[HN Gopher] ARPA is funding cheap community-owned gigabit fiber ...
___________________________________________________________________
ARPA is funding cheap community-owned gigabit fiber to neglected
neighborhoods
Author : hn_acker
Score : 132 points
Date : 2025-02-24 14:48 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techdirt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techdirt.com)
| hn_acker wrote:
| The full title is:
|
| > ARPA Is Quietly Funding Cheap ($50-$65 A Month) Community-Owned
| Gigabit Fiber Access To Long Neglected Neighborhoods
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Title made it sound like ARPA is comitting up to a whopping $65
| to fibre, which doesn't sound like enough.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| I get it, the US is big, but I just can't understand still why
| the government itself doesn't invest heavily in fiber
| connections. Most of Europe did this since the early 2000s, and
| here I am, writing this from my home connection which is
| symmetric 10Gbps (frankly, I can't really measure it, because
| it's faster than my 2.5Gbps Ethernet card, so I just believe it)
| for less than $50/month. And it doesn't matter which country I
| am, because this is common in most countries.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| My answer to that: it's a combination of a belief and lobbying.
|
| The belief: the federal government can't do anything correctly,
| and wastes taxpayer money.
|
| The lobbying: Comcast, and regional telephone oligopolies lobby
| to keep all governments, local, state, national, from providing
| internet services. The motives here vary, but probably come
| down to keeping a local or regional monopoly.
|
| An unfortunate synergy, essentially.
| relax88 wrote:
| The US has 1/3 the population density as Europe. I'm sure that
| helps to explain it somewhat.
| yetihehe wrote:
| But it has some biggest cities. Is such fast fiber available
| there?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| If you live in the right neighborhood where they installed
| fiber lines for residential connection already. Most I get
| is coax internet fwiw although fiber is available in
| certain parts. I asked my telecom about fiber they said it
| would cost like a couple thousand running the line to me.
| bombcar wrote:
| What I've noticed is that nobody is running new
| coax/copper anymore. It's all fiber for new developments,
| and any plant replacement is with fiber.
|
| Which makes sense, fiber has all sorts of advantages.
| dingnuts wrote:
| this also always gets forgotten when high speed rail comes
| up. Air travel makes a LOT of sense for the way the US
| population is distributed. Rail makes more sense when you
| want to have stops along the way, but in the US, there's a
| lot of nothing between distantly located cities.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Even in places where it makes all the sense in the world,
| we don't have quality rail. It's more expensive and slower
| to take the train than to drive from Boston to NYC, and
| that's a perfect length of trip for rail. The whole North
| East Corridor seems to run ancient track, and the "High
| Speed" Acela service doesn't even count as such in locales
| with modern HS services.
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| If it was just the matter of replacing track in the
| existing right-of-way they would have done that.
| Unfortunately, much of the NEC right-of-way between NY
| and Boston -- particularly in Connecticut -- is too
| curvy. Bulldozing a new, straighter right of way across
| CT is not politicaly feasible -- it would most likely
| require massive amounts of property seizure by eminent
| domain that nobody has the stomach for. If there were
| real breakthroughs in low cost tunnel boring machines
| there might be a way but it's not going to happen at or
| above ground.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| The old rich folks in CT who don't want the NEC alignment
| don't care if it's in a tunnel (folks still came out to
| oppose the new alignment near Old Lyme even when the
| proposal changed to allow for a tunnel so they didn't
| have to see or hear the thing).
|
| If there was true HS service on the NEC between Boston
| and NYC you'd easily get a far larger share of the BOS-
| NYC pax trips made. Estimates are about 15MM trips/yr
| with rail being about a third of that. Is getting an
| extra 5 million car trips off the road worth
| inconveniencing some of the most affluent communities in
| the US?
|
| BOS NYC, driven is about 2 micromorts, the drive is about
| 140kg CO2. So, napkin math, if half the people traveling
| by car and plane switched to train, you save 5 lives per
| year and 500,000 tons of CO2 emission. That's a (shittily
| calculated, admittedly) estimate of the cost of inaction.
| mapt wrote:
| Specific corridors in the US are quite populous and quite
| ready for modern infrastructure. We just aren't in the mood
| to pay anything for it, unless it's more highway lane-
| miles.
| tabony wrote:
| At least in my area, we also don't build new highways. We
| only widen existing ones.
|
| Right of way seems to be the biggest driver of cost and
| seems to be a major blocker for transportation progress.
| bombcar wrote:
| One attempt to do that (in CA) picked a not-great corridor,
| and hasn't done much in a decade. It's really turned people
| off it, even if there are much better places to try.
| wheelerwj wrote:
| Also the ridiculous lobbying by the major telecomm companies.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > I get it, the US is big, but I just can't understand still
| why the government itself doesn't invest heavily in fiber
| connections.
|
| Massive corporate lobbying.
|
| It isn't even just that they don't proactively invest in public
| Internet infrastructure, they (primarily though not exclusively
| the Republicans) also work to make it illegal at the local
| level as a protectionism racket for the telecom companies. The
| same telecom companies who have proven time and time again they
| have zero interest in actually competing and instead have
| mostly just carved up what amount to regional monopolies for
| broadband services.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/gop-plan-for-bro...
