If utilities are underground, it can be pretty expensive to install anything. I have an estimate for municipal fiber that's about that much to get fiber a mile or two down the street overhead, and then about that much to go down my driveway underground 400 feet.
It's hard to justify when the local phone company is probably going to roll out fiber in the next few years without a direct charge, at least for the portion on the street. Of course, that'll probably be PPPoE, maybe asymetrical, likely limited to 1G, etc. Comcast won't even quote me to come down my driveway, even though they serve my neighbor across the street from the pole at the corner of my driveway.
Wow, have you considered buying some conduit and renting a trenching machine and giving the driveway portion a go yourself? Might be worth talking over that option with the muni fiber people. Though sounds like the overhead portion would still be $$$.
A friend did this at his farm in central VA, but for power line instead of fiber. It was previously above ground, unsightly, and occasionally damaged by trees. He dug the trench from the road and had the power company lay the wire in it and make connections at each end. I don't remember the total numbers, but he saved thousands by doing the dig himself (with rented equipment) vs paying the power company to manage it.
Of course, this assume you're comfortable with heavy machinery and can work around other utilities (most counties have a "Miss Utility" service that will mark existing services).
I've considered it, but I suspect it might end up like bombcar's experience with cutting buried lines. I'm not much of a digger for the manual work either. And there's a seasonal creek to cross which seems like a lot of fun.
I'm not too worried about the overhead portion; in theory, I could group with neighbors and we all pay a share, or I could pay it and consider it a goodwill gesture to my neighbors; they wouldn't need to pay that portion if they wanted to get online (and some of them have overhead drops for electric and what not, so they'd be able to get a cheap drop for fiber, too)
It's funny because he said one of the houses needed 0.5 miles of cable. My jaw dropped when he said it would only be $30K for that.
I'm speaking as someone who has had a few hundred foot trenches dug in my yard for running cable. Extrapolating it to 0.5 miles would come out to a lot more than $30K.
What's the expensive part of a new fibre run? With $30k you could hire an excavator and operator for maybe 15 to 20 weeks straight, but I'm guessing the pits are expensive and dealing with obstacles is hard.
I don't know. I didn't do it. I just know how much money came out of my wallet and how long the trench was. :-)
So that means I paid for labor. But presumably some part of that $30K will be going to labor as well.
Another possibility is that when you get to the scale of 0.5 miles, you start using different tactics or machines than the small little backhoe loader that the guy used in our yard. So, more capital required but overall more efficient.
Anyway, I don't mean to try and offer an accurate accounting of all of this. I mostly just meant to provide a counter-expectation.
There are fixed costs to a job. It doesn't cost much more to dig a bit longer trench. Things like needing to do horizontal boring to cross an intersection would jack up the cost though.
e.g. I used to pay ~$2k for a contractor to come to re-gravel my driveway. Now I own my own excavator and loader and dump trailer it costs me about $200 (plus my time plus equipment depreciation).
Surely with utility plans you can just use a mole? Dig a few trenches and just use a mole to go between them. No need to dig the entire length. I'm pretty sure this is what utility companies use in the Uk if they can't drag the utility through the existing duct/pipe. Imaging installing fibre to a neighbour and having to dig up every single pavement/road to do this.
And you dig smaller trenches with them. Microtrenching digs a foot deep and two inch wide hole for direct bury fiber cable, saving time and money over older techniques.
It isn't, but that's the norm for all internet infrastructure, both last-mile and backbone.
Since time immemorial, the gap between the amortized cost of building it, and anyone's willingness to pay for transport or transit, has been a) huge (that is, commercially insurmountable), and b) traditionally covered by one of two means:
1. Government subsidy, or
2. Attempting to offer services at the high prices necessary to recoup the investment, consequently going bust due to low volumes, selling the infrastructure for a pittance in a fire sale, and the next owner gets to offer services for prices the market is willing to tolerate. With this approach, it merely remains to find some VCs to sucker for the build phase.
It was also possible, back in the day, to run tunnels across your peers since they would announce the IXP networks at each end into their IGP, but folks got wise to that scam.
