[HN Gopher] Microsoft and an army of tiny telecoms are part of a...
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Microsoft and an army of tiny telecoms are part of a plan to wire
rural America
Author : noptd
Score : 46 points
Date : 2021-09-23 09:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| adolph wrote:
| _To augment coverage, Aristotle [a company profiled in article]
| is turning increasingly to Citizens Broadband Radio Service
| (CBRS), a wireless spectrum historically used by U.S. Navy
| aircraft carriers for radar transmissions. In recent years the
| Federal Communications Commission has opened a slice of this
| spectrum for commercial use, enabling Aristotle to beam broadband
| as far as 6 miles to distant Arkansans over signal stations--
| installed atop cell towers, barns, even a prison--that are sort
| of like massive Wi-Fi routers._
|
| What is CBRS?
|
| _On January 27, 2020, the FCC authorized full use of the CBRS
| band for wireless service provider commercialization without the
| restrictions to prevent interference with military use of the
| spectrum. Under the new rules, wireless carriers using CBRS might
| be able to deploy 5G mobile networks without having to acquire
| spectrum licenses._ [0]
|
| 0.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Broadband_Radio_Servi...
| potiuper wrote:
| Charred burnt rappelling squirrels "We've fried quite a few
| squirrels"
| daxfohl wrote:
| One way to find out:
| https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/search-results?keywords=...
| mdasen wrote:
| I do applaud wireless internet companies that are fighting the
| good fight today. However, I feel like the big three wireless
| companies (Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T) are likely going to
| eclipse them in the near future. When dealing with wireless home
| internet, a lot of it is going to depend on the amount of
| spectrum you have, how much that spectrum can cover (lower
| frequencies travel farther), and how much resources you have to
| deploy it. I think that the big three wireless companies are
| going to win on those fronts.
|
| Aristotle has 40MHz of CBRS (3.5GHz) spectrum and can also use up
| to 80MHz more of unlicensed spectrum (though that could suffer
| interference problems from basically anyone else that wants to
| use the unlicensed portion). The big three companies have more
| spectrum - T-Mobile has 335MHz, AT&T 246MHz, and Verizon 290MHz.
| Not only that, it's across more frequency bands which has
| implications for coverage. Low-band (below 1GHz) spectrum will
| travel farther and be less susceptible to disruption. AWS/PCS
| spectrum from 1.7GHz to 2.1GHz and 2.5GHz BRS/EBS spectrum will
| travel farther than 3.5GHz spectrum. And yes, the big three also
| have CBRS/C-Band 3.5/3.7GHz spectrum.
|
| These companies are going to have an army of wireless
| technicians, a lot more spectrum, and the money to invest in
| deploying it. T-Mobile already has 30M eligible households for
| their home internet (around 20-25% of US households) and I'm sure
| it isn't perfect, but it will be improving rapidly over the next
| few years as they bring lots more spectrum online. Verizon has
| announced home internet plans as well (I think hitting 30M by the
| end of 2023 and 75M by the end of 2024 or 2025, but this is from
| memory here).
|
| To make a simple comparison, Verizon is going to be averaging
| 174MHz of 3.5/3.7GHz spectrum vs Aristotle with 40MHz. To me, it
| seems like Verizon is going to be able to deploy a better home
| internet service. However, rural wireless carriers have put up a
| good fight in the past and often serve areas where the big three
| don't. Aristotle might also invest in equipment that simply works
| better for what their customers want.
|
| For example, T-Mobile's home internet service just uses a
| router/modem that's the size of a WiFi router. There's no fancy
| large antenna or anything. Aristotle might work with their
| customers to install high-gain directional antennas much like
| rural people are used to installing for terrestrial or satellite
| TV. Localities might be more willing to give a small, local
| company like Aristotle access to their water towers in a way that
| they wouldn't give the big three access. Aristotle might also be
| better able to find a report with customers about the trade-offs
| of adding more capacity, cost, traffic management, etc.
|
| But T-Mobile could copy that playbook in the coming years.
| T-Mobile has talked a lot on investor calls about seeing rural
| customers as one of their big growth areas over the next 5 years.
| If Aristotle can make it work with 3.5GHz spectrum, T-Mobile's
| 2.5GHz spectrum has better coverage and they have more of it.
|
| I'm probably being overly pessimistic, but it just seems hard to
| compete with the big three wireless companies.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| I stop reading when it says microsoft. That is my rule.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| "army" ?
