> over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served
This doesn't seem very efficient to me.
replies(13):
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.
He's being paid by the government to bring Internet access to homes in the state that aren't currently wired for it.
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.
EDIT: At least here in Western Europe, we mostly have a supply side inflation, because energy got a lot more expensive, not because the government has been "printing" a lot of money. I suspect it's the same in the US.
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.
Oh the irony... Starlink is also tapping (federal) government subsidies to provide internet service to rural areas. Tapping government subsidies is a very important part of Starlink's plan to become profitable.
Ref: "SpaceX's Starlink wins nearly $900 million in FCC subsidies to bring internet to rural areas" https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/07/spacex-starlink-wins-nearly-...
This could even increase support of people to pay taxes (reducing fraud) as the taxpayers would know they would be supporting projects in line with their vision and lifestyle.
Of course, this assume you're comfortable with heavy machinery and can work around other utilities (most counties have a "Miss Utility" service that will mark existing services).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority
One of the first thing the US's founders did was create the postal service, which was to provide mail service to everyone, regardless of location; it literally costs the same to mail a letter across the street as to send it to some house in Whoknowswhere, Alaska. This provides a minimum communications infrastructure.
One of the best things that were done in the New Deal was the Rural Electrification Act, which ensured that electrical service was provided to everyone, providing a minimum availability of a critical energy source.
Also essential was the initial telecommunications acts, which required providing telephone service at the same rates to all addresses. Again, providing this service universally ensures that the entire country has a baseline communications infrastructure.
This is why the telecomm companies have been aggressively stripping copper telephone wires from their system and replacing everything with fiber or coax — because the laws requiring universal service are tied to phone service and copper wires. This is why we wind up with companies like Comcast saying "F*$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.
Or you can rent a ditch witch and do it yourself and dig by hand near anything remotely marked by the marking crew.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...
But here in the USA, people like to believe it must be political and local, completely unrelated to the totally-coincidental worldwide issue that happens to be very similar.
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.
In rural areas, a 1000 foot radius doesn't get you very many people, and since you ran fiber all the way to that antenna, you might as well run fiber the rest of the way.
Sure, they're helping an ally in a De facto war against Russia, but currently the us spends more on "defense" than both Russia and China combined, when it is technically at peace. In case of a war with China, are you expecting the military budget to not increase at all?
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.
This has already been tried. People used to subscribe to fire service, or ambulance service. It doesn't work, and is also bad for society.
If you want people to only use the things they directly pay for, and not pay for shared things through taxes, then only drive on your own driveway. Don't drive on any roads outside of your cul-de-sac. Don't get your Amazon order delivered on state and federally-funded highways. Don't fly out of any big airport in America. Don't fly on any commercial airline, since they have all received taxpayer bailouts in the past. Don't use a bank. Don't use money. Hire a security guard to protect your property, and another one to follow you around every day. Get your water from a well on your own property.
For an 88-day-old account to be this stunningly obtuse, I'm going with "troll," rather than "genuinely completely oblivious to how the world works."
The country I live in SE Asia is a good example. It's quite libertarian out here and yeah being able to pay for private hospitals is nice, but generally speaking your quality of life is lower, quality of goods is lower, average person is less educated, traffic is a crippling problem due to poor planning, it goes on and on. And despite labor being super cheap, roads are a mess, sidewalks are few and far between and if you do get one it's crowded with junk.. Only 10% of the country pays taxes, the inequality with the rich is massive, and if you're not in the top 1% you're basically a poor.
I recommend everyone in a rich english speaking country spending at least a year or two living in a developing country to get some perspective
Snark aside, I spent years being angry about every government subsidy until I learned that some subsidies are pork barrel spending and some are just the normal allocations required by a functioning government to maintain the expected standard of living.
There's no ISDN, no DSL, no Starlink yet, no 5G fixed, no 4G fixed, no power-line Internet. They are not watching any Netflix, and things like Social Security and Medicare are increasingly accessed through poorly performing, bloated websites. They paid taxes more than five decades of full-time work. There's fiber within two miles of them, but nobody's used it to extend what's becoming a modern necessity to their house.
If they lived on the other side of the road, they'd have the area's rural electric cooperative. Then they could get at least 10 Mbps over the power lines. However, they're on a corporate power provider that has 4 to 12 hour outages 3 to 4 times a year besides not offering similar additional services.