There is a variation on (2) involving anti-trust laws during M&A but it amounts to the same thing.
Depends on the area. Wireless won't work well in the mountains, and I assume weather could affect some wireless technologies as well.
I live in a mountainous area and we have a local ISP that provides fiber to our entire county. Which is weird, because I recently lived in a major city and couldn't get fiber.
It's way easier to push fiber through the ground in rural areas where there's basically nothing than it is in major cities where there are tons of things and already some form of wired internet.
And if you're within a mile of the destination, that last mile isn't actually that terribly expensive, especially if it's literally rural and that mile is on the property owner's land. They can figure out how to get to the box at the road.
Agreed - that much money could put in a computer lab in a local library for everyone to use. I’m very supportive of rural people and the life they choose to live, but you are right - they should understand the drawbacks.
Its more than he personally was willing to pay ;-)
>Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house—and that he would have gone with Comcast if they only wanted $10,000.
Im guessing being a nerd working at akamai he wont be the one spending ~1-2 days on a Ditch Witch/trencher to make those. He probably wont even hire anyone to work a rental from United Rentals. He will subcontract to same company that does trenches for Comcast.
In most locations in the US any entity can hang wire on utility poles (the poles are often owned by the city, with an open access policy -- this is how CATV and PSTN wires are up there on poles, and more recently 5GUWB base stations). There are certain requirements (e.g. insurance, you have to have assets on hand to repair your cable when someone drives into a pole, you need workers who are certified to work near high tension wires, etc). Usually you can outsource that stuff, for a price, possibly to the same contracting company who does the same work for Comcast.
Friend of mine needed to run fiber across the street. They had to dig up the road. Cost was $50k. This was in a city where there aren’t large pools of money from the government to get people decent Internet address.
You are a private person and you choose to live deep in the country-side / on a desert / on an island / remote location / deep in the forest.
Who should pay for your road, your electricity, your water, your internet connection when you are the one mostly benefiting from it ?
Taxes have to be used primarily with the goal to maximize public interest, not the interests of single private persons.
Perhaps a Starlink connection would have been enough for them and perfectly fine if it's a single family.
Could there have been alternatives that maximize coverage ? For example, by supporting deployment of 5G antennas as public infrastructure (thus, benefiting the whole area).
This family doesn't necessarily need a single fiber cable to reach their house.
As a general principle it's fine. The issue is a combination of:
* Providing infrastructure and services for rural areas like this is inherently monumentally expensive.
* For most people, rural living is some kind of choice: most could likely move to a cheap suburb that could be served much more easily, but don't want to.
* Far from having more money to fund things like this, rural areas are actually much less economically productive per person, on average. Of course you need some people to farm, but in practice you have many more people than that.
Essentially, society is providing a heavy subsidy for a lifestyle choice for most people, with no compelling government interest there.
While I do think we should make a goal of hooking everyone up to decent internet, any sensible plan has to look at how we can do this efficiently. Absolutely bare minimum, we should be superceding local zoning laws and similar that often make it illegal for people to build more densely in these areas (small town city centers), such that people can individually choose to live in a more efficient way in the same general area if they want. Not talking about skyscrapers obviously, but traditional, walkable downtowns with townhomes or duplexes would be a great thing.
Some Americans may scoff at this, but you don't need large numbers of people to get walkable neighborhoods. I've been through Bavarian villages of a few hundred people that were more walkable than US cities 100x their size.
It's especially nonsensical that we'd heavily subsidize super low density living when that's basically always gonna be worse for the environment. It means you need much more land per person, obviously, so you gotta cut into nature more, plus higher energy requirements.
He's actually connecting hundreds of people that otherwise wouldn't have such access to fiber. The big ISPs took WAY more money [0] and delivered less.
The point of taxes is to provide collective goods, such as infrastructure, defense, education.
One of the first thing the US's founders did was create the postal service, which was to provide mail service to everyone, regardless of location; it literally costs the same to mail a letter across the street as to send it to some house in Whoknowswhere, Alaska. This provides a minimum communications infrastructure.
One of the best things that were done in the New Deal was the Rural Electrification Act, which ensured that electrical service was provided to everyone, providing a minimum availability of a critical energy source.
