9 ms·

I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instea

by devin 7mo ago

I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites. Yes, this post is about internet access while traveling 500mph, which is a different problem, but it is so messed up that people fall over themselves about Starlink for rural connectivity when it is an incredibly complex and expensive technology with huge ongoing costs that could have been solved once and for all by simply running some wires.

iknowstuff 7mo ago
People in the United States can choose to live in very rural and sparsely populated areas, far more remote than most OECD countries. It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries. We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities. As a country we need to make a decision about which choices we want to encourage and discourage.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- scubbo 7mo ago
  People can't afford to live in cities? Well, they should simply choose to live elsewhere. People choose to live outside cities, but want access to basic utilities of modern life? Well, fuck 'em.
  - aaaaaaabbbbbb 7mo ago
    Ah yes, one step outside of New York City, and I'm immediately in the boondocks.
  - kbar13 7mo ago
    that’s a bit pendantic, there exists such a thing as suburbs. even some rural communities are perfectly reasonable in terms of municipal infrastructure. but we are specifically talking about houses that are miles and miles from the next house that is then miles and miles away etc
    - TulliusCicero 7mo ago
      Even in "rural regions", there are typically some small towns where infrastructure could be provided to them decently efficiently. It's when every single house is a good distance away from their neighbors that things like running fiber cabling become grossly inefficient.
  - TulliusCicero 7mo ago
    Small towns exist, and ones far away from major metro areas are usually quite affordable. Small towns are or can be made to be efficient in terms of basic infrastructure/services, whereas truly rural areas where everyone is very spread out, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that.
    - samus 7mo ago
      Small town are usually quite affordable because they offer fewer high-paying jobs. Remote work is by far not yet common enough.
  - vineyardmike 7mo ago
    Many of the aspects of life "outside the city" are subsidized by the city. It's affordable because of this, and the cities are extra unaffordable as a result. There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers. Even health care is subsidized. If rural people actually had to pay market-rate for these resources, it wouldn't be cheaper than the city.
    - gib444 7mo ago
      So if 10 million people from rural towns moved to their nearest cities, the cities would become cheaper? What would drop in price exactly?
      - iknowstuff 7mo ago
        Yes, if you compare the efficiency of China’s economy to America, you’ll find that their giant cities save them a ton of money on everything overall. As long as you’re willing to build a lot of dense housing very quickly.
        ghaff 7mo ago
        And not give people much of a choice. Chairman Mao would like a word.
      - vineyardmike 7mo ago
        Well, we'd stop having to spend so much taxes on redistributive efforts, again, like subsidized internet. It's up to voters and politicians to actually change the tax rate to save the money. It'd reduce government debt at least. Electricity would be cheaper. Here in California, a significant amount of the (very high) electricity costs are used to maintain rural power lines. If rural people moved away, we'd be able to decommission them and no longer maintain the lines. It wouldn't happen immediately, but as more people become urbanites, we'd be able to move gas subsidies and government road maintenance spending to the urban environment, where we'd spend on more drivers-per-mile roads, OR shift to public transit funding, or simply reduce that government spending. Over time, we'd be less reliant on cars, which reduces everyones costs, but will mean we aren't so desperate to protect oil interests, so we'd be able to stop paying for wars in the middle-east. Honestly this alone has so many positive side-affects it'd be hard to actually enumerate.
- TulliusCicero 7mo ago
  Some people will be really mad about this comment, but it's absolutely correct. Broadly speaking, very rural living is generally a lifestyle choice. Yes, not everyone can afford to live in big cities, but there are typically small towns in the general vicinity of rural areas that are quite affordable. Of course, there are exceptions where you truly need the space, like if you're a farmer, but that's not most people in rural areas. Edit: to be clear, I don't think it's fundamentally wrong or anything for people to choose the rural lifestyle, I just don't think we should be heavily subsidizing it.
  - devin 7mo ago
