Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

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.

That's fair, maybe this family should be able to opt out of taxes that don't benefit them then, you know since they are so remote and everything.

> Perhaps a Starlink connection would have been enough for them and perfectly fine if it's a single family.

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-...

Well it's not a stupid idea at all, that when you pay taxes, you could vote for the 3 or 4 topics that you want support in priority, and they get allocated a more budget in proportion or something like that.

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.

It's pretty widely accepted that the government will help people gain and maintain access to infrastructure, even (especially?) in rural areas. Ever heard of the Rural Electrification Administration[0]? The Tennessee Valley Authority[1]? Despite the fact that it is not considered a _necessary_ utility de jure, internet access is hugely important in our modern society and economy. These areas have post offices, electricity, trash service, etc., so why shouldn't they also have access to internet? Those other utilities cost money to install as well.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority

I don't understand this comment. There are a lot of places in the country where a majority pays for the minority when it comes to infrastructure. Case in point NYC or Chicago, whose populations and tax bases make up a majority of the state, yet their taxes still go to maintaining the state infrastructure as a whole. The state, in order to function, needs some kind of continuity and predictability to plan for population dynamics and spread out taxes accordingly.

Yes.

Do you also think the [16th amendment][1] should be repealed? Because what you are arguing is basically the same as the opponents of that amendment.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...

5G base stations have a range on the order of 1000 feet, and need to be connected to a high-speed backbone to function.

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.

Further, they should be forcibly blocked from using any services they refused to pay taxes for. No highways, flood protection, low food prices, or access to the global trade network for you!

I get the idea, but this is basically just admitting that our representative form of government doesn't work. Ostensibly we control our taxes already by who we vote for.

Sounds good. Might even bring some accountablity

Except if they purchase a subscription to these benefits through one of the two companies (same parent company) that provide them. The subscriptions are of course competitively priced, since they only have the best interest of their customers at heart.

Even beyond helping the state as a whole, they are also helping themselves. Good luck getting anything into or out of Chicago or New York without rail, roads, locks, dams, and airports. Infrastructure that connects to nothing isn't all that useful. All that downstate Illinois roadway, railway, navigable rivers, and smaller airports have their uses for Chicago, too. That's what networks - like the Internet - do.

That sounds like it would bring even more political divisiveness and injustice to the US.

I find it's helpful to create a monopoly on purpose, and then give that monopoly for a service an additional monopoly on violence. Then, if someone doesn't want to use the monopoly, they can just send men with weapons of war to force them to fund the monopoly at gunpoint.

The difference is that those investments will be usable by anyone who wants the service and can setup the antenna. Where-as a half mile fiber run to your house in the boonies can only ever be useful to you.

You should look up the area that Jared is building his fiber network. These homes are probably 10 minutes from the University of Michigan. It's not a remote country-side, it's just far enough out of reach of Comcast that they won't build out. I understand your point if someone decides to build their house on 20 acres of forest, but this is not that. That's why we need these programs.

The subsidy is for the company though and not this specific fiber run, which was a sort of worst-case. The company is quite limited in geographical scope, so they got a fairly small subsidy, while Starlink is much larger in scope and thus got a larger one.

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.

5G internet is no replacement for wired internet. The latency is terrible for use cases like gaming.

Rural sprawl significantly increases overall infrastructure costs. Their taxes are already being subsidized by more urban tax payers. Those rural areas can't afford to maintain what they have.

Some people are farmers. Everyone benefits if there is Internet in remote places in order to help people stay and live where the farming is going to happen.

I thought 5G was in the range of 1-10ms.

One way or another, tax payers spent $30K on a fiber run to one house. Yes, they spent less on some other ones too. The indirection just increases cost insensitivity.

It's all about averages though. Some people will be cheap to connect, while others will be expensive to connect. And the subsidies are most likely written in a way, such that the ISPs can't only go for the low-hanging fruit.

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..

...or not: "FCC denies Starlink’s application for $885M subsidy" (breaking news)

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/10/fcc-denies-starlinks-appli...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32417587

You are thinking of 5G mmwave which trades off better range for better speed and latency. For maximizing coverage you are looking at something that looks like 4G.

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.