s also cheaper to do a group of homes then it is to do 1 as the cost of bringing the workers, the machinery and the permits is spread across all clients. That’s why we hear a lot of cases where someone has a fiber cable passing close by but the cable company did not see enough profit to finish the last mile (or they asked at the time of building and not enough homes signed up at the time).
- newjersey 4y ago
  I don't get it. Why is fiber to the home so expensive? I think in principle, it makes sense for us to pay for rural broadband the same way we paid for rural electricity. The problem is some companies took the money but didn't deliver the results, no? > In 1936, the REA was made permanent through the Rural Electrification Act. It was granted an initial budget of $50 million for the first two years, then $40 million a year for the following decade ($550 million in 1936 is approximately $10.3 billion today). Jul 12, 2021 snippet answer from Google search https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+much+did+rural+electrification+cost https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+muc... I can't imagine how our government can justify subsidizing anything other than fiber to the home in the current year. As far as I know, there is very little ongoing maintenance cost and glass fiber is much cheaper than copper, no? Coax people are saying they can get symmetric gigabit up and down with docsis but I will believe it when I see it (low latency symmetric gigabit up and down, no data caps, reasonable pricing). Until then, we shouldn't give them any money.
  - wmf 4y ago
    Any kind of utility is expensive; fiber is no worse than electricity, water, or gas. The difference is that all those utilities were installed before we shot ourselves in the foot with 10,000 pages of regulations written by incumbent monopoly lobbyists.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Which is why a lot of fiber roll-outs happen when electrical, water, or gas lines are already being replaced.
  - bityard 4y ago
    > Why is fiber to the home so expensive? I guess it costs more than you think to hire someone to dig a hole, put something in it, and then cover it back up again. I paid a guy almost $2000 to fix a few feet of sewer line in my front yard. Very little work to do once the old line was dug up, the main costs were in pulling various permits, renting the equipment, hiring crew, etc. Now multiply that by a few miles and $30k starts to look like a bargain.
    - fundad 4y ago
      Soil is as heavy as almost any construction material and being underground, you're paying for potential energy. It's expensive in fuel and in the cost and maintenance of machinery designed to deliver the most energy. It's like paying for GPU compute time.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      If the main costs were permits, equipment rentals and crew, then your math is way off. By definition, those are mostly fixed costs so the first foot is phenomenally expensive. A crew can easily dig 1/2-1 mile per day, so maybe 4 days instead of the one to dig a few feet. If 1/2 the cost was equipment and crew and the other half permits, that puts us at a $5k total.
- jcims 4y ago
  What’s the increase in property value by now appealing to tech/knowledge workers? Would you personally move to a place that only offered shitty DSL? I almost pulled the trigger on a $30k quote from Centurylink to run fiber to my home but they proved incapable of backhauling anywhere near what i was looking for. I didn’t give a shit about its amortized cost.
- bityard 4y ago
  This might be an odd notion considering the average HN commenter but hear me out. It's _just_ possible the guy running that ISP isn't doing it to grow into a VC-backed unicorn with an exit strategy of getting scooped up by a FAANG in 5 years. He doesn't want to _lose_ money on it, but he's an engineer and has evaluated the risks and costs and found them acceptable. He's doing it because because the incumbent ISP won't, because it's a challenge, and because he wants to to serve his community. Or so I've been able to gather.
  - stephen_greet 4y ago
    But running an ISP requires a metric ton of capital upfront. No matter the motivation, how do you get that capital?
    - bityard 4y ago
      I can't speak for the guy running this network so I don't know if he has investors or creditors or what, but I live in the same area as he does and can say that if you have a high-paying tech job well into the six figures and live in a LCOL area like this (AND don't blow it all on hedonic purchases like luxury pickups), it's not hard to amass a surprising surplus of cash in a surprisingly short amount of time.
jeffbee 4y ago
A federal fund to agglomerate dispersed people into small villages where the utilities can be provided at a reasonable price is a better use of tax funds than massive subsidies for existing settlement patterns. We already had another article on here today about how the feds are throwing ~$10k per household at some Michigan ISP to hook up people who live miles from anywhere.
emkoemko 4y ago
where do you live that rural costs less? electricity costs way more then in a city, heating if you get gas line way more if not you pay a lot for heating oil, i have to pay like 200$ for electricity even if i didn't use a watt...
djmips 4y ago
I feel like the land and building cost in my city dwarf the utility difference.
partiallypro 4y ago
Some people can't afford to live in cities...and their life is better in rural areas. Some people prefer to own rather than rent, even if it's a 100K house on a small plot passed down generations. You're essentially saying poor people don't deserve internet access. It's hilarious to me that people with your position proclaim to be progressive (not saying you are,) when there is an explicit hatred of the poor when you start talking to them. I imagine -that- is why people in rural areas feel a disconnect with people in cities.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Life is better when they have access to electricity, internet, roads, and other public services that are subsidized by the government. More importantly these are the people who are more likely to complain about government handouts and socialism.
  - partiallypro 4y ago
    Except utilities and roads aren't socialism; and maybe treating these people as (essentially) garbage that doesn't deserve these things because they complain about government is actually a very polarizing thing that pushes them farther away...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- HWR_14 4y ago