    Buddy, many of the people who are being served by Starlink are by no means "very" rural at all. If you get into "lives in a shack in the mountains", then sure I agree, but a HUGE number of people are barely outside of an immediate service area and have no access for one dumb reason or another. This is a demonstration of the failure of our country to do simple, pragmatic things that would benefit our citizens' lives. The "fix" was for some private company to launch things into orbit. It's an expensive fix to a simple problem.
    - TulliusCicero 7mo ago
      Generally speaking, private companies want to make money by getting customers. Obviously there can be edge cases, but if there's profit to be made by hooking people up, they'll want to do it, and if private companies don't want to get more customers, you have to ask yourself some hard questions about why. I think we both know what's usually happening: people in an area who, as a whole, are rural enough and poor enough that the economics don't really pen out well. And I'm sure said corporations would be happy for the local government to pay the cost of running those lines out -- if that's not happening, ask yourself why those local governments don't want to pay for it either. Now if you want to say, "well I don't care if it scales badly, the federal government should just subsidize it until it works", that's your prerogative. But another option would be to encourage zoning and similar rules that impact how people live to change towards better scaling of infrastructure and services, so that spending on these kinds of things is more sustainable and fair.
- strbean 7mo ago
  I think this is very short-sighted, on the order of "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?" The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.
  - TulliusCicero 7mo ago
    > "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?" Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either. > The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself. Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 7mo ago
      [flagged]
      - TulliusCicero 7mo ago
        I'm a social democrat, I'm fine with subsidies in general, I just want them to be applied intelligently. Spending a lot of money to subsidize someone's lifestyle that's intentionally inefficient isn't smart. I'm all for helping the poor, but we should do it in a way that gets us a lot of bang for the buck.
        jasonwatkinspdx 7mo ago
        Having grown up in rural Kansas and now being an urban tech worker, I think you have a derogatory and ignorant view on people who live rurally.
        TulliusCicero 7mo ago
- hdgvhicv 7mo ago
  If you’re on the electric grid why can’t you be on a fibre grid.
  - sysguest 7mo ago
    well for electric grid, you only need "local" connections -- eg. just your town and the generator...
    - hdgvhicv 7mo ago
      The problem isn’t running a fibre to a town, there aren’t that many towns in the US which are completely disconnected from the road network. It’s the last mile (or miles) to farm houses.
- poulsbohemian 7mo ago
  >It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area where rural broadband investment could make a difference. Likewise, when we talk about American competitiveness in manufacturing et al, that isn't going to happen in our cities, but rather in more rural areas.
  - performative 7mo ago
    other than introducing public policy to encourage building more housing, i assume?
    - poulsbohemian 7mo ago
      The problem is that in places like Seattle and the Bay Area, there are hard geographic limits to construction, even if you turn them into endless high-rises. Having watched the WA state legislature go through several years of attempts to fix housing by throwing random policy ideas into the void, I'm not convinced any of it matters nearly as much as a) more money in the state housing trust to help people with down payments and b) a robust economy so more people have more money that they can apply toward housing. So, sure, yes, by all means do things like pass residential-in-repurposed commercial changes, ADUs, greater density in transit-oriented neighborhoods - do all the things. But, getting more people able to move to parts of the state (in my case, Yakima, the Tri-Cities, Spokane, etc) where there are houses just sitting around relative to King / Pierce / Snohomish... that's just as viable a solution and solves a whole bunch of other water / energy / land use / political / social type problems.
      - poulsbohemian 7mo ago
        Jesus Christ the replies to this are stupid. Have any of you three spent any time in Olympia or working on housing? No? Then shut the fuck up.
- jjmarr 7mo ago
  Countries subsidize rural living because it enforces their control over the frontier. The United States is difficult to invade because of the oceans surrounding it and the many people with guns in the interior that'll take shots at armies. If you put everyone in a few cities on the coast, the USA becomes easier to invade.
  - pibaker 7mo ago
    No country capable of landing a single troop on the lower 48 is scared of undisciplined men with AR-15s. In fact I am not sure if any country can get a troop transport near the US coast without being nuked to the ground first.
    - jjmarr 7mo ago
      In the 1930s and 1940s, Mexico wanted to invade Texas and reverse the Mexican American war.
