5 ms·

Yes, the US is huge, but if an area can get power, we should be able to rollout fibre along the same routes. It just takes a bit of work.

pengaru 4y ago
Starlink is delivering internet to otherwise off-grid homes... Solar+battery tech has made power lines not only unnecessary, but in some states arguably not worth the fire risk anymore.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Solar+battery tech has made power lines not only unnecessary, but in some states arguably not worth the fire risk anymore. Power lines aren't an inherent fire risk. Unmaintained power lines, however, are. Primarily, you need to maintain clearance from bushes and trees.
  - msh 4y ago
    Or bury the cables.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Burying high voltage transmission cables is extremely expensive [1] and usually only done when there is no other choice (such as being in an urban environment, near airports and the likes) as the loss due to capacitance is far greater than on poles. The exception to the "usually only" is, once again, our beloved "german redneck" government in Bavaria who insisted that the new North-South line Südlink got buried on Bavarian soil to quash local NIMBY resistance [2] - at the price of taking ages longer to build and costing ~8x the amount of pole-run lines. [1] see page 64, https://www.amprion.net/Dokumente/Dialog/Downloads/Studien/Erfahrungsbericht-Erdkabel_Oktober-2020.pdf https://www.amprion.net/Dokumente/Dialog/Downloads/Studien/E... [2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/energiewende-warum-erdkabel-und-wer-bezahlt-die-stromtrassen-ueberhaupt-1.3181453 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/energiewende-warum-erdkab...
      - msh 4y ago
        I think the comment I replied to was referring to normal powerlines for households. Individual solar+batteries is not going to replace high voltage lines.
  - pengaru 4y ago
    "This shirt is dry-clean only, which means it's dirty" - Mitch Hedberg
ejb999 4y ago
should read 'a lot of work' and 'a lot of money'. In my own little town, when we (residents) voted to pay for a municipal internet, the residents had to pay to replace close to 50% of the utility owned poles in order to gain access to those poles to run fiber. and due to the way the laws are written, we had to pay to have an engineer prescribe what work needed to be done to each pole - up to and including replacing it - then submit plans to the utilities, and then pay the utilities to pay 'their' engineer to do the same study - and then when it was agreed that a pole needed to be replaced, we had to pay the full cost of replacing it, and then when the work was done, the utility still owned the pole and rented it back to us for a yearly fee - repeat several hundred times. Several million dollars for about 500 households.
- chatmasta 4y ago
  Generally speaking, what is the cost differential between hanging wires and digging wires? I would imagine that in rural areas, underground wires require less maintainence since you don't need to monitor them for fallen trees, brush overgrowth, etc. But at the same time I would guess the installation costs are higher? Maybe? Surely avoiding utility poles saves money.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > Generally speaking, what is the cost differential between hanging wires and digging wires? Orders of magnitude. I actually once worked in construction, specifically in trench digging for German Telekom. Putting up poles is easy, drill a hole in the ground for the pole, put the pole in, string a fiber on it, done. Even cheaper if you already have poles, all you need there is a truck with a lift. Downside is, unless you own the poles, you have to rent them from the local utility and some of these charge extortion rates for third parties. And there are always drunkards or people with shoddy cars taking down entire series of poles, not to mention adverse weather events and vandals taking pot shots. Phone and electricity lines are easy to fix, you can probably train apes to do that, but splicing fiber still involves specialists. Trench digging is a whole different beast: you need to pull permits, dig the trench, hope you don't hit something else that's buried, deal with bad soil (sometimes straight out rock) or shit like WW2 bombs, lay down your cable, bury the cable in a first layer of fine sand, place a warning band, bury and fill up that with the coarse soil you removed, restore asphalt/plaster where needed... it takes weeks and multiple dedicated crews - usually you have one crew that deals with cutting up and removing asphalt, one that deals with placing and removing anti-traffic barriers, one with doing the actual dig and backfill, one that runs the cable, and one that restores surface. There is a third way however, it's virtually "underground poles" - earth displacement hammers. These "rockets" can shoot up to 70m through the soil in one go. Nice shit but needs the right soil to operate and it will cut through anything already buried, including solid water and wastewater mains.
yencabulator 4y ago
The problem with that is that the power lines were laid down some 30+ years ago, and a new digging project is not cost-efficient. Laying fiber with other utilities should happen in every new development, but that only helps new developments.