  The point being made is that they cannot afford to live in rural areas. Their subsidized lives are affordable. I don't hate poor people, but subsidizing people in urban areas is just a better way to help them - the money goes a lot further.
  - partiallypro 4y ago
    People have lived in rural areas for cheaper than in cities for far far longer than government subsidies have existed. It sure just sounds like a very classist take that people that don't live in cities don't deserve what people in cities do. Which is sort of ironic because I see people with tons of money stepping over homeless in wealthy cities all the time. I don't think there are massive homeless problems in US cities because of a redneck getting a 4G tower installed 15 miles from his property. I have had the opportunity of growing up in a poorer rural area, and have lived in a major city. I find this mindset pretty grotesque and extremely polarizing, to the degree that it actually undercuts public policy.
martyvis 4y ago
You eat food right? It doesn't grow in the supermarket? Maybe you take vacations outside of the city and you expect the people who provide the services you use there to have a life and access to the internet.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
chmod600 4y ago
Downvoted because (a) sarcasm isn't helpful; (b) generalized criticism of unnamed people rather than specific ideas.
- themitigating 4y ago
  I don't have to name specific people to make a general critical statement about a situation. However, if you'd like me to be more specific and not be sarcastic- I find right wing Republicans who decry government handouts and whatever they believe "socialism" is because some receive farm subsidies and others have utilities subsidized through rural improvement programs by the government. For those that aren't political but live in rural areas, please remove them from my list. If you want to reply that city people also take advantage of government programs remember they aren't going around angry all the time about government spending and welfare. It's the hypocrisy that brings out my sarcastic side.
  - bityard 4y ago
    Do you believe that all rural citizens are republicans?
    - themitigating 4y ago
      " For those that aren't political but live in rural areas, please remove them from my list."
TinkersW 4y ago
People do not live in rural areas "to save money".
bityard 4y ago
This feels quite a lot like asking why should healthy people subsidize the sick, poor, and old?
Broken_Hippo 4y ago
"I love how people want to live in rural areas to save money" They aren't saving money, though. Everything gets weird if you live in a rural area - or heck, a small town. Sometimes housing is cheaper, sure, and then you realize that while you don't have a water bill, you do now have to get your septic system pumped regularly, keep bottled water around because your well pump doesn't work when there is a power outage, and you have to drive everywhere. I imagine that Amazon has made it slightly cheaper because you can drive less. If you don't want to drive, good luck: You can't take your bike on the fastest route and the country roads are poorly maintained. And I'm really happy the government makes up for the utilities. You might live in the country, but if you don't have electricity and internet service, your time is going to be more isolated and miserable. Folks living in the countryside shouldn't have to be without because of crushing costs, especially when we consider that a portion these folks are producing food for the rest of us.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Based on voting patterns most people in rural areas don't like government spending and handouts
  - edmcnulty101 4y ago
    No they think taxes are too high and the federal government is bloated and filled with lobbyist backed policies and corruption. Important distinction.
  - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    You can't get that from voting patterns: Resistance to government spending and handouts depend on where you are putting the money. I haven't actually met a farmer that is opposed to farm subsidies, for example. And I think there is a hint of ignorance when it does benefit them: The local ISP finally giving a rural location higher-speed internet probably did so because they received government money or have brushed up against government regulations that require them to upgrade in the countryside as well as urban areas - yet the government spending goes unnoticed. I'll add that the US is a 2 party system in practice, so the reasons for voting conservative vary greatly and you can't really take voting a certain way as "against handouts" when it is easily other issues that prompts the vote.
beart 4y ago
Edit: I was reading two different articles and got them mixed up, so I apologize. I thought I was on this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32411493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32411493 The rest of this post will probably be very confusing. I understand the sentiment. However, real life is more complex than that. For example, this article in particular is talking about an area around Ann Arbor. I have a friend who lives in this area (in a rural house). He's a tech worker. His neighbor is a tech worker. His brother around the corner used to be a tech worker. I've been to the gun range near his house several times, and each time it is populated by a diverse (age, race, sex) group of people. On the flip side, there are folks (without children) at the local school board meeting trying to have certain books removed. A council in the area recently got into trouble for misallocating covid funds as personal bonuses. It's a constant battle, but painting everyone in a rural area with the same brush is a mistake.
testing7787 4y ago
topspin 4y ago
At one time people placed great value in universal access. That's how we ended up with a constitutionally mandated postal system and nearly universal electric and phone service. The people behind these efforts knew full well there was a cost imbalance, but they placed greater value on the ubiquity of important services, thinking this would yield a better nation. Now we have people like you, hating on anyone that doesn't want or can't afford to live as you think they should.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

