6 ms·
ARPA is funding cheap community-owned gigabit fiber to neglected neighborhoods
- asow92 2y agoI live near where the article talks about and the ISP it mentions, Empire Access, is fantastic! I have $60/mo 1Gbps fiber with 1 to 3 ms latency.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoWe the taxpayers gave the telcos hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars to bring this to everyone, and they... just blew it off and kept the money: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
- hn_acker 2y agoNot sure what you meant by replying with the (otherwise relevant) article about violating subsidy conditions (usually done by serial abusers like AT&T) to a comment about Empire Access. I don't know what Empire Access usually does, but in the case mentioned in TFA, Empire Access will operate on municipal open-access fiber infrastructure, which the Oswego County (not Empire Access) will use subsidies to build.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoI'm pointing out that by now we should all be enjoying fiber to the home; it should not be remarkable.
- AngryData 2y agoThey did lay some fiber, the problem is it was the fiber to supply their cellphone networks and not to directly serve customers, which allows them to gouge customers through mobile data without running afoul of any of the restrictions put on the fiber network the government paid them for.
- troyvit 2y agoOh but don't worry about it! Remember how they all said 5G would replace wired internet completely? 'augmented reality, “the internet of things,” and seamless streaming to the mainstream': https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/5g-explained https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/5g-explained 'By packing or “densifying” the network, signals will be carried faster and more reliably, with bandwidth measured not in megabits but rather in gigabits per second.': https://hbr.org/2019/03/5gs-potential-and-why-businesses-should-start-preparing-for-it https://hbr.org/2019/03/5gs-potential-and-why-businesses-sho... 'Consumers expect 5G to offer a step change in network performance, relief from urban network congestion and more home broadband choices as near-term benefits.': https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/consumerlab/reports/5g-consumer-potential https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/consumerlab/r... (All these are articles published between January 2018 and October 2020)
- asow92 2y agoI'm not disagreeing with you, however, Empire Access is neither Verizon, AT&T, nor CenturyLink.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoClearly, because they're actually delivering.
- yostrovs 2y agoYou should be upset at the government that gave the money and that didn't do the due diligence to make sure it's used for proper cause. Secondly, it should be reconsidered that giving billions to profit making corporations so that they can make more money is a good idea.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoI am, as all taxpayers should be.
- hn_acker 2y agoThe full title is: > ARPA Is Quietly Funding Cheap ($50-$65 A Month) Community-Owned Gigabit Fiber Access To Long Neglected Neighborhoods
- madeofpalk 2y agoTitle made it sound like ARPA is comitting up to a whopping $65 to fibre, which doesn't sound like enough.
- not_your_vase 2y agoI get it, the US is big, but I just can't understand still why the government itself doesn't invest heavily in fiber connections. Most of Europe did this since the early 2000s, and here I am, writing this from my home connection which is symmetric 10Gbps (frankly, I can't really measure it, because it's faster than my 2.5Gbps Ethernet card, so I just believe it) for less than $50/month. And it doesn't matter which country I am, because this is common in most countries.
- bediger4000 2y agoMy answer to that: it's a combination of a belief and lobbying. The belief: the federal government can't do anything correctly, and wastes taxpayer money. The lobbying: Comcast, and regional telephone oligopolies lobby to keep all governments, local, state, national, from providing internet services. The motives here vary, but probably come down to keeping a local or regional monopoly. An unfortunate synergy, essentially.
- relax88 2y agoThe US has 1/3 the population density as Europe. I'm sure that helps to explain it somewhat.
- yetihehe 2y agoBut it has some biggest cities. Is such fast fiber available there?
- kjkjadksj 2y agoIf you live in the right neighborhood where they installed fiber lines for residential connection already. Most I get is coax internet fwiw although fiber is available in certain parts. I asked my telecom about fiber they said it would cost like a couple thousand running the line to me.
- bombcar 2y agoWhat I've noticed is that nobody is running new coax/copper anymore. It's all fiber for new developments, and any plant replacement is with fiber. Which makes sense, fiber has all sorts of advantages.
- moralestapia 2y agoThis is really good! In this time and age, fast and reliable access to the internet should be a given, particularly on developed countries.
- jpm_sd 2y agoThis is American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) not Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, DARPA, ARPA-[E|H|I], etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPA#Acronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPA#Acronym
- ThinkBeat 2y agoThanks
- DidYaWipe 2y agoThey seriously hijacked a well-known longstanding government acronym? Technically-ignorant legislators strike again.
- throwup238 2y agoAt this point I doubt any of our legislators are actually writing*, or even reading the title of, any of these bills. They spend the vast majority of their time fundraising, either for themselves or their party. * I assume the Office of Legislative Counsel actually does that, when it’s not brought to the legislator by a lobbyist
- DidYaWipe 2y agoYep. Can you imagine showing up at your job totally ignorant of what you're implementing... and that's A-OK? Just realized that I likened Congress to Severance.