Also essential was the initial telecommunications acts, which required providing telephone service at the same rates to all addresses. Again, providing this service universally ensures that the entire country has a baseline communications infrastructure.
This is why the telecomm companies have been aggressively stripping copper telephone wires from their system and replacing everything with fiber or coax — because the laws requiring universal service are tied to phone service and copper wires. This is why we wind up with companies like Comcast saying "F*$k-You - $50,000 for 500m of wire" to to everyone that isn't instantly profitable.
These universal service mandates are not to benefit each individual living on some remote farm or homestead, or just more remote suburbs/exurbs.
They are to benefit THE ENTIRE NATION. Everyone benefits from infrastructure, and benefits most when the infrastructure is more universal, when everyone can has power, can communicate and can transport goods.
You live in an advanced society with advanced infrastructure. When that infrastructure gets built out, perhaps notice that it is a good thing, instead of thinking of only your own petty concerns.
Or, go find someplace where there are no taxes and you get to do everything yourself (hey, if you want it done right, do it yourself, right?) - see what you can find and how well you can live with no roads, comms, power, security, etc. Report back.
If utilities are underground, it can be pretty expensive to install anything. I have an estimate for municipal fiber that's about that much to get fiber a mile or two down the street overhead, and then about that much to go down my driveway underground 400 feet.
It's hard to justify when the local phone company is probably going to roll out fiber in the next few years without a direct charge, at least for the portion on the street. Of course, that'll probably be PPPoE, maybe asymetrical, likely limited to 1G, etc. Comcast won't even quote me to come down my driveway, even though they serve my neighbor across the street from the pole at the corner of my driveway.
Wow, have you considered buying some conduit and renting a trenching machine and giving the driveway portion a go yourself? Might be worth talking over that option with the muni fiber people. Though sounds like the overhead portion would still be $$$.
A friend did this at his farm in central VA, but for power line instead of fiber. It was previously above ground, unsightly, and occasionally damaged by trees. He dug the trench from the road and had the power company lay the wire in it and make connections at each end. I don't remember the total numbers, but he saved thousands by doing the dig himself (with rented equipment) vs paying the power company to manage it.
Of course, this assume you're comfortable with heavy machinery and can work around other utilities (most counties have a "Miss Utility" service that will mark existing services).
2 replies →
I've considered it, but I suspect it might end up like bombcar's experience with cutting buried lines. I'm not much of a digger for the manual work either. And there's a seasonal creek to cross which seems like a lot of fun.
I'm not too worried about the overhead portion; in theory, I could group with neighbors and we all pay a share, or I could pay it and consider it a goodwill gesture to my neighbors; they wouldn't need to pay that portion if they wanted to get online (and some of them have overhead drops for electric and what not, so they'd be able to get a cheap drop for fiber, too)
1 reply →
It's funny because he said one of the houses needed 0.5 miles of cable. My jaw dropped when he said it would only be $30K for that.
I'm speaking as someone who has had a few hundred foot trenches dug in my yard for running cable. Extrapolating it to 0.5 miles would come out to a lot more than $30K.
What's the expensive part of a new fibre run? With $30k you could hire an excavator and operator for maybe 15 to 20 weeks straight, but I'm guessing the pits are expensive and dealing with obstacles is hard.
I don't know. I didn't do it. I just know how much money came out of my wallet and how long the trench was. :-)
So that means I paid for labor. But presumably some part of that $30K will be going to labor as well.
Another possibility is that when you get to the scale of 0.5 miles, you start using different tactics or machines than the small little backhoe loader that the guy used in our yard. So, more capital required but overall more efficient.
Anyway, I don't mean to try and offer an accurate accounting of all of this. I mostly just meant to provide a counter-expectation.
There are fixed costs to a job. It doesn't cost much more to dig a bit longer trench. Things like needing to do horizontal boring to cross an intersection would jack up the cost though.
e.g. I used to pay ~$2k for a contractor to come to re-gravel my driveway. Now I own my own excavator and loader and dump trailer it costs me about $200 (plus my time plus equipment depreciation).