pengaru 4y ago

Starlink is delivering internet to otherwise off-grid homes... Solar+battery tech has made power lines not only unnecessary, but in some states arguably not worth the fire risk anymore.

mschuster91 4y ago
> Solar+battery tech has made power lines not only unnecessary, but in some states arguably not worth the fire risk anymore. Power lines aren't an inherent fire risk. Unmaintained power lines, however, are. Primarily, you need to maintain clearance from bushes and trees.
- msh 4y ago
  Or bury the cables.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Burying high voltage transmission cables is extremely expensive [1] and usually only done when there is no other choice (such as being in an urban environment, near airports and the likes) as the loss due to capacitance is far greater than on poles. The exception to the "usually only" is, once again, our beloved "german redneck" government in Bavaria who insisted that the new North-South line Südlink got buried on Bavarian soil to quash local NIMBY resistance [2] - at the price of taking ages longer to build and costing ~8x the amount of pole-run lines. [1] see page 64, https://www.amprion.net/Dokumente/Dialog/Downloads/Studien/Erfahrungsbericht-Erdkabel_Oktober-2020.pdf https://www.amprion.net/Dokumente/Dialog/Downloads/Studien/E... [2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/energiewende-warum-erdkabel-und-wer-bezahlt-die-stromtrassen-ueberhaupt-1.3181453 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/energiewende-warum-erdkab...
    - msh 4y ago
      I think the comment I replied to was referring to normal powerlines for households. Individual solar+batteries is not going to replace high voltage lines.
- pengaru 4y ago
  "This shirt is dry-clean only, which means it's dirty" - Mitch Hedberg

ejb999 4y ago

should read 'a lot of work' and 'a lot of money'. In my own little town, when we (residents) voted to pay for a municipal internet, the residents had to pay to replace close to 50% of the utility owned poles in order to gain access to those poles to run fiber. and due to the way the laws are written, we had to pay to have an engineer prescribe what work needed to be done to each pole - up to and including replacing it - then submit plans to the utilities, and then pay the utilities to pay 'their' engineer to do the same study - and then when it was agreed that a pole needed to be replaced, we had to pay the full cost of replacing it, and then when the work was done, the utility still owned the pole and rented it back to us for a yearly fee - repeat several hundred times. Several million dollars for about 500 households.

chatmasta 4y ago
Generally speaking, what is the cost differential between hanging wires and digging wires? I would imagine that in rural areas, underground wires require less maintainence since you don't need to monitor them for fallen trees, brush overgrowth, etc. But at the same time I would guess the installation costs are higher? Maybe? Surely avoiding utility poles saves money.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Generally speaking, what is the cost differential between hanging wires and digging wires? Orders of magnitude. I actually once worked in construction, specifically in trench digging for German Telekom. Putting up poles is easy, drill a hole in the ground for the pole, put the pole in, string a fiber on it, done. Even cheaper if you already have poles, all you need there is a truck with a lift. Downside is, unless you own the poles, you have to rent them from the local utility and some of these charge extortion rates for third parties. And there are always drunkards or people with shoddy cars taking down entire series of poles, not to mention adverse weather events and vandals taking pot shots. Phone and electricity lines are easy to fix, you can probably train apes to do that, but splicing fiber still involves specialists. Trench digging is a whole different beast: you need to pull permits, dig the trench, hope you don't hit something else that's buried, deal with bad soil (sometimes straight out rock) or shit like WW2 bombs, lay down your cable, bury the cable in a first layer of fine sand, place a warning band, bury and fill up that with the coarse soil you removed, restore asphalt/plaster where needed... it takes weeks and multiple dedicated crews - usually you have one crew that deals with cutting up and removing asphalt, one that deals with placing and removing anti-traffic barriers, one with doing the actual dig and backfill, one that runs the cable, and one that restores surface. There is a third way however, it's virtually "underground poles" - earth displacement hammers. These "rockets" can shoot up to 70m through the soil in one go. Nice shit but needs the right soil to operate and it will cut through anything already buried, including solid water and wastewater mains.

yencabulator 4y ago

The problem with that is that the power lines were laid down some 30+ years ago, and a new digging project is not cost-efficient. Laying fiber with other utilities should happen in every new development, but that only helps new developments.