| [deleted]
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Are you asking what it means? Or questioning the use of a term
| commonly associated with a military? Because, in English, it
| has another very commonly used meaning:
|
| > a large number of people or things, typically formed or
| organized for a particular purpose.
| ToFab123 wrote:
| https://archive.is/YnlwF
| iammisc wrote:
| How about we just pay smaller regional companies? I'm like 100%
| certain the people of the Arkansas delta don't want some company
| from seattle in their area. Can't we just leave people alone?
|
| For example, this wireless technology is not difficult to deploy
| and maintain. By allying with large companies, we're just
| contributing to wealth inequality.
|
| Instead, develop community college programs in these areas to
| encourage technological development. Recruit microsoft et al as
| _training_ partners, not owners, and let people start their own
| ISPs.
|
| Why is it that the moment government subsidizes big business in
| the name of social welfare, everyone fawns over it?
|
| EDIT: All this is is a wealth transfer from government to
| companies (that conveniently tend to support the party currently
| in charge!... how nice) to own yet more infrastructure in a place
| that predominantly votes against the incumbency. No wonder no one
| likes the federal government.
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| You must have missed the "army of tiny telecoms" in the
| headline.
| iammisc wrote:
| Conveniently beholden to Microsoft.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| > Can't we just leave people alone?
|
| Evangelicalism comes in all shapes and sizes.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| >How about we just pay smaller regional companies?
|
| I believe that's what the article is about.
| CyanLite2 wrote:
| So much apparent bias in this article (from telecom vendors).
|
| >Bowles says a fiber-to-the-home alternative would've cost $5.5
| million, taken at least four months longer to construct, and
| covered just over 600 homes.
|
| This is the problem. If it was a wealthy neighborhood, no one
| would blink an eye at spending $5.5 million of government funding
| to string fiber to 600+ homes. But if it's rural people,
| especially the black or brown ones, then it's a questionable
| decision, and they should just get shoddy CBRS-based Internet
| instead at a $2m cost instead.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| This is a horse crap take. People in rural areas get an insane
| amount of subsidization for infrastructure. And for what
| reason? Why does their incredibly energy intensive, land
| intensive lifestyle deserve to get subsidized?
|
| This is yet another take that money deserves to get sucked out
| of cities and pushed to car dependent, unsustainable areas.
|
| The city where I live had a good, commercially successful fiber
| roll out going. The ISP literally stopped the progress of the
| roll out in the city for a couple of years, where it was
| actually affordable and paying for itself, because they got a
| massive government "grant" to put up fiber in a rural area just
| to the south.
|
| If people want to live in rural areas and then shit on people
| living in dense areas, where quality infrastructure is actually
| possible for a reasonable price, let them pay for it!
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| https://terragraph.com/
| scohesc wrote:
| Somehow I'd be more comfortable with Microsoft handling my
| traffic rather than Facebook.
|
| I know it's probably misguided, but still.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Well, Microsoft spent about 20 years not tracking their
| users, despite having full control of and an effective
| monopoly on desktop and laptop operating systems.
|
| Facebook... has never not.
| GDC7 wrote:
| I bet many would be willing to be tracked in exchange for a
| free desktop/laptop
|
| It takes 2 to tango. Always.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| This was done in the past. "Internet appliances", I don't
| recall any being free but they were inexpensive and
| paired with free/cheap (for the time) internet service.
| Netzero was also an ISP that offered free internet funded
| by ads.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_appliance
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetZero
| syntaxing wrote:
| Wow that was a blast to the past! I remember my dad
| trying it out because AOL was getting too expensive for
| us to sustain. Good times!
| ipaddr wrote:
| You are really misguided. Microsoft is more aligned with
| military/government with contacts and projects going back 20+
| years. Facebook hacks around your privacy to keep you coming
| back to sell higher priced ads. Microsoft doesn't really sell
| ads but they make great products for law enforcement and
| desire to work with the cia, nsa, fbi,etc.
| madengr wrote:
| If there is an electric/telephone pole, put fiber on it. I don't
| see what the hell the problem is. Power and telephone were run
| before, thus fiber can be run now.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Diminishing returns? In the '80s half of America was in cities,
| and the rest rural. But today its more like half are in coastal
| cities, and most of the rest in cities. Rural folk are a
| diminishing fraction of America.
| topkai22 wrote:
| Did you mean the 1880s? The US population has been majority
| urban / suburban since the 1920s. The rural population is
| declining, but remains 17% of the population. That's a
| significant portion of the population and would be incredibly
| wrong to write off.