Surely with utility plans you can just use a mole? Dig a few trenches and just use a mole to go between them. No need to dig the entire length. I'm pretty sure this is what utility companies use in the Uk if they can't drag the utility through the existing duct/pipe. Imaging installing fibre to a neighbour and having to dig up every single pavement/road to do this.
You get bigger machines, which do work faster.
And you dig smaller trenches with them. Microtrenching digs a foot deep and two inch wide hole for direct bury fiber cable, saving time and money over older techniques.
1 reply →
It isn't, but that's the norm for all internet infrastructure, both last-mile and backbone.
Since time immemorial, the gap between the amortized cost of building it, and anyone's willingness to pay for transport or transit, has been a) huge (that is, commercially insurmountable), and b) traditionally covered by one of two means:
1. Government subsidy, or
2. Attempting to offer services at the high prices necessary to recoup the investment, consequently going bust due to low volumes, selling the infrastructure for a pittance in a fire sale, and the next owner gets to offer services for prices the market is willing to tolerate. With this approach, it merely remains to find some VCs to sucker for the build phase.
It was also possible, back in the day, to run tunnels across your peers since they would announce the IXP networks at each end into their IGP, but folks got wise to that scam.
There is a variation on (2) involving anti-trust laws during M&A but it amounts to the same thing.
Yeah seems like some sort of mix of fiber and wireless for the "last mile" would make more sense for installations like this.
Depends on the area. Wireless won't work well in the mountains, and I assume weather could affect some wireless technologies as well. I live in a mountainous area and we have a local ISP that provides fiber to our entire county. Which is weird, because I recently lived in a major city and couldn't get fiber.
It's way easier to push fiber through the ground in rural areas where there's basically nothing than it is in major cities where there are tons of things and already some form of wired internet.
And if you're within a mile of the destination, that last mile isn't actually that terribly expensive, especially if it's literally rural and that mile is on the property owner's land. They can figure out how to get to the box at the road.
Agreed - that much money could put in a computer lab in a local library for everyone to use. I’m very supportive of rural people and the life they choose to live, but you are right - they should understand the drawbacks.
Its more than he personally was willing to pay ;-)
>Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house—and that he would have gone with Comcast if they only wanted $10,000.
Im guessing being a nerd working at akamai he wont be the one spending ~1-2 days on a Ditch Witch/trencher to make those. He probably wont even hire anyone to work a rental from United Rentals. He will subcontract to same company that does trenches for Comcast.
At $55/mo, he'll start making a profit in 45 years.
From the article: he had $2.6MM in help from the "American Rescue Plan's Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds".
He's being paid by the government to bring Internet access to homes in the state that aren't currently wired for it.
Gotta pay your fair share, so it can be granted out for someone elses gain
25 replies →
That bill and these types of projects are basically why we have 10% inflation now.
20 replies →
You can hang your fiber on existing infrastructure like electric distribution poles. edit: If you're the electric company.
In most locations in the US any entity can hang wire on utility poles (the poles are often owned by the city, with an open access policy -- this is how CATV and PSTN wires are up there on poles, and more recently 5GUWB base stations). There are certain requirements (e.g. insurance, you have to have assets on hand to repair your cable when someone drives into a pole, you need workers who are certified to work near high tension wires, etc). Usually you can outsource that stuff, for a price, possibly to the same contracting company who does the same work for Comcast.
Friend of mine needed to run fiber across the street. They had to dig up the road. Cost was $50k. This was in a city where there aren’t large pools of money from the government to get people decent Internet address.
.....have you ever dug fiber in Michigan?
Same sentiment here. Maybe he could look into some WAN to CPE connections from the fibre terminations
To say the least, it's more about siphoning public taxes
I don't understand this sentiment. Taxes are levied to then pay for things such as infrastructure which this qualifies as. How else should this work?
You are a private person and you choose to live deep in the country-side / on a desert / on an island / remote location / deep in the forest.
Who should pay for your road, your electricity, your water, your internet connection when you are the one mostly benefiting from it ?
Taxes have to be used primarily with the goal to maximize public interest, not the interests of single private persons.
Perhaps a Starlink connection would have been enough for them and perfectly fine if it's a single family.