With the right negotiations and a few hundred thousand dollars, their moderately densely populated unincorporated area could serve hundreds of homes with broadband. The cable and phone companies were given millions upon millions of subsidies every month for decades now for rural phone and Internet access, but have not served this area. It's time something else is done in these areas to give them the same access to the modern marketplace and to government services as everyone else.
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.
Also that fiber run will remain useful for far longer than the Starlink satellites. It's pretty much a one-time cost with negligible operating cost, whereas Starlink will have to continuously keep launching satellites to keep it running.
If multiple and more reliable than Starlink existed, maybe.
The point of universal access is just that - UNIVERSAL access.
We are already failing this massively with laws granting territorial monopolies to companies like Comcast AT&T, Verizon, etc., enabling them to give the worst possible service at globally awful prices. Granting another effective monopoly to Starlink is not the solution, UNLESS we are going to regulate all of this like a utility - actual regulated standards of service, by companies with a large in-state business nexus, cost-plus rates approved by regulatory body, etc.
Using Starlink seems fine, but Starlink has effectively zero skin in the game, no in-state nexux. If it is convenient for them to shut off or downgrade service to these houses for some reason, there is essentially zero recourse for these customers or the state to exercise any leverage to cause Starlink to resume service.
This is actually an excellent solution, with a local vendor with skin in the game, providing solid fiber infrastructure.
You really seem to entirely miss the point of UNIVERSAL SERVICE. Yes, the local post office makes a wild profit on delivering a $0.60 1-ounce first-class envelope to a PO box in the same post office, and loses an insane amount delivering the same letter to/from Wherethafakawe, Alaska by bush planes. I'm sure they could be more efficient scanning the letter and sending an email to/from Alaska, but that won't get grandma's fabric sample to her grandkid, or my high-performance sample to my customer. The point is that the same service level everywhere has it's own benefits, and those benefits are to the entire nation, not only to some.
With every general solution, you can point out individual point inefficiencies. What you are failing to notice is that if you optimize for every one of those point inefficiencies, you effectively de-scale the system.
You lose ALL the benefits of a consistent system, as well as losing most of the economies of scale. This is why companies repeatedly go on binges to reduce their supply chain vendor count - sure, some of those suppliers are lower cost at that point, but the overhead of managing many redundant suppliers outweighs the cost.
And you are looking at only one point of the costs, getting bent out of shape, and trowing out a generic "taxes bad" comment. Yes, it looks like a clueless anti-government political comment.
It might even be the case that in some circumstances, a Starlink solution could be best. But you have done none of the analysis to establish that claim, and other people, who are actually 'in the arena' have found a different solution is better. If you want to challenge them, do so with something better than "ugh, taxes and spending bad".
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).
But I suspect that subsidies for infrastructure is one of the least impactful factor for inflation.
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)
This is the problem with mitary and security infra of any country. They keep the bogeyman alive because their paychecks depend on it.
- Private developer builds a sprawling subdivision with plenty of nice wide roads and lots. (So a very large area of pavement per tax-paying property.) And turns the whole thing over to the city/village/township, to be their public road budget black hole forever more.
- Private developer builds a very compact little development, with houses (or condo's) packed in like sardines along a rather narrow and minimalist Private Road.
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.
Same with Starlink on a bigger scale. Some ground station will have more people near them than others (absent satellite to satellite comms). Some orbits will be used by more people than others..
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/10/fcc-denies-starlinks-appli...
That's interesting - FEMA says that 70% of the fire departments in the US are all-volunteer, and >90% have a volunteer component.
https://apps.usfa.fema.gov/registry/summary#g
I've lived in areas with volunteer fire departments that paid for their operations primarily with "fire dues" for most of my life. As far as I know, most volunteer departments operate like that.
I had no idea they didn't work. I wonder if anyone has told them?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-fo...
* 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.
>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.
You cannot simply assume as you stated, that just because something looks like a viable solution, it is.
Again, the people that decided are doing the WORK of figuring out how to make the system work, in contrast to taking random potshots in an internet forum.
From the article: >> The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rejected Starlink's application to receive $885.51 million in broadband funding
>>The FCC said that both Starlink and LTD "failed to meet program requirements," submitted "risky proposals," and that their "applications failed to demonstrate that the providers could deliver the promised service."
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/fcc-rejects-star...
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).
Subscription fire departments were commercial entities, sometimes run by insurance companies, to which you paid a regular subscription fee. If you house was on fire, they'd extinguish the flames. If your neighbor's house was on fire, and they didn't subscribe, then they let it burn.
Citing a completely different thing does not refute what I wrote. It just illustrates that you don't fully understand the issue.