      - pibaker 7mo ago
        I can't find any source suggesting this was actually a thing in the 30s and 40s. All I can find is the Zimmerman telegram from a hundred years ago which the Mexicans weren't exactly enthusiastic about. In any case, I doubt there is any realistic threat of a Mexican invasion beyond fantasizing from political fringes.
  - samus 7mo ago
    Quite the contrary: an empty countryside would make invasions harder because there would be no infrastructure: no roads, no bridges, no tunnels, no electricity, no water supply, no opportunities for shelter. Everything would have to be shipped from outside or built by combat engineers, putting an immense strain on logistics and slowing operations to a crawl.
- galleywest200 7mo ago
  Moving is incredibly expensive. First+Last month rent up-front, plus a deposit equal to one month rent up-front. That could total around $10,000 up-front costs if you are targeting a major city. Conversely, having quality utilities in smaller communities could incentivize the building up of those areas and they would become less rural.
  - nailer 7mo ago
    lol I paid 17K for NYC - two months rent, extra month for being foreign, 2K since they removed blinds since they showed me the apartment and everyone in NYC could see into my house.
- edgyquant 7mo ago
  I don’t think we should subsidize internet, but your framing here rubs me the wrong way. People in these rural areas usually live among family and have lived there for generations, reducing this to a choice feels very elitist. People aren’t “choosing” to not pack up their entire lives and move to a city or town.
  - platevoltage 7mo ago
    We shouldn't subsidize internet, it should be provided. The internet is necessary to participate in modern society, and to only provide it to people who can afford it is what's actually elitist.
    - iknowstuff 7mo ago
      Last we checked we pay for water too. It’s abundant. It still makes sense to have a price on it because it’s a resource like anything else. In the same way, we pay for the internet. Free wifi exists if you can’t afford service. Rather than elitist, it’s just… not communist.
      - greedo 7mo ago
        And your water is subsidized... Subsidies don't have to make something free.
      - olelele 7mo ago
        what is the point of a society that doesen't have common utilities? and where does one draw the line at what is necessary for a decent life in a modern society?
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  Who needs all of the damn farmers anyway?
  - platevoltage 7mo ago
    The corporations buying up all of the land formerly owned by these bankrupt farmers probably do.
moduspol 7mo ago
Eh, I think we'll look back on this in 10-20 years and conclude that wireless transmission was always going to make more sense than running millions of miles of wires. Especially so for rural access.
- scottyah 7mo ago
  Wired will definitely be the rich, elite way to go.
  - BurningFrog 7mo ago
    Satellite internet can get several orders of magnitudes more capacity.
aaron695 7mo ago
[dead]
fy20 7mo ago
Are there any countries that have actually done an exhaustive job of this? I'm from the UK, and I'd say they are pretty good, my parents live in a 300 person village, and they can get 50ish mbit internet through wires. But "rural" in the UK is very different from "rural" in some parts of the US. And this was done by a private company (although it was based on infrastructure built by the government).
miki123211 7mo ago
Internet still has a "moral vice" label associated with it that I don't think electricity ever had. In the popular person's imagination, electricity is the revolutionary technology that enables cheap and safe lighting, as well as instant access to information (through radio). The telephone is the revolutionary technology that lets you call a doctor in an emergency or negotiate crop prices. The internet is the revolutionary technology that lets you go on dating sites and stare at pretty girls on HotOrNot, talk to fellow netizens on discussion forums, and waste hours playing Mmorpgs. It's "that weird technology that the young people use for God knows what." It's for entertainment, not serious business use, except if your business is in providing the entertainment. Of course none of it is true, especially these days as so much non-tech-adjacent business is happening over the internet (and especially internet-enabled smartphones).
- coryrc 7mo ago
  It used to be cheap and possible to build things. The USA no longer can.
jasonwatkinspdx 7mo ago
The only way rural America got landline service was by the government forcing it. The market had no solution.
GMoromisato 7mo ago
I don't think the math works. There are 23 million rural homes in the US and about 3 million miles of rural public roads. Let's say you wired just the public rural roads (ignore going from the road to the house). It costs $30,000 per mile to put up aerial wiring. $60,000 per mile underground. So we're already at $90 billion for wired poles and $180 billion for underground. And that's just for the wires--we're not including any of the switches and routers for actual internet. By comparison, the Starlink system cost about an order of magnitude less ($10 billion).