Could there have been alternatives that maximize coverage ? For example, by supporting deployment of 5G antennas as public infrastructure (thus, benefiting the whole area).
This family doesn't necessarily need a single fiber cable to reach their house.
27 replies →
As a general principle it's fine. The issue is a combination of:
* Providing infrastructure and services for rural areas like this is inherently monumentally expensive.
* For most people, rural living is some kind of choice: most could likely move to a cheap suburb that could be served much more easily, but don't want to.
* Far from having more money to fund things like this, rural areas are actually much less economically productive per person, on average. Of course you need some people to farm, but in practice you have many more people than that.
Essentially, society is providing a heavy subsidy for a lifestyle choice for most people, with no compelling government interest there.
While I do think we should make a goal of hooking everyone up to decent internet, any sensible plan has to look at how we can do this efficiently. Absolutely bare minimum, we should be superceding local zoning laws and similar that often make it illegal for people to build more densely in these areas (small town city centers), such that people can individually choose to live in a more efficient way in the same general area if they want. Not talking about skyscrapers obviously, but traditional, walkable downtowns with townhomes or duplexes would be a great thing.
Some Americans may scoff at this, but you don't need large numbers of people to get walkable neighborhoods. I've been through Bavarian villages of a few hundred people that were more walkable than US cities 100x their size.
It's especially nonsensical that we'd heavily subsidize super low density living when that's basically always gonna be worse for the environment. It means you need much more land per person, obviously, so you gotta cut into nature more, plus higher energy requirements.
He's actually connecting hundreds of people that otherwise wouldn't have such access to fiber. The big ISPs took WAY more money [0] and delivered less.
[0] https://newnetworks.com/bookofbrokenpromises.htm
The point of taxes is to provide collective goods, such as infrastructure, defense, education.
One of the first thing the US's founders did was create the postal service, which was to provide mail service to everyone, regardless of location; it literally costs the same to mail a letter across the street as to send it to some house in Whoknowswhere, Alaska. This provides a minimum communications infrastructure.
One of the best things that were done in the New Deal was the Rural Electrification Act, which ensured that electrical service was provided to everyone, providing a minimum availability of a critical energy source.
Also essential was the initial telecommunications acts, which required providing telephone service at the same rates to all addresses. Again, providing this service universally ensures that the entire country has a baseline communications infrastructure.
This is why the telecomm companies have been aggressively stripping copper telephone wires from their system and replacing everything with fiber or coax — because the laws requiring universal service are tied to phone service and copper wires. This is why we wind up with companies like Comcast saying "F*$k-You - $50,000 for 500m of wire" to to everyone that isn't instantly profitable.
These universal service mandates are not to benefit each individual living on some remote farm or homestead, or just more remote suburbs/exurbs.
They are to benefit THE ENTIRE NATION. Everyone benefits from infrastructure, and benefits most when the infrastructure is more universal, when everyone can has power, can communicate and can transport goods.
You live in an advanced society with advanced infrastructure. When that infrastructure gets built out, perhaps notice that it is a good thing, instead of thinking of only your own petty concerns.
Or, go find someplace where there are no taxes and you get to do everything yourself (hey, if you want it done right, do it yourself, right?) - see what you can find and how well you can live with no roads, comms, power, security, etc. Report back.
I'm saying to allocate budget to maximize as much as possible the public/global interest.
Yes it's nicer to have optic fiber, but this is somewhat luxury if Starlink exists, and if the gov funds it already.
I'm sure some other people in the US need more these 30'000 USD than optic fiber to watch Netflix with a little less buffering.
Budget could be used somewhere else (to build roads, or to support medicine/health, education, animal welfare, etc).
So it's not about refusing to help rural / remote people, but rather about optimising allocation in order to support as much people as possible.
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The resources of this country are to be allocated for the benefit of its citizens.
In other words, it is our money, and we can spend it on decent internet for rural areas.
Lack of internet access is disenfranchising when numerous necessary government and school services has been moved online.
>The resources of this country are to be allocated for the benefit of its citizens.
Sounds like a great idea! When can we get started?
1 reply →