- boilerupnc 2y agoNot far off. POTUS owns a few goats as a tax write off for Bedminster Golf Resort [0] [0]. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-golf-goats_n_5d546ebce4b08385506719f1 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-golf-goats_n_5d546ebce4...
- HumblyTossed 2y ago> Technically-ignorant legislators strike again. While fair point, look at how many non-technically-ignorant developers hijack common names for projects. It's a disease anyone can catch.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 2y agoIn the muni where I serve on our telecoms commission, we built (before I got there) a fiber network with the anticipation of potentially offering it to tenant ISPs. We wanted the network anyways for internal municipal needs. But the economics of building an ISP on top of that fiber in a place already served by AT&T and Comcast are not great: you target a certain amount of uptake to break even, and you're not going to get it.
- bombcar 2y agoThe trick, which is hard to do, is to get AT&T and Comcast to realize that they can serve the customers better and faster over your network. But that involves negotiation and there can be lots of finger-pointing, so companies don't like it.
- threemux 2y agoCool! So where is the funding going to come from for the hard stuff like long term upgrades and maintenance? Are the citizens of Oswego County going to accept a tax increase down the line, or will maintenance be deferred indefinitely until they need to be bailed out by the state?
- oneplane 2y agoIf you read the article, and then read the referenced report, you can see that long term planning is included, which also covers maintenance and upgrades. None of those are new issues or unsolved problems. It's not core to the issue of broadband access at all.
- threemux 2y ago[flagged]
- eightysixfour 2y ago> Oswego County will own the broadband network and make it available for lease to internet service providers, including Empire Access, on a non-discriminatory and non-exclusive basis. The revenue generated from these leases will support the network's ongoing maintenance and future expansion. This innovative public infrastructure model ensures sustainable, affordable access while promoting competition among service providers. From the first link in the article.
- asow92 2y agoSubscriber to Empire Access here. They've been expanding all over upstate NY. They have been a joy to work with. Far better than the only other previous option being Spectrum.
- noelwelsh 2y ago"Oswego County will own the broadband network and make it available for lease to internet service providers, including Empire Access, on a non-discriminatory and non-exclusive basis. The revenue generated from these leases will support the network's ongoing maintenance and future expansion." https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-26-million-connectall-investment-expand-affordable-broadband-access https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-2...
- xyst 2y agoI’ll never understand why municipal run internet is illegal in some (most?) states. Maybe national ISP lobbyist groups are just that powerful or have the right amount of propaganda to influence the people in their direction. One of the many benefits I see: - local, high paying jobs across the board (linemen, network engineers) - money kept locally within the economy rather than used to fund a C-level executives jet fuel costs - strong motivation to improve the network and make it resilient
- gruez 2y ago>- local, high paying jobs across the board (linemen, network engineers) As opposed to linemen telecommuting from the other side of the country? >- money kept locally within the economy rather than used to fund a C-level executives jet fuel costs True, although this could turn out to a wash. There's operational efficiencies that can be obtained by a national company (billing system, support, etc.) that city-scale ISPs can't achieve. >- strong motivation to improve the network and make it resilient The city has "strong motivation" to do a lot of things, but based on how universal complaints about city services are across the country (from potholes to clearing homeless encampments), I don't think it's a slam dunk argument you think it is.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoIt is due to isp lobbying for the most part.
- nobody9999 2y agocf. The American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC)[0] tactics[1] [0] https://alec.org/ https://alec.org/ [1] https://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/02/12385/how-alec-helps-big-telecom-change-state-laws-corporate-gain https://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/02/12385/how-alec-helps-bi...
- bombcar 2y agoWhen nobody cares strongly about something, the lobbyist groups have a much easier time.
- 2y ago
- thecleaner 2y agoHide it before Doge gets wind ?
- actionfromafar 2y agoExplain what you did last week or you're fired. Probably fired anyways, sounds like a communist iniative.
- xhkkffbf 2y agoWell, who expects a private company be able to compete with a ARPA-funded system that gets an extra $26m to pull fiber optics throughout the county? The wording here is just a tad biased. Two companies, Charter and Verizon, are said to be, "regional New York State monopolies". Yet they're competing against each other. The county government, on the other hand, is truly the only government there, yet when it owns all of the fiber it is somehow encouraging competition. I'm not saying that government ownership of a collective resource is bad. Maybe it's the best option, especially in rural environments, but the tone doesn't seem very fair. $26m is quite a nice chunk of change, even today.
- throwaway48476 2y agoIts not economically efficient for both charter and Verizon to lay fiber to the same buildings so some kind of government mediated solution is always going to be required. Without competition markets aren't free.
- ck2 2y agoEasily predictable anything federal government funded that is highlighted by the media as "quietly helping people" is about to be nuked. I get journalists want to write about stuff, but if they keep this up they will likely cover their own imprisonment or colleagues over the next year or two.
