Comment by burntsushi
3 years ago
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.
Only a foot deep? My sprinkler system is deeper than that.
ATT recently did fiber by my house with some kind of machine. It did some kind of U shaped trench, where it drilled down (not sure how deep), then over about 200 feet, and back up. So you only see a hole every 200 or so feet, vs a solid trench. Let them go under driveways and all of that.
A team of 4 guys was able to do my entire neighborhood in a day. Still waiting for ATT to actually wire up the fiber, until them I am stuck with comcast cable (which is fine ,except the data cap doesn't scale with speed, so the faster connections cap cap you out in like 15 minutes).