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

(arstechnica.com)
1135 points carride | 2 comments | 10 Aug 22 13:23 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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rvnx ◴[10 Aug 22 13:36 UTC] No.32411670[source]▶
To say the least, it's more about siphoning public taxes
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deelowe ◴[10 Aug 22 13:50 UTC] No.32411904[source]▶
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?
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rvnx ◴[10 Aug 22 13:58 UTC] No.32412026[source]▶
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.

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1. halfmatthalfcat ◴[10 Aug 22 14:17 UTC] No.32412361{4}[source]▶
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.
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2. cestith ◴[10 Aug 22 14:53 UTC] No.32413007[source]▶
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.