|
| https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...
|
| https://broadbandbreakfast.com/sen-cruz-leads-gop-effort-to-...
| renw0rp wrote:
| In the peripherial Europe, like the United Kingdom, fiber optic
| became available only in the last couple of years, definitely
| not early 2000s. There are still places within 80KM from
| London, near main train lines, where you can't get more than
| 50Mbps, so while probably most of the population of Europe has
| access to fast Internet, your statements are not entirely true.
| In 2012 average internet speed in the UK was 7Mbps and now it's
| probably around 75Mbps.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| On the otherhand, fibre is now a requirement for any new
| dewllings in the UK. I have a friend outside of London who
| just upgraded to 2.5Gbps fibre today.
| xyst wrote:
| I blame national ISPs using their money to buy up lobbyists and
| cozy up with the legislators. I know in Texas it's outright
| illegal for cities/municipalities to setup an ISP. They have to
| rely on national providers to pick up the slack.
|
| In reality, these companies have under the table deals with
| each other to avoid competing in a vast majority of regions,
| largely rural areas. Leaving them with shitty and unreliable
| internet service.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > And it doesn't matter which country I am, because this is
| common in most countries.
|
| I've spent a lot of time hiring and working with people across
| Europe and I can assure you that cheap 10Gbps symmetric fiber
| is absolutely not common across Europe.
|
| In some of the countries where we hired we had difficulty with
| people getting any reliable connection at home, let alone high
| speed fiber. (Company supported WFH but reliable internet was a
| requirement).
|
| I think you're probably projecting from your own local
| experience into the entire EU, which is not accurate.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Where I am at which is around 598 people per square mile, fiber
| optic is being installed or has been installed for several
| years by AT&T allowing up to 1Gbps symmetric link. To put it in
| perspective, New York has a density of about 27,000 people per
| square mile. Rural areas have about 100 people per square mile.
| So where I live, I am between low and moderately dense with
| fiber. It's not that bad.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| In 2023, only 64% of EU27 households had access to FttP
| (although 79% had access to gigabit-capable networks, and 93%
| to 'next-gen' networks (VDSL/DOCSIS 3/FttP)).
|
| 'Gigabit connectivity for all by 2030' is an EU policy goal.
|
| Ref: Broadband Coverage in Europe 2023: Mapping progress
| towards the coverage objectives of the Digital Decade (2024).
| URL: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/digital-
| dec...
| bombcar wrote:
| The real reason it hasn't happened is because the vast majority
| of the USA has "good enough" Internet service.
|
| As long as Netflix works, and email sends, people don't care
| too much.
|
| WE love symmetric gigabits and spend all day downloading and
| uploading Linux ISOs, but the average American doesn't.
|
| Even in places, like where I am, where fiber has appeared, it
| hasn't really changed how people use the Internet.
|
| Or to put it another way, there's not yet been a killer app for
| symmetric gigabit connections, so there's not a terrible amount
| of demand.
| superjan wrote:
| The consumers that I know of don't have a clue what they
| need. They don't understand that the upstream network is
| rarely the bottleneck. They're prepared to pay a 30-40%
| premium to triple their network speed. Smart ISP's bundle
| their upgrade with new Wifi mesh routers, because that is
| more often the issue. This is in NL, not the US, so there
| still is _some_ price competition here.
| overstay8930 wrote:
| 5G home internet is good enough for 90% of people, so nobody
| cares to spend money for a product almost nobody is asking for
| bityard wrote:
| Most of Europe has a culture of government-owned utilities and
| infrastructure, correct?
|
| Here in the US, that does exist but is less prevalent. Some
| government programs end up costing too much while delivering
| too little, these get a lot of media attention and become the
| focus of too much political debate, and now nobody trusts the
| government to get anything done. (Despite all the government
| programs that do get run well.)
|
| That said, I've long thought that the ideal arrangement for
| last-mile Internet should be that the local government (perhaps
| county) owns the fiber, contracts service and maintenance to a
| local company, and sells access to the fiber and customers to
| companies like AT&T and Comcast. Then companies can compete on
| service and price rather than which board members they can
| bribe.
|
| But that's quite a bit more work than just telling Comcast that
| they can have exclusive access to all of the homes and
| businesses in the township and charge whatever they like.
| kingnothing wrote:
| The government did exactly this. The telecom companies took the
| $400B and never delivered.
|
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
| moralestapia wrote:
| This is really good!
|
| In this time and age, fast and reliable access to the internet
| should be a given, particularly on developed countries.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| This is American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) not Advanced Research
| Projects Agency (ARPA, DARPA, ARPA-[E|H|I], etc.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPA#Acronym
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Thanks
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| They seriously hijacked a well-known longstanding government
| acronym?
|
| Technically-ignorant legislators strike again.
| throwup238 wrote:
| At this point I doubt any of our legislators are actually
| writing*, or even reading the title of, any of these bills.