| coding123 wrote:
| I think you will see that in the next 10 years will be the big
| return of rural as people want to get away from... other
| people.
| spa3thyb wrote:
| More terrestrial infrastructure - fiber and radios - is an
| interesting 'Tech New Deal', but I look at just Starlink (and I
| hope there are more competitors with customers soon!) and see
| this area is already covered:
|
| https://sebsebmc.github.io/starlink-coverage/index.html
|
| If we're gonna spend 65B, could we throw 100M at buying everyone
| in the delta a dish?
| smoldesu wrote:
| Starlink is quite good. I've been using them for a few months
| now after switching from a more traditional, smaller WISP (and
| before that, godforsaken Hughesnet). It's really hard to beat
| Starlink, especially at the price. Unless you have a local
| telecom willing to run CAT6 out to your house, you can't really
| find speeds like it. Latency is low enough to game on,
| bandwidth is zippy (and unlimited), and the uptime puts 4G
| hotspots to shame.
|
| If I had one complaint with it, it's probably the hardware
| itself. For $500, the installation kit is fairly barebones. On
| top of that, the router is pretty obviously "beta hardware"
| too, as well as the software and even parts of the dish itself.
| I'd be a little disappointed if I opened a Comcast installation
| kit with the same trappings, but I'll give Starlink some credit
| for pulling together such an impressive infrastructure/consumer
| hardware product at a non-alienating price.
| jagger27 wrote:
| > Unless you have a local telecom willing to run CAT6 out to
| your house, you can't really find speeds like it.
|
| Is CAT6 all that common? 100m runs seems pretty limiting in a
| rural setting. I think even the fibre that was strung up to
| my house in a fairly dense inner city neighbourhood has a
| longer run than that to the hub.
|
| Is it possible to provide power to signal repeaters with POE
| to get around the ~100 meter limit?
| tim-- wrote:
| > Is it possible to provide power to signal repeaters with
| POE to get around the ~100 meter limit?
|
| Yes, but at that point you may as well just run fiber.
| These days, the SFP modules are cheap (20km SFP for ~$80).
|
| The loss of signal on a CAT6 cable will be much greater
| then on fiber. When too much noise is introduced on a CAT6
| cable, speeds will drop considerably. Packet loss will be
| quite high.
| posguy wrote:
| Starlink has a finite amount of bandwidth, orders of magnitude
| less bandwidth than fiber. This is due to a restricted range of
| spectrum that will penetrate the atmosphere to their clients
| and an even smaller set which Starlink is allowed to use.
|
| It is questionable whether their network could immediately
| handle 100k additional households, and by the time they scale
| the network to handle this, it is likely their existing 90k
| users will have continued with the yearly double digit
| bandwidth usage increase, eating much of the added capacity.
|
| https://www.lightreading.com/4g3gwifi/starlinks-network-face...
| chollida1 wrote:
| Starlink has been incredibly unreliable for us in our testing.
| VPN's dropping alot. I'm sure its great for basic web surfing
| or things that don't require low latency but it has it issues
| for sure.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Their constellation is < 10% deployed, though.
| mdasen wrote:
| We kinda are. Starlink has won $885.5M in FCC subsidies
| already. However, as others have pointed out, Starlink doesn't
| have infinite bandwidth.
|
| Starlink works because they're building a constellation of
| thousands of satellites. Previous satellite internet companies
| had comparatively few satellites so they needed to restrict how
| much you could use the internet with low data caps. Starlink
| still has capacity constraints.
|
| Terrestrial wireless infrastructure is likely to be cheaper for
| the amount of capacity you get - especially when you consider
| that most of the cost will be shared with existing mobile
| networks.
|
| With terrestrial wireless, it's relatively easy to split cells
| when you need more capacity. Wireless cells can cover hundreds
| of square miles in rural areas.
|
| That's not to say that Starlink doesn't have a place, but it
| isn't a cheap service. $100/mo and $550 sign-up cost isn't
| cheap internet. $100M wouldn't buy a Starlink Dishy for even
| 200,000 people, never mind the monthly cost and never mind the
| fact that we're already spending $885.5M on Starlink.
|
| $65B looks like a big number, but if we're talking 25M people
| it's only $2,600 per person and that pays for less than 2 years
| of Starlink per person (including the $550 startup cost). Plus,
| Starlink won't have capacity for 25M people. Elon Musk has said
| that they'll probably be able to serve the 500,000 preorders
| and that things get more challenging in the several million
| user range - never mind 25M users.
