Comment by mschuster91
3 years ago
As someone who actually was working in excavation for internet... well, some points to unpack here:
- You don't hire your own workers to dig trenches as an ISP, you sub-contract that stuff out to contractors - they can spread out the cost of, say, a backhoe not over the one year or two you need to build out a district's fiber, but over twenty years.
- Other underground stuff isn't much of an issue in rural areas - you have the central map register of the district which shows exactly where active lines are, and there aren't many. Usually it's the 10 kV/220V electricity line, water mains and the huge POTS cable. Sewers in most cases aren't much of a concern as they tend to be built very deep (here in Germany, minimum 100cm below ground level, and usually it's more like 2-3 meters). In rural areas you can usually get away with shooting a mole through the ground or a plough for a trench that a following tractor immediately closes after the pipe is laid in.
- That pipe or whatever you're building out underground can last literally for decades. POTS cable in many cases is over fifty years old, personally I have seen stuff that was covered in clay protection plates with swastikas meaning it was well over 70 years old. At 50 years, the life time earning of a connection is 33.000$.
- Governments usually subsidize the cost because broadband is an extremely net-positive investment. Assume a small village of 100 people gets broadband Internet uplink - now a small company moves into some farmer's shed because the rent is cheap and now pays tens of thousands a year in corporate and employment taxes.
In many rural places in the US, the majority of homes have their own septic tank and leech field. Some homes (although it's much rarer) even haul in their own water by truck. Power and phone are often on poles. They probably use LP gas brought in by truck. So often the main concern is the water mains.
I live in one of those rural homes. We only get electricity (and natural gas too, but that's unusual around here) brought in. Water and sewer are on-site. Phone is VoIP. Internet is wireless (via an ISP I built). Rural piped water is very rare here.
Lots of rural folks rely on well water.
True. Many of the places that are low-hanging fruit for rural Internet access do not, but it's a mix. Many of these places that the comments are dismissing as irredeemably remote are along secondary highways less than five miles from a city limit. Lots of those places have water mains, but certainly there are places with private wells.