matthewfcarlson 4y ago

Right? There was an article here earlier about running fiber in rural Michigan. Kudos to the dude doing it and I agree that internet access is important. But 30k per house seems like a very wonky investment. At 100$ a month that would be 25 years to pay back, which could be feasible depending on what we are doing for internet in 25 years. Still seems ridiculous. If you wanted to pay 30k per household to build super fast internet for everyone in Seattle or Austin, people would laugh you out of the room.

calgoo 4y ago
It’s all about where you pass the cables. If you need to dig up the street then 30k is not a lot of money to do the installation. If you can install the cables on already existing poles, then that reduces the cost a lot. It’s also cheaper to do a group of homes then it is to do 1 as the cost of bringing the workers, the machinery and the permits is spread across all clients. That’s why we hear a lot of cases where someone has a fiber cable passing close by but the cable company did not see enough profit to finish the last mile (or they asked at the time of building and not enough homes signed up at the time).
newjersey 4y ago
I don't get it. Why is fiber to the home so expensive? I think in principle, it makes sense for us to pay for rural broadband the same way we paid for rural electricity. The problem is some companies took the money but didn't deliver the results, no? > In 1936, the REA was made permanent through the Rural Electrification Act. It was granted an initial budget of $50 million for the first two years, then $40 million a year for the following decade ($550 million in 1936 is approximately $10.3 billion today). Jul 12, 2021 snippet answer from Google search https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+much+did+rural+electrification+cost https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+muc... I can't imagine how our government can justify subsidizing anything other than fiber to the home in the current year. As far as I know, there is very little ongoing maintenance cost and glass fiber is much cheaper than copper, no? Coax people are saying they can get symmetric gigabit up and down with docsis but I will believe it when I see it (low latency symmetric gigabit up and down, no data caps, reasonable pricing). Until then, we shouldn't give them any money.
- wmf 4y ago
  Any kind of utility is expensive; fiber is no worse than electricity, water, or gas. The difference is that all those utilities were installed before we shot ourselves in the foot with 10,000 pages of regulations written by incumbent monopoly lobbyists.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Which is why a lot of fiber roll-outs happen when electrical, water, or gas lines are already being replaced.
- bityard 4y ago
  > Why is fiber to the home so expensive? I guess it costs more than you think to hire someone to dig a hole, put something in it, and then cover it back up again. I paid a guy almost $2000 to fix a few feet of sewer line in my front yard. Very little work to do once the old line was dug up, the main costs were in pulling various permits, renting the equipment, hiring crew, etc. Now multiply that by a few miles and $30k starts to look like a bargain.
  - fundad 4y ago
    Soil is as heavy as almost any construction material and being underground, you're paying for potential energy. It's expensive in fuel and in the cost and maintenance of machinery designed to deliver the most energy. It's like paying for GPU compute time.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    If the main costs were permits, equipment rentals and crew, then your math is way off. By definition, those are mostly fixed costs so the first foot is phenomenally expensive. A crew can easily dig 1/2-1 mile per day, so maybe 4 days instead of the one to dig a few feet. If 1/2 the cost was equipment and crew and the other half permits, that puts us at a $5k total.
jcims 4y ago
What’s the increase in property value by now appealing to tech/knowledge workers? Would you personally move to a place that only offered shitty DSL? I almost pulled the trigger on a $30k quote from Centurylink to run fiber to my home but they proved incapable of backhauling anywhere near what i was looking for. I didn’t give a shit about its amortized cost.