- devin 7mo ago
  I appreciate you actually taking a moment to think through the cost, but I think we could start with some pragmatism and look to run wires to people who are within a reasonable range of existing systems, of which there are many. Clearly not every public road needs wiring. Then, consider that you could run wired connections to wireless access points to increase high speed wireless coverage. 1 wire to light up dozens of homes in areas which currently have no service beyond DSL.
- Tempest1981 7mo ago
  Doesn't Starlink have some annual upkeep costs? Maybe $1-2 billion per year to replace aging satellites?
  - panick21_ 7mo ago
    Yes, but Starlink needs to exist for military, planes, boats and other essential very rural services as well. So the upkeep should pay for itself. And of course Starlink has to be for the whole planet, so just comparing it to the US would be a false analysis. Of course you also need to upkeep the physical infrastructure. Specially if you don't put all those lines underground. But one would need to do some more real work to compare. I would also say that a real program for urban fiber makes a lot of sense in more places. But I would love to see somebody take a shot at this, what would be the best if you started from 0 today?
  - coryrc 7mo ago
    You don't think aerial lines have upkeep costs? ice, tree branches, hurricanes, etc
modeless 7mo ago
You have it exactly backwards. It is far less complex and expensive and resource intensive to build Starlink than to run a new copper or fiber line with associated telecom equipment on both sides to every rural residence in the US, let alone worldwide. Yes, despite the large cost of launching satellites. And it's especially good that we don't have to force everyone to subsidize inefficient monopoly utilities with our tax dollars to get everyone connected. Plus the benefit of mobility is enormous and shouldn't be ignored. As solar and batteries become cheaper, eventually we can transition to most rural residences being entirely off the grid and self sufficient. This will also be cheaper and less resource intensive than maintaining the electric grid in those rural areas, let alone building it in the first place, and we can all stop paying hidden subsidies for those users.
- sunshinekitty 7mo ago
  The HN groupthink is to hate on anything Elon adjacent, satellite internet included.
  - razingeden 7mo ago
    hopefully that include his business partners , airlines in this case.
  - platevoltage 7mo ago
    It's not groupthink to believe that the guy sucks and is a threat to humanity. He constantly fights against the type of programs that could have possibly given us satellite internet, the same way we all get to enjoy GPS.
    - SV_BubbleTime 7mo ago
      > It's not groupthink to believe that the guy sucks and is a threat to humanity. Wow, that’s a wild misstatement; that is exactly groupthink nonsense. You (people) loved him before he went in for Trump.
      - 7mo ago
raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
Blame rural America who continuously votes for politicians who oppose it.
gowld 7mo ago
Why is wire better than terrestrial wireless? Isn't terrestrial wireless how most of Africa caught up to more earlier-developed regions in telecom?
stevenhuang 7mo ago
Your understanding of the history and economics of it all is very confused. > simply running wires Lol. Yes let's just ignore the most expensive and complicated part of the whole endeavor.
platevoltage 7mo ago
Municipal internet is something the ISPs lobby against like there is no tomorrow. It is a shame, but that's how the US government works.
DaedalusII 7mo ago
its literally cheaper to create a low earth orbit satellite constellation than deal with bureaucracy
protocolture 7mo ago
>I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites. Actually whats crazy is that you guys had private and public power run everywhere, and those companies had private and public fibre companies run fibre through those power lead ins almost everywhere that's practical. A feat thats honestly not been achieved anywhere else that I have seen. Lots of people in other countries stomp around wondering why private fibre doesnt just materialise in their house, when they have no access to national public utilities. The answer was local utilities. But there's not even an ounce of appreciation for it outside of the ISP space.
tgma 7mo ago
Let me guess, it would be a 512kbit/sec service.
anonu 7mo ago
Weird take. The vast majority of US electricity infrastructure is privately owned and financed.
philipallstar 7mo ago
It's not a shame. The US, like most countries who sort of want rural internet, just gives money to massive companies who do a tiny bit of rural internetting every 4 years. They don't want to solve the problem because then there's no more free money coming their way. Starlink gets paid to solve their customers' problems, not to perpetuate them.
buckle8017 7mo ago
Matter of fact the feds have been spending billions of dollars onbrural internet projects for decades. Those have just resulted in ya know... almost nothing.