|
| If we're talking 43M people like Broadband Now estimates or the
| 120M that Microsoft estimates, it gets even more clear that
| we'll need more than Starlink.
|
| Starlink is a good way to serve extremely rural customers who
| likely won't even get decent wireless signals and it's a good
| way for SpaceX to get large government subsidies for providing
| service to rural areas. Starlink isn't a private company
| solving a problem for the public. It's public money being
| offered for a solution to a problem and SpaceX wanting to go
| after some of that money and hopefully create a decent business
| out of it.
| jessaustin wrote:
| _The Delta is what government officials refer to as a "high-cost
| area," a remote spot with a sparse population, high poverty rate,
| and topography that makes everything complicated._
|
| I support more broadband options and in general I like TFA, but
| this is the sort of thing that undermines the argument. There is
| no easier "topography" in which to bury lines or over which to
| beam LOS than completely flat alluvial plain. The lines can be
| simply plowed into the ground and the antennas only have to clear
| the treetops.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The rivers that make up a delta deposit a lot of sediment and
| rapidly switch channels, so I imagine that could actually be a
| very difficult environment to bury wires in.
| jessaustin wrote:
| This exaggerates the range over which the rivers in question
| move. They aren't regularly destroying houses and other
| buildings that need broadband. Rather, they take various
| paths through low land that is already devoted to the passage
| of rivers. Rivers on alluvial plains are more movable than
| rivers in mountain gorges, but they pose no greater threat to
| cables than they do to other permanent facilities like roads,
| buildings, power lines, etc.
|
| Even in the rare cases when a section of cable must be
| replaced, it's still just plow it into deep soil rather than
| bore through rock the whole way.
| cptskippy wrote:
| According to the article it's $50,000 a mile to run fiber.
|
| According to Wikipedia: The Delta has some of
| the lowest population densities in the American South,
| sometimes fewer than 1 person per square mile.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Delta#Today
| User23 wrote:
| That's surprisingly high. Surely locals who already have
| tractors and experience digging trenches would take the job
| for less?
|
| It's not like unrolling a spool of fiber is rocket science
| either.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I'm with you. I suspect this is in places where you need to
| be careful. If you go "we provide service to this node -
| last mile is your problem" and sell wholesale fiber optic
| I'm sure you could make it cheaper. Let the guy run his own
| repeaters and cable. You just provide the link to the
| closest node.
|
| I wonder if there are consumer laws that make that
| infeasible.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Also from the Wikipedia article:
| Urbanization and the shift to mechanization of farm
| technology during the past 60 years has sharply
| reduced jobs in the Delta. People have followed
| jobs out of the region, leading to a declining tax base.
| This hampers efforts to support education,
| infrastructure development, community health and
| other vital aspects of growth. The region's
| remaining people suffer from unemployment, extreme poverty,
| and illiteracy.
| scohesc wrote:
| Back when the telecom companies were running cross-country
| cabling in the 80's 90's in Canada, there's a large part of the
| country starting about central Canada going east-wards that's
| called the Canadian Shield. It's made of _EXTREMELY_ dense
| rock. Cable companies had to literally make a series of
| controlled explosions to run cables underground or to even set
| communications poles in the ground.
|
| There's a lot of factors that go into running underground
| cable, heck even above-ground can be problematic too!
|
| I believe Telus buries their cross-country fiber cables at
| least 18 feet underground, far below anybody even coming close
| to excavating it, due to the sheer amount of financial damage
| that could be caused by a fiber cut.
| Arrath wrote:
| > Cable companies had to literally make a series of
| controlled explosions to run cables underground or to even
| set communications poles in the ground.
|
| Trench blasting can be expensive at times, but its not an
| unknown quantity for infrastructure projects[1]. That expense
| of installation can be weighed against, as you mention,
| service cuts of more vulnerable surface lines.
|
| [1]See the first video here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZc2gAMxFzg
| garmaine wrote:
| Is this a job for The Boring Company? Dig a straight hole
| through bedrock that can be "tapped" from the surface with a
| precisely positioned narrow drill, but is wide enough for
| human technicians to traverse in electric golf carts.
| scohesc wrote:
| You'd be looking at billions of dollars to dry and drill
| through that rock. It's incredibly dense.
|
| But yeah, it would be pretty cool to see done.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| There's already a much easier path if you are going to drill
| coast to coast by simply going south.
|
| Plus that reuses existing infrastructure.
| adolph wrote:
| Yeah, I think the author got the delta mixed up for Arkansas in
| general.
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(page generated 2021-09-24 23:00 UTC)