However much you think it costs to lay new fiber, add three zeroes. If you lay a new line, you have to individually negotiate for easment rights with the owner of every single property your line crosses. You then have to pay for the construction and any remediations the property owner demands. Typically you have to put the land back to exactly how you found it.
This is the entire reason that the US forced Bell/AT&T to allow any company to lease a connection to their network. Without that, it would have been flatly impossible for any new provider to compete. There is simply no way that anyone could have ever built out a network to compete with Bell.
You can probably lease a connection to the fiber network in the same way (I haven't checked, but I assume common carrier applies), but if there's no fiber to the addresses you want to service you're SOL unless you want to front tens of thousands of dollars per customer. No ROI on that for many, many years.
Your only recourse there is to additionally stand up DSL/DOCSIS as a 'last mile' connection between the customer and your fiber. At additional unbelievable expense.
> If you lay a new line, you have to individually negotiate for easment rights with the owner of every single property your line crosses.
This may be true in some areas, but it wasn't in mine. I didn't have to agree to anything; it was negotiated with the town, not me. I presume they used the existing utility/sewer easements.
If I'm in a city neighborhood, could I just run fiber on the telephone poles just like Comcast does cable? I could probably run point-to-point connections from my garage to 16 single family homes and 2 multi-unit buildings with 3000' (extremely generous) of fiber.
If it was $50/mo, and 20 customers, that's only $1k/mo, which I'm not sure would cover a fiber backhaul...
You can get on the poles, if they're there and there's room, and you can find and follow the attachment rules and pay the attachment prices. Back when Google was going to run fiber to the home, they couldn't figure out how to manage the rules, which made their deployments very slow and eventually they gave up when AT&T (and others) deployed fiber to the communities Google announced before Google had managed to get plans finished.
They probably should have found a small telco or three to buy for expertise on pole bureaucracy.
Responding to your parent...
> You can probably lease a connection to the fiber network in the same way (I haven't checked, but I assume common carrier applies), but if there's no fiber to the addresses you want to service you're SOL unless you want to front tens of thousands of dollars per customer. No ROI on that for many, many years.
I would assume mandatory line sharing doesn't apply; the FCC walked back almost all of the 1996 Telecom Act line sharing; telcos and cablecos may well have designed their fiber to the home in ways to thwart what limited regulation was present anyway. If you're near 'commercial' fiber though, lots of that is available for lease.
Satellite is - once you've got the infra up in the air - very straightforward, with the downside that your satellite ISP is likely owned/operated by an unregulated billionaire nutcase that will turn off your access if he doesn't like you any more (c.f. Ukraine front line). It's hard to do that with regulated fiber backhaul, but not impossible.
I've seen a few wireless ISPs mentioned here before, which can be a nice hub/spoke model - run fast fiber to a community, but distribute via wireless (note, not WiFi) to homes and businesses within range.
I'd definitely love to see more community-run ISPs in the World, it's how the Internet should work, really.
> In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia. This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.
However much you think it costs to lay new fiber, add three zeroes. If you lay a new line, you have to individually negotiate for easment rights with the owner of every single property your line crosses. You then have to pay for the construction and any remediations the property owner demands. Typically you have to put the land back to exactly how you found it.
This is the entire reason that the US forced Bell/AT&T to allow any company to lease a connection to their network. Without that, it would have been flatly impossible for any new provider to compete. There is simply no way that anyone could have ever built out a network to compete with Bell.
You can probably lease a connection to the fiber network in the same way (I haven't checked, but I assume common carrier applies), but if there's no fiber to the addresses you want to service you're SOL unless you want to front tens of thousands of dollars per customer. No ROI on that for many, many years.
Your only recourse there is to additionally stand up DSL/DOCSIS as a 'last mile' connection between the customer and your fiber. At additional unbelievable expense.
> If you lay a new line, you have to individually negotiate for easment rights with the owner of every single property your line crosses.
This may be true in some areas, but it wasn't in mine. I didn't have to agree to anything; it was negotiated with the town, not me. I presume they used the existing utility/sewer easements.
If I'm in a city neighborhood, could I just run fiber on the telephone poles just like Comcast does cable? I could probably run point-to-point connections from my garage to 16 single family homes and 2 multi-unit buildings with 3000' (extremely generous) of fiber.
If it was $50/mo, and 20 customers, that's only $1k/mo, which I'm not sure would cover a fiber backhaul...
You can get on the poles, if they're there and there's room, and you can find and follow the attachment rules and pay the attachment prices. Back when Google was going to run fiber to the home, they couldn't figure out how to manage the rules, which made their deployments very slow and eventually they gave up when AT&T (and others) deployed fiber to the communities Google announced before Google had managed to get plans finished.
They probably should have found a small telco or three to buy for expertise on pole bureaucracy.
Responding to your parent...
> You can probably lease a connection to the fiber network in the same way (I haven't checked, but I assume common carrier applies), but if there's no fiber to the addresses you want to service you're SOL unless you want to front tens of thousands of dollars per customer. No ROI on that for many, many years.
I would assume mandatory line sharing doesn't apply; the FCC walked back almost all of the 1996 Telecom Act line sharing; telcos and cablecos may well have designed their fiber to the home in ways to thwart what limited regulation was present anyway. If you're near 'commercial' fiber though, lots of that is available for lease.
Easements and access.
-The people that install fiber cost $100/hr+
-Trenching and directional boring equipment is expensive. Setting poles to run overhead fiber on is expensive.
-Restoration of green space, asphalt, and concrete are all expensive
-Easements are time consuming to negotiate if there isn’t a utility easement available to use
Laying fiber is expensive and time consuming.
Satellite is - once you've got the infra up in the air - very straightforward, with the downside that your satellite ISP is likely owned/operated by an unregulated billionaire nutcase that will turn off your access if he doesn't like you any more (c.f. Ukraine front line). It's hard to do that with regulated fiber backhaul, but not impossible.
I've seen a few wireless ISPs mentioned here before, which can be a nice hub/spoke model - run fast fiber to a community, but distribute via wireless (note, not WiFi) to homes and businesses within range.
I'd definitely love to see more community-run ISPs in the World, it's how the Internet should work, really.
And even if you aren't disconnected, there are valid concerns about privacy and censorship.
> owned/operated by an unregulated billionaire nutcase that will turn off your access if he doesn't like you any more (c.f. Ukraine front line)
Is this actually true?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
> In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia. This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.
Sad to see your comment downvoted for inconvenient facts correcting a very prevalent urban legend.
This is the level of political bias that exists where facts have to be suppressed to fuel the narrative and the agenda.
Original (non-primary) source cited at the end of that paragraph:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk...
[EDIT: Deleted quoted text from above, because I missed (!!!) the retraction from the cited primary author ]
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