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I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money, and also that accepting th

by hedora 3y ago

I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money, and also that accepting the grant automatically granted you the appropriate right of way via imminent domain. It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places (they have little portable boring machines, so you don’t even have to trench), and independent ISPs have no problem profitably laying fiber where they are legally allowed to do so.

voakbasda 3y ago
So, my tiny rural co-op ISP should barred from getting one of these, because they cannot afford to lay dozens of miles of fiber in order to serve a hundred households? You want to keep us country folk in the dark ages? Because that’s what it sounds like. Laying fiber requires a small crew, and they don’t work for free. My driveway alone is over a 1/4 mile (400m), and it will take them a day to lay and terminate my branch due to all of the buried obstructions (based on how long it took them to lay new copper lines a decade ago). I would be all for disqualifying the regional cable/telco monopolists, but who do you think lobbied their Congress critters to get these funds allocated in the first place? Ain’t never gunna happen….
- dboreham 3y ago
  Indeed. Fiber as a last mile solution for true rural areas is a non-starter. Source: I also built a small WISP and still maintain my own microwave service, and use Starlink as a backup.
  - newaccount74 3y ago
    Why? We managed to get power lines and phone lines to pretty much every house even in rural areas. Why should laying fiber be a "non-starter"?
    - voakbasda 3y ago
      Exactly. We decided internet is as important as any other infrastructure service. It is only infeasible when people decide that rural citizens do not deserve it. Indeed, it is hard for me not to read this thread in that light; I’m guessing those that seem to oppose subsidizing rural fiber either already have theirs or have simply given up all hope of it ever happening.
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      Fiber can even run aerial on those same power lines. It doesn't have to be buried, which could help some of the more remote areas that already have power.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Thats not what they said. <I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money If your ISP already took millions and didn't do what they said they would last time, that should disqualify them for another grant. >because they cannot afford to lay dozens of miles of fiber in order to serve a hundred households? You want to keep us country folk in the dark ages? Because that’s what it sounds like. Sounds like starlink may make more sense for your home and community than fiber. There is obviously a density threshold where laying fiber is not cost effective.
  - voakbasda 3y ago
    They never qualified it as taking millions and not building out; the only qualifier included was not building out for a decade, which includes my ISP. My ISP has applied for these funds to bring fiber to my property. The original statement asserts they should not be allowed to receive funding. You seem to feel the same way, unless you genuinely believe that Starlink is in any way comparable to fiber. To be clear, it is not even close, and it never will be. Rural citizens do not deserve to be left behind with speeds that are an order of magnitude slower than what everyone else has. We subsidize other utilities to reach everyone, and we have decided internet is critical to our society. It is time for everyone to pony up to fund access for everyone.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      I can see that reading. I took it the other way given the larger context of concern about paying providers like starlink for service that will never be delivered. I dont think starlink is the same as fiber, but I also dont think fiber is a human right or even relevant for most people given a reasonable alternative.
- esoterica 3y ago
  If you choose to live away from civilization then you’ve chosen to forgo the benefits of civilization. It’s ridiculous that we massively subsidize people who made the voluntary decision to live in a way that makes providing infrastructure for them cost prohibitive. It’s a free country and you can live in a cave on top of a mountain if you want, but you shouldn’t get to demand that the government spend millions of dollars to run fiber up the mountain to your cave.
  - networkchad 3y ago
    [dead]
  - voakbasda 3y ago
    That is exactly what we do for power and phone, which are no more difficult to bring in than fiber. If you live in the city, you have made the choice to subsidize rural citizens. We spend millions of dollars on shiny buildings, parks, and other infrastructure in the city. Is it ridiculous that rural taxpayers massively subsidize those things just because you have made the decision to live there? It’s a free country and you can live in the city if you want, but you shouldn’t demand the government provide more services for you than it does for its rural citizens. Or do you think people should be given fundamentally and grossly differently opportunities, based solely on where they happen to live? Remember, before you annswer: not everyone gets a choice where they were born or live.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  I live in a small EU country, and we had the same issues here.... we solved them by municipalities building fiber (usually when (re)building the roads, because it's cheaper then) and ISPs just renting it out. There's actually EU fuding for that and ISPs aren't forced to invest where they don't want to (but have to pay rent to the municipality).