bityard 4y ago
This might be an odd notion considering the average HN commenter but hear me out. It's _just_ possible the guy running that ISP isn't doing it to grow into a VC-backed unicorn with an exit strategy of getting scooped up by a FAANG in 5 years. He doesn't want to _lose_ money on it, but he's an engineer and has evaluated the risks and costs and found them acceptable. He's doing it because because the incumbent ISP won't, because it's a challenge, and because he wants to to serve his community. Or so I've been able to gather.
- stephen_greet 4y ago
  But running an ISP requires a metric ton of capital upfront. No matter the motivation, how do you get that capital?
  - bityard 4y ago
    I can't speak for the guy running this network so I don't know if he has investors or creditors or what, but I live in the same area as he does and can say that if you have a high-paying tech job well into the six figures and live in a LCOL area like this (AND don't blow it all on hedonic purchases like luxury pickups), it's not hard to amass a surprising surplus of cash in a surprisingly short amount of time.

jeffbee 4y ago

A federal fund to agglomerate dispersed people into small villages where the utilities can be provided at a reasonable price is a better use of tax funds than massive subsidies for existing settlement patterns. We already had another article on here today about how the feds are throwing ~$10k per household at some Michigan ISP to hook up people who live miles from anywhere.

emkoemko 4y ago

where do you live that rural costs less? electricity costs way more then in a city, heating if you get gas line way more if not you pay a lot for heating oil, i have to pay like 200$ for electricity even if i didn't use a watt...

djmips 4y ago

I feel like the land and building cost in my city dwarf the utility difference.

partiallypro 4y ago

Some people can't afford to live in cities...and their life is better in rural areas. Some people prefer to own rather than rent, even if it's a 100K house on a small plot passed down generations. You're essentially saying poor people don't deserve internet access. It's hilarious to me that people with your position proclaim to be progressive (not saying you are,) when there is an explicit hatred of the poor when you start talking to them. I imagine -that- is why people in rural areas feel a disconnect with people in cities.

themitigating 4y ago
Life is better when they have access to electricity, internet, roads, and other public services that are subsidized by the government. More importantly these are the people who are more likely to complain about government handouts and socialism.
- partiallypro 4y ago
  Except utilities and roads aren't socialism; and maybe treating these people as (essentially) garbage that doesn't deserve these things because they complain about government is actually a very polarizing thing that pushes them farther away...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
HWR_14 4y ago
The point being made is that they cannot afford to live in rural areas. Their subsidized lives are affordable. I don't hate poor people, but subsidizing people in urban areas is just a better way to help them - the money goes a lot further.
- partiallypro 4y ago
  People have lived in rural areas for cheaper than in cities for far far longer than government subsidies have existed. It sure just sounds like a very classist take that people that don't live in cities don't deserve what people in cities do. Which is sort of ironic because I see people with tons of money stepping over homeless in wealthy cities all the time. I don't think there are massive homeless problems in US cities because of a redneck getting a 4G tower installed 15 miles from his property. I have had the opportunity of growing up in a poorer rural area, and have lived in a major city. I find this mindset pretty grotesque and extremely polarizing, to the degree that it actually undercuts public policy.