by devin 7mo ago

iknowstuff 7mo ago

People in the United States can choose to live in very rural and sparsely populated areas, far more remote than most OECD countries. It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries. We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities. As a country we need to make a decision about which choices we want to encourage and discourage.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
scubbo 7mo ago
People can't afford to live in cities? Well, they should simply choose to live elsewhere. People choose to live outside cities, but want access to basic utilities of modern life? Well, fuck 'em.
- aaaaaaabbbbbb 7mo ago
  Ah yes, one step outside of New York City, and I'm immediately in the boondocks.
- kbar13 7mo ago
  that’s a bit pendantic, there exists such a thing as suburbs. even some rural communities are perfectly reasonable in terms of municipal infrastructure. but we are specifically talking about houses that are miles and miles from the next house that is then miles and miles away etc
  - TulliusCicero 7mo ago
    Even in "rural regions", there are typically some small towns where infrastructure could be provided to them decently efficiently. It's when every single house is a good distance away from their neighbors that things like running fiber cabling become grossly inefficient.
- TulliusCicero 7mo ago
  Small towns exist, and ones far away from major metro areas are usually quite affordable. Small towns are or can be made to be efficient in terms of basic infrastructure/services, whereas truly rural areas where everyone is very spread out, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that.
  - samus 7mo ago
    Small town are usually quite affordable because they offer fewer high-paying jobs. Remote work is by far not yet common enough.
- vineyardmike 7mo ago
  Many of the aspects of life "outside the city" are subsidized by the city. It's affordable because of this, and the cities are extra unaffordable as a result. There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers. Even health care is subsidized. If rural people actually had to pay market-rate for these resources, it wouldn't be cheaper than the city.
  - gib444 7mo ago
    So if 10 million people from rural towns moved to their nearest cities, the cities would become cheaper? What would drop in price exactly?
    - iknowstuff 7mo ago
      Yes, if you compare the efficiency of China’s economy to America, you’ll find that their giant cities save them a ton of money on everything overall. As long as you’re willing to build a lot of dense housing very quickly.
      - ghaff 7mo ago
        And not give people much of a choice. Chairman Mao would like a word.
    - vineyardmike 7mo ago
      Well, we'd stop having to spend so much taxes on redistributive efforts, again, like subsidized internet. It's up to voters and politicians to actually change the tax rate to save the money. It'd reduce government debt at least. Electricity would be cheaper. Here in California, a significant amount of the (very high) electricity costs are used to maintain rural power lines. If rural people moved away, we'd be able to decommission them and no longer maintain the lines. It wouldn't happen immediately, but as more people become urbanites, we'd be able to move gas subsidies and government road maintenance spending to the urban environment, where we'd spend on more drivers-per-mile roads, OR shift to public transit funding, or simply reduce that government spending. Over time, we'd be less reliant on cars, which reduces everyones costs, but will mean we aren't so desperate to protect oil interests, so we'd be able to stop paying for wars in the middle-east. Honestly this alone has so many positive side-affects it'd be hard to actually enumerate.
TulliusCicero 7mo ago
Some people will be really mad about this comment, but it's absolutely correct. Broadly speaking, very rural living is generally a lifestyle choice. Yes, not everyone can afford to live in big cities, but there are typically small towns in the general vicinity of rural areas that are quite affordable. Of course, there are exceptions where you truly need the space, like if you're a farmer, but that's not most people in rural areas. Edit: to be clear, I don't think it's fundamentally wrong or anything for people to choose the rural lifestyle, I just don't think we should be heavily subsidizing it.
- devin 7mo ago
  Buddy, many of the people who are being served by Starlink are by no means "very" rural at all. If you get into "lives in a shack in the mountains", then sure I agree, but a HUGE number of people are barely outside of an immediate service area and have no access for one dumb reason or another. This is a demonstration of the failure of our country to do simple, pragmatic things that would benefit our citizens' lives. The "fix" was for some private company to launch things into orbit. It's an expensive fix to a simple problem.
  - TulliusCicero 7mo ago
    Generally speaking, private companies want to make money by getting customers. Obviously there can be edge cases, but if there's profit to be made by hooking people up, they'll want to do it, and if private companies don't want to get more customers, you have to ask yourself some hard questions about why. I think we both know what's usually happening: people in an area who, as a whole, are rural enough and poor enough that the economics don't really pen out well. And I'm sure said corporations would be happy for the local government to pay the cost of running those lines out -- if that's not happening, ask yourself why those local governments don't want to pay for it either. Now if you want to say, "well I don't care if it scales badly, the federal government should just subsidize it until it works", that's your prerogative. But another option would be to encourage zoning and similar rules that impact how people live to change towards better scaling of infrastructure and services, so that spending on these kinds of things is more sustainable and fair.
strbean 7mo ago
I think this is very short-sighted, on the order of "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?" The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.
- TulliusCicero 7mo ago
  > "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?" Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either. > The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself. Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - TulliusCicero 7mo ago
      I'm a social democrat, I'm fine with subsidies in general, I just want them to be applied intelligently. Spending a lot of money to subsidize someone's lifestyle that's intentionally inefficient isn't smart. I'm all for helping the poor, but we should do it in a way that gets us a lot of bang for the buck.
      - jasonwatkinspdx 7mo ago
        Having grown up in rural Kansas and now being an urban tech worker, I think you have a derogatory and ignorant view on people who live rurally.
        TulliusCicero 7mo ago
hdgvhicv 7mo ago
If you’re on the electric grid why can’t you be on a fibre grid.
- sysguest 7mo ago
  well for electric grid, you only need "local" connections -- eg. just your town and the generator...
  - hdgvhicv 7mo ago
    The problem isn’t running a fibre to a town, there aren’t that many towns in the US which are completely disconnected from the road network. It’s the last mile (or miles) to farm houses.
poulsbohemian 7mo ago
>It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area where rural broadband investment could make a difference. Likewise, when we talk about American competitiveness in manufacturing et al, that isn't going to happen in our cities, but rather in more rural areas.
- performative 7mo ago
  other than introducing public policy to encourage building more housing, i assume?
  - poulsbohemian 7mo ago
    The problem is that in places like Seattle and the Bay Area, there are hard geographic limits to construction, even if you turn them into endless high-rises. Having watched the WA state legislature go through several years of attempts to fix housing by throwing random policy ideas into the void, I'm not convinced any of it matters nearly as much as a) more money in the state housing trust to help people with down payments and b) a robust economy so more people have more money that they can apply toward housing. So, sure, yes, by all means do things like pass residential-in-repurposed commercial changes, ADUs, greater density in transit-oriented neighborhoods - do all the things. But, getting more people able to move to parts of the state (in my case, Yakima, the Tri-Cities, Spokane, etc) where there are houses just sitting around relative to King / Pierce / Snohomish... that's just as viable a solution and solves a whole bunch of other water / energy / land use / political / social type problems.
    - poulsbohemian 7mo ago
      Jesus Christ the replies to this are stupid. Have any of you three spent any time in Olympia or working on housing? No? Then shut the fuck up.
jjmarr 7mo ago
Countries subsidize rural living because it enforces their control over the frontier. The United States is difficult to invade because of the oceans surrounding it and the many people with guns in the interior that'll take shots at armies. If you put everyone in a few cities on the coast, the USA becomes easier to invade.
- pibaker 7mo ago
  No country capable of landing a single troop on the lower 48 is scared of undisciplined men with AR-15s. In fact I am not sure if any country can get a troop transport near the US coast without being nuked to the ground first.
  - jjmarr 7mo ago
    In the 1930s and 1940s, Mexico wanted to invade Texas and reverse the Mexican American war.
    - pibaker 7mo ago
      I can't find any source suggesting this was actually a thing in the 30s and 40s. All I can find is the Zimmerman telegram from a hundred years ago which the Mexicans weren't exactly enthusiastic about. In any case, I doubt there is any realistic threat of a Mexican invasion beyond fantasizing from political fringes.
- samus 7mo ago
  Quite the contrary: an empty countryside would make invasions harder because there would be no infrastructure: no roads, no bridges, no tunnels, no electricity, no water supply, no opportunities for shelter. Everything would have to be shipped from outside or built by combat engineers, putting an immense strain on logistics and slowing operations to a crawl.
galleywest200 7mo ago
Moving is incredibly expensive. First+Last month rent up-front, plus a deposit equal to one month rent up-front. That could total around $10,000 up-front costs if you are targeting a major city. Conversely, having quality utilities in smaller communities could incentivize the building up of those areas and they would become less rural.
- nailer 7mo ago
  lol I paid 17K for NYC - two months rent, extra month for being foreign, 2K since they removed blinds since they showed me the apartment and everyone in NYC could see into my house.
edgyquant 7mo ago
I don’t think we should subsidize internet, but your framing here rubs me the wrong way. People in these rural areas usually live among family and have lived there for generations, reducing this to a choice feels very elitist. People aren’t “choosing” to not pack up their entire lives and move to a city or town.
- platevoltage 7mo ago
  We shouldn't subsidize internet, it should be provided. The internet is necessary to participate in modern society, and to only provide it to people who can afford it is what's actually elitist.
  - iknowstuff 7mo ago
    Last we checked we pay for water too. It’s abundant. It still makes sense to have a price on it because it’s a resource like anything else. In the same way, we pay for the internet. Free wifi exists if you can’t afford service. Rather than elitist, it’s just… not communist.
    - greedo 7mo ago
      And your water is subsidized... Subsidies don't have to make something free.
    - olelele 7mo ago
      what is the point of a society that doesen't have common utilities? and where does one draw the line at what is necessary for a decent life in a modern society?
raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
Who needs all of the damn farmers anyway?
- platevoltage 7mo ago
  The corporations buying up all of the land formerly owned by these bankrupt farmers probably do.

moduspol 7mo ago

Eh, I think we'll look back on this in 10-20 years and conclude that wireless transmission was always going to make more sense than running millions of miles of wires. Especially so for rural access.

scottyah 7mo ago
Wired will definitely be the rich, elite way to go.
- BurningFrog 7mo ago
  Satellite internet can get several orders of magnitudes more capacity.

aaron695 7mo ago

[dead]

fy20 7mo ago

Are there any countries that have actually done an exhaustive job of this? I'm from the UK, and I'd say they are pretty good, my parents live in a 300 person village, and they can get 50ish mbit internet through wires. But "rural" in the UK is very different from "rural" in some parts of the US. And this was done by a private company (although it was based on infrastructure built by the government).

miki123211 7mo ago

Internet still has a "moral vice" label associated with it that I don't think electricity ever had. In the popular person's imagination, electricity is the revolutionary technology that enables cheap and safe lighting, as well as instant access to information (through radio). The telephone is the revolutionary technology that lets you call a doctor in an emergency or negotiate crop prices. The internet is the revolutionary technology that lets you go on dating sites and stare at pretty girls on HotOrNot, talk to fellow netizens on discussion forums, and waste hours playing Mmorpgs. It's "that weird technology that the young people use for God knows what." It's for entertainment, not serious business use, except if your business is in providing the entertainment. Of course none of it is true, especially these days as so much non-tech-adjacent business is happening over the internet (and especially internet-enabled smartphones).

coryrc 7mo ago
It used to be cheap and possible to build things. The USA no longer can.

jasonwatkinspdx 7mo ago

The only way rural America got landline service was by the government forcing it. The market had no solution.

GMoromisato 7mo ago

I don't think the math works. There are 23 million rural homes in the US and about 3 million miles of rural public roads. Let's say you wired just the public rural roads (ignore going from the road to the house). It costs $30,000 per mile to put up aerial wiring. $60,000 per mile underground. So we're already at $90 billion for wired poles and $180 billion for underground. And that's just for the wires--we're not including any of the switches and routers for actual internet. By comparison, the Starlink system cost about an order of magnitude less ($10 billion).