  - turquoisevar 3y ago
    Don’t bother. I used to live in a small EU country as well. Even in the tiny rural village I lived in the last couple of years before I moved to the US, they did pretty much what you’re talking about (with the details being slightly different). Still, in true US fashion, this problem is deemed “uniquely American” and thus can’t benefit from the plethora of wheels invented overseas to solve this issue. In my case, the fiber was paid for 50% by the municipality and 50% by a group of ISPs accessible for any ISP that would like to offer services, only realized if at least x amount of households would sign a promise they’d sign up for a contract with one of the ISPs for at least a year once infrastructure was completed. This was easily accomplished because the ISPs offered a €30/month 1Gbps symmetrical connection in an area with shitty sub-10Mbps DSL that was at least twice that price and expensive asymmetrical DOCSIS at more than triple that price. Here in the US, I’m in a rural area where the “best option” is 1Gbp down/20Mbp up at 4x that price. Also, don’t underestimate how much people in the US hate taxes and governments spending money on useful things. My area has a volunteer firefighter department that cannot handle the entire area and has been trying to expand its tiny little footprint for the last decade. Aside from the lack of equipment, the firefighters can’t even park at their fire station and instead have to park at a paid parking spot. Just last month, there was a ballot initiative to raise the property taxes by $0.02, averaging to an annual property tax increase of a few dollars, so that they could fund the much-needed expansion of the fire station. Of course, it failed. If the county were willing to fund fiber for the community here, there would be riots. Still, at the same time, everyone is always bitching about the internet and the lack of any cellular signal from any of the carriers.
iav 3y ago
Hmm, I would like to see a citation on that second comment. You can look at Frontier's last earnings release, they spent $168M of build Capex to pass 332k homes, or $506/home passed in the last quarter. Note that "passing" a home is not the same as connecting a home, there is additional cost involved there. And Frontier has tremendous cost benefit from the fact that they already own the telephone poles that they can reuse and have been doing this for decades at massive scale. If you think the entire cost of laying fiber is just the cost of boring/digging, then you don't know what you are talking about.
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  The thing is they keep saying it IS the digging that is hampering them (we know that to be false). The one I saw a few weeks ago they ran about 1000ft of cable in under an hour. Most of that was getting the machine off/on the trailer and reterminating the lines.
- iAMkenough 3y ago
  I'd like to see a citation on the "imminent" domain comment as well. It seems far-fetched to me that the Federal government would take away local control from counties and municipal governments to issue permits and inspect their right-of-ways, just because a utility company was awarded a grant.
arolihas 3y ago
eminent domain
- inemesitaffia 3y ago
  Of what exactly? You want the Feds to pay 100's of billions for SpaceX? Instead of Fiber?
  - arolihas 3y ago
    I don't want that. I don't think a lot of what OP made sense, but I was just correcting their typo since it's an understandable mistake and can be easily fixed.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places I'm sorry what? This part of your comment is so absurd that it calls into question anything else you might be saying here. I lived through a fiber roll out only a short year or so ago, it was an entire summer of trucks, mostly contractors by the look of them, with trailers, with boring machines, stacks of boxes, and of course, spools upon spools of fiber and conduit. If that cost "essentially nothing" do you really assert that all of those workmen, all of those resources, all of those assets were simply brought forth from the void to perform their work and then sent back? And that's just the actual work, I'm sure there was months if not years of permitting, working with the city engineers to plan things out, the logistics behind all of that shit, for actual months of work that was barely completed before snow hit the ground. Holy fuck people. Infrastructure is HARD. It's one of the hardest things you CAN BUILD.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  When you're rebuilding a road (so the old asphalt is dug out and new one put in place), laying an additional small pipe and running fiber through is actually very cheap. Here in my small country in europe the municipalites lay fiber along the road repair works and then rent it out to ISPs in rural areas. In some areas als private ISPs can apply to put their own fiber if they want.
rpmisms 3y ago
I love how the cost of directional drilling is completely discounted here. It's an expensive process that requires a ton of skilled (often union) labor.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ejb999 3y ago
>>It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places How to tell us you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber, without actually saying you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber

by hedora 3y ago

voakbasda 3y ago

So, my tiny rural co-op ISP should barred from getting one of these, because they cannot afford to lay dozens of miles of fiber in order to serve a hundred households? You want to keep us country folk in the dark ages? Because that’s what it sounds like. Laying fiber requires a small crew, and they don’t work for free. My driveway alone is over a 1/4 mile (400m), and it will take them a day to lay and terminate my branch due to all of the buried obstructions (based on how long it took them to lay new copper lines a decade ago). I would be all for disqualifying the regional cable/telco monopolists, but who do you think lobbied their Congress critters to get these funds allocated in the first place? Ain’t never gunna happen….

dboreham 3y ago
Indeed. Fiber as a last mile solution for true rural areas is a non-starter. Source: I also built a small WISP and still maintain my own microwave service, and use Starlink as a backup.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  Why? We managed to get power lines and phone lines to pretty much every house even in rural areas. Why should laying fiber be a "non-starter"?
  - voakbasda 3y ago
    Exactly. We decided internet is as important as any other infrastructure service. It is only infeasible when people decide that rural citizens do not deserve it. Indeed, it is hard for me not to read this thread in that light; I’m guessing those that seem to oppose subsidizing rural fiber either already have theirs or have simply given up all hope of it ever happening.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    Fiber can even run aerial on those same power lines. It doesn't have to be buried, which could help some of the more remote areas that already have power.
s1artibartfast 3y ago
Thats not what they said. <I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money If your ISP already took millions and didn't do what they said they would last time, that should disqualify them for another grant. >because they cannot afford to lay dozens of miles of fiber in order to serve a hundred households? You want to keep us country folk in the dark ages? Because that’s what it sounds like. Sounds like starlink may make more sense for your home and community than fiber. There is obviously a density threshold where laying fiber is not cost effective.
- voakbasda 3y ago
  They never qualified it as taking millions and not building out; the only qualifier included was not building out for a decade, which includes my ISP. My ISP has applied for these funds to bring fiber to my property. The original statement asserts they should not be allowed to receive funding. You seem to feel the same way, unless you genuinely believe that Starlink is in any way comparable to fiber. To be clear, it is not even close, and it never will be. Rural citizens do not deserve to be left behind with speeds that are an order of magnitude slower than what everyone else has. We subsidize other utilities to reach everyone, and we have decided internet is critical to our society. It is time for everyone to pony up to fund access for everyone.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    I can see that reading. I took it the other way given the larger context of concern about paying providers like starlink for service that will never be delivered. I dont think starlink is the same as fiber, but I also dont think fiber is a human right or even relevant for most people given a reasonable alternative.
esoterica 3y ago
If you choose to live away from civilization then you’ve chosen to forgo the benefits of civilization. It’s ridiculous that we massively subsidize people who made the voluntary decision to live in a way that makes providing infrastructure for them cost prohibitive. It’s a free country and you can live in a cave on top of a mountain if you want, but you shouldn’t get to demand that the government spend millions of dollars to run fiber up the mountain to your cave.
- networkchad 3y ago
  [dead]
- voakbasda 3y ago
  That is exactly what we do for power and phone, which are no more difficult to bring in than fiber. If you live in the city, you have made the choice to subsidize rural citizens. We spend millions of dollars on shiny buildings, parks, and other infrastructure in the city. Is it ridiculous that rural taxpayers massively subsidize those things just because you have made the decision to live there? It’s a free country and you can live in the city if you want, but you shouldn’t demand the government provide more services for you than it does for its rural citizens. Or do you think people should be given fundamentally and grossly differently opportunities, based solely on where they happen to live? Remember, before you annswer: not everyone gets a choice where they were born or live.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
I live in a small EU country, and we had the same issues here.... we solved them by municipalities building fiber (usually when (re)building the roads, because it's cheaper then) and ISPs just renting it out. There's actually EU fuding for that and ISPs aren't forced to invest where they don't want to (but have to pay rent to the municipality).
- turquoisevar 3y ago
  Don’t bother. I used to live in a small EU country as well. Even in the tiny rural village I lived in the last couple of years before I moved to the US, they did pretty much what you’re talking about (with the details being slightly different). Still, in true US fashion, this problem is deemed “uniquely American” and thus can’t benefit from the plethora of wheels invented overseas to solve this issue. In my case, the fiber was paid for 50% by the municipality and 50% by a group of ISPs accessible for any ISP that would like to offer services, only realized if at least x amount of households would sign a promise they’d sign up for a contract with one of the ISPs for at least a year once infrastructure was completed. This was easily accomplished because the ISPs offered a €30/month 1Gbps symmetrical connection in an area with shitty sub-10Mbps DSL that was at least twice that price and expensive asymmetrical DOCSIS at more than triple that price. Here in the US, I’m in a rural area where the “best option” is 1Gbp down/20Mbp up at 4x that price. Also, don’t underestimate how much people in the US hate taxes and governments spending money on useful things. My area has a volunteer firefighter department that cannot handle the entire area and has been trying to expand its tiny little footprint for the last decade. Aside from the lack of equipment, the firefighters can’t even park at their fire station and instead have to park at a paid parking spot. Just last month, there was a ballot initiative to raise the property taxes by $0.02, averaging to an annual property tax increase of a few dollars, so that they could fund the much-needed expansion of the fire station. Of course, it failed. If the county were willing to fund fiber for the community here, there would be riots. Still, at the same time, everyone is always bitching about the internet and the lack of any cellular signal from any of the carriers.

