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

(arstechnica.com)
1135 points carride | 1 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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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. dboreham ◴[10 Aug 22 16:09 UTC] No.32414343[source]▶
There are fixed costs to a job. It doesn't cost much more to dig a bit longer trench. Things like needing to do horizontal boring to cross an intersection would jack up the cost though.

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).