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

(arstechnica.com)
1135 points carride | 3 comments | 10 Aug 22 13:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.682s | source
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qwe----3 ◴[10 Aug 22 13:35 UTC] No.32411651[source]▶
> over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served

This doesn't seem very efficient to me.

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burntsushi ◴[10 Aug 22 14:11 UTC] No.32412258[source]▶
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.

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1. brianwawok ◴[10 Aug 22 14:14 UTC] No.32412325[source]▶
You get bigger machines, which do work faster.
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2. fragmede ◴[10 Aug 22 17:47 UTC] No.32415861[source]▶
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.
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3. brianwawok ◴[11 Aug 22 14:54 UTC] No.32426674[source]▶
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).