iav 3y ago

Hmm, I would like to see a citation on that second comment. You can look at Frontier's last earnings release, they spent $168M of build Capex to pass 332k homes, or $506/home passed in the last quarter. Note that "passing" a home is not the same as connecting a home, there is additional cost involved there. And Frontier has tremendous cost benefit from the fact that they already own the telephone poles that they can reuse and have been doing this for decades at massive scale. If you think the entire cost of laying fiber is just the cost of boring/digging, then you don't know what you are talking about.

sumtechguy 3y ago
The thing is they keep saying it IS the digging that is hampering them (we know that to be false). The one I saw a few weeks ago they ran about 1000ft of cable in under an hour. Most of that was getting the machine off/on the trailer and reterminating the lines.
iAMkenough 3y ago
I'd like to see a citation on the "imminent" domain comment as well. It seems far-fetched to me that the Federal government would take away local control from counties and municipal governments to issue permits and inspect their right-of-ways, just because a utility company was awarded a grant.

arolihas 3y ago

eminent domain

inemesitaffia 3y ago
Of what exactly? You want the Feds to pay 100's of billions for SpaceX? Instead of Fiber?
- arolihas 3y ago
  I don't want that. I don't think a lot of what OP made sense, but I was just correcting their typo since it's an understandable mistake and can be easily fixed.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

> It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places I'm sorry what? This part of your comment is so absurd that it calls into question anything else you might be saying here. I lived through a fiber roll out only a short year or so ago, it was an entire summer of trucks, mostly contractors by the look of them, with trailers, with boring machines, stacks of boxes, and of course, spools upon spools of fiber and conduit. If that cost "essentially nothing" do you really assert that all of those workmen, all of those resources, all of those assets were simply brought forth from the void to perform their work and then sent back? And that's just the actual work, I'm sure there was months if not years of permitting, working with the city engineers to plan things out, the logistics behind all of that shit, for actual months of work that was barely completed before snow hit the ground. Holy fuck people. Infrastructure is HARD. It's one of the hardest things you CAN BUILD.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
When you're rebuilding a road (so the old asphalt is dug out and new one put in place), laying an additional small pipe and running fiber through is actually very cheap. Here in my small country in europe the municipalites lay fiber along the road repair works and then rent it out to ISPs in rural areas. In some areas als private ISPs can apply to put their own fiber if they want.

rpmisms 3y ago

I love how the cost of directional drilling is completely discounted here. It's an expensive process that requires a ton of skilled (often union) labor.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ejb999 3y ago

>>It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places How to tell us you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber, without actually saying you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber