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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: 0.25s | source
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boplicity ◴[10 Aug 22 16:59 UTC] No.32415153[source]▶
He's getting $2.6 million to set up access to 417 homes. That works out to $6,235 per home. At $55 per month, it would take 113 months, or over 9 years just to get $2.6 million in revenue.

Horrible economics! What a crazy business to be in. No wonder grants like this are necessary.

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jrajav ◴[10 Aug 22 17:09 UTC] No.32415334[source]▶
So taxpayer dollars are necessary to make this business viable, and the product of that business is something that, realistically, everyone absolutely needs access to - certainly seems like this should not be a private business at all but a public utility. Have we ever asked this kind of question for interstate highways?
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1. floren ◴[10 Aug 22 18:19 UTC] No.32416320[source]▶
The Grant County Public Utility District in eastern Washington (and presumably PUDs elsewhere in the nation) did exactly that. They built a fiber network throughout the county (physically large but pretty sparsely-populated), although they don't provide service directly to customers--instead, a healthy number of local ISPs still exist in the area. If fiber isn't at your house yet, there are also a few WISPs, which were easy to stand up because of the fiber.

https://www.grantpud.org/getfiber