martyvis 4y ago

You eat food right? It doesn't grow in the supermarket? Maybe you take vacations outside of the city and you expect the people who provide the services you use there to have a life and access to the internet.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

chmod600 4y ago

Downvoted because (a) sarcasm isn't helpful; (b) generalized criticism of unnamed people rather than specific ideas.

themitigating 4y ago
I don't have to name specific people to make a general critical statement about a situation. However, if you'd like me to be more specific and not be sarcastic- I find right wing Republicans who decry government handouts and whatever they believe "socialism" is because some receive farm subsidies and others have utilities subsidized through rural improvement programs by the government. For those that aren't political but live in rural areas, please remove them from my list. If you want to reply that city people also take advantage of government programs remember they aren't going around angry all the time about government spending and welfare. It's the hypocrisy that brings out my sarcastic side.
- bityard 4y ago
  Do you believe that all rural citizens are republicans?
  - themitigating 4y ago
    " For those that aren't political but live in rural areas, please remove them from my list."

TinkersW 4y ago

People do not live in rural areas "to save money".

bityard 4y ago

This feels quite a lot like asking why should healthy people subsidize the sick, poor, and old?

Broken_Hippo 4y ago

"I love how people want to live in rural areas to save money" They aren't saving money, though. Everything gets weird if you live in a rural area - or heck, a small town. Sometimes housing is cheaper, sure, and then you realize that while you don't have a water bill, you do now have to get your septic system pumped regularly, keep bottled water around because your well pump doesn't work when there is a power outage, and you have to drive everywhere. I imagine that Amazon has made it slightly cheaper because you can drive less. If you don't want to drive, good luck: You can't take your bike on the fastest route and the country roads are poorly maintained. And I'm really happy the government makes up for the utilities. You might live in the country, but if you don't have electricity and internet service, your time is going to be more isolated and miserable. Folks living in the countryside shouldn't have to be without because of crushing costs, especially when we consider that a portion these folks are producing food for the rest of us.

themitigating 4y ago
Based on voting patterns most people in rural areas don't like government spending and handouts
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  No they think taxes are too high and the federal government is bloated and filled with lobbyist backed policies and corruption. Important distinction.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  You can't get that from voting patterns: Resistance to government spending and handouts depend on where you are putting the money. I haven't actually met a farmer that is opposed to farm subsidies, for example. And I think there is a hint of ignorance when it does benefit them: The local ISP finally giving a rural location higher-speed internet probably did so because they received government money or have brushed up against government regulations that require them to upgrade in the countryside as well as urban areas - yet the government spending goes unnoticed. I'll add that the US is a 2 party system in practice, so the reasons for voting conservative vary greatly and you can't really take voting a certain way as "against handouts" when it is easily other issues that prompts the vote.

beart 4y ago

Edit: I was reading two different articles and got them mixed up, so I apologize. I thought I was on this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32411493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32411493 The rest of this post will probably be very confusing. I understand the sentiment. However, real life is more complex than that. For example, this article in particular is talking about an area around Ann Arbor. I have a friend who lives in this area (in a rural house). He's a tech worker. His neighbor is a tech worker. His brother around the corner used to be a tech worker. I've been to the gun range near his house several times, and each time it is populated by a diverse (age, race, sex) group of people. On the flip side, there are folks (without children) at the local school board meeting trying to have certain books removed. A council in the area recently got into trouble for misallocating covid funds as personal bonuses. It's a constant battle, but painting everyone in a rural area with the same brush is a mistake.

testing7787 4y ago

topspin 4y ago

At one time people placed great value in universal access. That's how we ended up with a constitutionally mandated postal system and nearly universal electric and phone service. The people behind these efforts knew full well there was a cost imbalance, but they placed greater value on the ubiquity of important services, thinking this would yield a better nation. Now we have people like you, hating on anyone that doesn't want or can't afford to live as you think they should.