- cj 2y agoMeanwhile, in my neck of the woods in NY, we have Archtop Fiber who raised $350m from a private equity firm to build a fiber network and get everyone in our area to switch away from Comcast (only alternative). They're signing up entire neighborhoods for about $60/mo (and installing the necessary fiber infrastructure at the same time). I was excited to see the local investment in fiber, especially in such a rural area, but I'm a bit less excited now that I see it's funded by private equity.
- sammyteee 2y agoDo you mean in a sense that you'd like to see such service provided as a necessity service and owned publically? I'm not sure I understand the private equity part.
- soperj 2y agoPrivate equity isn't in it to help people.
- cj 2y agoPrivate Equity is well known for exploiting markets for profits without regard for much else. They will do things like enter a niche market, buy up all mom & pop shops (or in the case of ISP, even replace an existing monopoly), then once they own the entire niche, commercialize the niche and extract as much money out of the niche as humanly possible (usually at the expense of customer experience, quality of product, etc)
- foobarchu 2y agoPrivate equity is almost by definition profit driven. There's a high likelihood that they're using the low introductory cost to build out a network before jacking prices up and up in a bid to become the new monopoly.
- daveguy 2y agoNot to be glib, but private equity loves to enshittify for profit. It's really bad in combination with necessary services. See also: dental, medical, veterinary
- deadbabe 2y agoI wish there was a news site that was dedicated only to reporting these sort of “quiet moves”, as they seem far more interesting.
- DeepSpaceRadio 2y agoI am in a county that has been laying lots of fiber with ARPA support. Prior to this, I could either use Starlink or a PTP antenna on my roof for internet. Now I get gigabit FTTH for $100 a month. It's cheaper AND faster than my other two options.
- black_puppydog 2y agoEUR40/month for a 8Gbit/s FTTH here in france. Private company by the way. Just saying, while I do have preferences about who builds infrastructure and how to regulate markets on that infrastructure, I recognize that the presence of a market as such isn't the problem.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- troyvit 2y agoWait everybody on HN says Europe is a technological backwater. How can this be?
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoWhy not just subsidize consumers in these Areas using Starlink? I feel like money invested in physical links in the past has basically disappeared without much change to neglected areas.
- whalesalad 2y agoThe article touches on this. Starlink is not the answer. It's a short term solution.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoIt doesn’t say much, and to me it reads like an emotional anti-Musk take: > ignoring the LEO satellite platform’s capacity constraints, high prices, erratic leadership, and problematic environmental impact I think capacity constraints are nonexistent for most uses, and capacity is increasing all the time. Clearly LEO has enough capacity because there are many other large constellations also launching. The price is not very different than Comcast or whoever, but with much easier installation, better speeds in most areas, and better customer service. The “erratic” leadership has no effect on the problem we’re discussing, and in fact, Musk has done amazing work with SpaceX and Starlink. On the other hand we’ve already spent tens or hundreds of billions on traditional broadband to neglected areas and got very little for it. We would have been better off giving all those people the money directly so they can pay for satellite Internet.
- michaelt 2y agohttps://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/starlinks-current-problem-capacity https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/starlinks-current-pro... Capacity issues are a common problem for wireless internet users, because the bandwidth provided by a base station / cell / satellite is divided among its users. Corporations have trouble resisting the temptation to over-sell their capacity, as adding subscribers on the same equipment is pure profit.
- whalesalad 2y ago
- Arubis 2y agoIf they want to keep going down this route, they'll keep it quiet. Now is a rough time to be doing work with the US Feds that benefits the proletariat..._especially_ if it could compete with something Elon is involved in.
- Over3Chars 2y ago[flagged]
- Vivtek 2y agoI think they might be rolling out here in rural Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, which to be absolutely honest I would not have expected in a million years. Certainly a guy came by this week measuring for, he said, laying fiber optic cable. Just to put this into perspective, our barrio is the least populous in Adjuntas, which is the least populous municipio on the island. For my own perception, as a displaced rural Hoosier, it's still really densely populated, which means it's probably a reasonable cable investment, all else equal, but still. Astonishing to see it.
- AnAnonymousDude 2y agoClaro has had the goal of rolling out fiber island-wide for quite some time. We (In the rural foothills of Mayagüez) were the some of the first customers to receive this expansion several years ago. Are you sure it wasn't Claro?
- 2jhrf09834 2y agowhen you have the gigabit, it is easier to notice that unwanted data is being sent
- AngryData 2y agoMy poor ass area finally got internet service through a fiber co-op that is doing great now. Before this the people around here couldn't even get DSL because telecomms didn't want to spend the money upgrading any of the 60+ year old phone lines or laying down any fiber that wasn't for their cell phone towers that they can gouge people on.