devin 7mo ago
I appreciate you actually taking a moment to think through the cost, but I think we could start with some pragmatism and look to run wires to people who are within a reasonable range of existing systems, of which there are many. Clearly not every public road needs wiring. Then, consider that you could run wired connections to wireless access points to increase high speed wireless coverage. 1 wire to light up dozens of homes in areas which currently have no service beyond DSL.
Tempest1981 7mo ago
Doesn't Starlink have some annual upkeep costs? Maybe $1-2 billion per year to replace aging satellites?
- panick21_ 7mo ago
  Yes, but Starlink needs to exist for military, planes, boats and other essential very rural services as well. So the upkeep should pay for itself. And of course Starlink has to be for the whole planet, so just comparing it to the US would be a false analysis. Of course you also need to upkeep the physical infrastructure. Specially if you don't put all those lines underground. But one would need to do some more real work to compare. I would also say that a real program for urban fiber makes a lot of sense in more places. But I would love to see somebody take a shot at this, what would be the best if you started from 0 today?
- coryrc 7mo ago
  You don't think aerial lines have upkeep costs? ice, tree branches, hurricanes, etc

modeless 7mo ago

You have it exactly backwards. It is far less complex and expensive and resource intensive to build Starlink than to run a new copper or fiber line with associated telecom equipment on both sides to every rural residence in the US, let alone worldwide. Yes, despite the large cost of launching satellites. And it's especially good that we don't have to force everyone to subsidize inefficient monopoly utilities with our tax dollars to get everyone connected. Plus the benefit of mobility is enormous and shouldn't be ignored. As solar and batteries become cheaper, eventually we can transition to most rural residences being entirely off the grid and self sufficient. This will also be cheaper and less resource intensive than maintaining the electric grid in those rural areas, let alone building it in the first place, and we can all stop paying hidden subsidies for those users.

sunshinekitty 7mo ago
The HN groupthink is to hate on anything Elon adjacent, satellite internet included.
- razingeden 7mo ago
  hopefully that include his business partners , airlines in this case.
- platevoltage 7mo ago
  It's not groupthink to believe that the guy sucks and is a threat to humanity. He constantly fights against the type of programs that could have possibly given us satellite internet, the same way we all get to enjoy GPS.
  - SV_BubbleTime 7mo ago
    > It's not groupthink to believe that the guy sucks and is a threat to humanity. Wow, that’s a wild misstatement; that is exactly groupthink nonsense. You (people) loved him before he went in for Trump.
    - 7mo ago

raw_anon_1111 7mo ago

Blame rural America who continuously votes for politicians who oppose it.

gowld 7mo ago

Why is wire better than terrestrial wireless? Isn't terrestrial wireless how most of Africa caught up to more earlier-developed regions in telecom?

stevenhuang 7mo ago

Your understanding of the history and economics of it all is very confused. > simply running wires Lol. Yes let's just ignore the most expensive and complicated part of the whole endeavor.

platevoltage 7mo ago

Municipal internet is something the ISPs lobby against like there is no tomorrow. It is a shame, but that's how the US government works.

DaedalusII 7mo ago

its literally cheaper to create a low earth orbit satellite constellation than deal with bureaucracy

protocolture 7mo ago

>I've written it elsewhere, but: it is such a shame that the United States saw fit to run electricity _everywhere_, no matter how rural your location, but instead of do the same for rural internet we had to wait for... a private company to launch a global network of satellites. Actually whats crazy is that you guys had private and public power run everywhere, and those companies had private and public fibre companies run fibre through those power lead ins almost everywhere that's practical. A feat thats honestly not been achieved anywhere else that I have seen. Lots of people in other countries stomp around wondering why private fibre doesnt just materialise in their house, when they have no access to national public utilities. The answer was local utilities. But there's not even an ounce of appreciation for it outside of the ISP space.

tgma 7mo ago

Let me guess, it would be a 512kbit/sec service.

anonu 7mo ago

Weird take. The vast majority of US electricity infrastructure is privately owned and financed.

philipallstar 7mo ago

It's not a shame. The US, like most countries who sort of want rural internet, just gives money to massive companies who do a tiny bit of rural internetting every 4 years. They don't want to solve the problem because then there's no more free money coming their way. Starlink gets paid to solve their customers' problems, not to perpetuate them.

buckle8017 7mo ago

Matter of fact the feds have been spending billions of dollars onbrural internet projects for decades. Those have just resulted in ya know... almost nothing.