| They spend the vast majority of their time fundraising,
| either for themselves or their party.
|
| * I assume the Office of Legislative Counsel actually does
| that, when it's not brought to the legislator by a lobbyist
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Yep. Can you imagine showing up at your job totally
| ignorant of what you're implementing... and that's A-OK?
|
| Just realized that I likened Congress to Severance.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > Technically-ignorant legislators strike again.
|
| While fair point, look at how many non-technically-ignorant
| developers hijack common names for projects. It's a disease
| anyone can catch.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| You are, of course, right. I mean... Amazon named their
| digital assistant after the best-known cinema camera in the
| industry.
|
| And VW named one of its cars after the last 30+ years of
| Canon cameras.
|
| Huh, my entire litany of two other examples involves
| cameras...
| dboreham wrote:
| Perhaps it's a cloaking device designed to make it Musk-
| resistant? I'm guessing he's familiar with the real ARPA.
| neilv wrote:
| This is a bad name collision, given the domain (Internet).
|
| I saw the headline, and immediately thought "Huh, what's their
| angle? Surveillance?"
| ape4 wrote:
| Not the ARPAnet
| tptacek wrote:
| In the muni where I serve on our telecoms commission, we built
| (before I got there) a fiber network with the anticipation of
| potentially offering it to tenant ISPs. We wanted the network
| anyways for internal municipal needs. But the economics of
| building an ISP on top of that fiber in a place already served by
| AT&T and Comcast are not great: you target a certain amount of
| uptake to break even, and you're not going to get it.
| bombcar wrote:
| The trick, which is hard to do, is to get AT&T and Comcast to
| realize that they can serve the customers better and faster
| over your network.
|
| But that involves negotiation and there can be lots of finger-
| pointing, so companies don't like it.
| threemux wrote:
| Cool! So where is the funding going to come from for the hard
| stuff like long term upgrades and maintenance? Are the citizens
| of Oswego County going to accept a tax increase down the line, or
| will maintenance be deferred indefinitely until they need to be
| bailed out by the state?
| oneplane wrote:
| If you read the article, and then read the referenced report,
| you can see that long term planning is included, which also
| covers maintenance and upgrades. None of those are new issues
| or unsolved problems. It's not core to the issue of broadband
| access at all.
| threemux wrote:
| I read every word of the article, please follow site
| guidelines regarding comments like that and quote where it
| says anything about future maintenance. The link to the
| Oswego County project links to a New York press release which
| is all about initial connectivity.
|
| A single lump sum is never sustainable, so if you have
| evidence of commitment in an ongoing way, please provide it.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| > Oswego County will own the broadband network and make it
| available for lease to internet service providers,
| including Empire Access, on a non-discriminatory and non-
| exclusive basis. _The revenue generated from these leases
| will support the network 's ongoing maintenance and future
| expansion._ This innovative public infrastructure model
| ensures sustainable, affordable access while promoting
| competition among service providers.
|
| From the first link in the article.
| asow92 wrote:
| Subscriber to Empire Access here. They've been expanding
| all over upstate NY. They have been a joy to work with.
| Far better than the only other previous option being
| Spectrum.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| "Oswego County will own the broadband network and make it
| available for lease to internet service providers,
| including Empire Access, on a non-discriminatory and non-
| exclusive basis. The revenue generated from these leases
| will support the network's ongoing maintenance and future
| expansion."
|
| https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-
| announces-2...
| threemux wrote:
| I see - so it depends on private companies profitably
| providing service to rural residents.
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| It would be a cost to those companies to lease the lines.
| Whether those companies are profitable or not is up to
| their business models. Those companies didn't/wont invest
| in the infrastructure to start with, which is why this
| initiative exists in the first place.
|
| You think you have some sort of gotcha argument against
| this but you keep missing it (largely from being
| uninformed on the subject). Private companies aren't
| investing to build the infra to remote areas due to
| recovery cost timelines. The Govt is providing funding to
| build the infra alongside private partnerships to fund
| the maintenance and operation of the system.
|
| There is very little downside here, if anything it avoids
| monopolistic control due to infrastructure investments
| required to service areas by providing the infra
| companies can then leverage in their business model.
|
| Very similar to roads, powerlines and other things we
| take for granted daily that are fundamental to the
| operation and success of private companies.
| threemux wrote:
| It's not at all similar to roads, the Dulles Greenway
| notwithstanding. Not really similar to power either. I'm
| aware of how this arrangement works and why government
| would want to create and own the infrastructure in an
| attempt to attract investment.
|
| There is no attempt at a "gotcha" argument, just
| dispensing with the Panglossian notion that this will
| definitely work long term. It might!
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| Its similar to roads in a lot of ways, one of the
| important ones is that there is a civil/social utility in
| ensuring even remote people are "connected" by road or
| internet to the rest of the country/world, often at a
| cost to the society outside of private profit.
|
| So the idea that it needs to be self-sustainable or
| profitable to be considered working is myopic. The
| completion/connection of the people is the achievement,
| the sustainability and integration with private companies
| hopefully reduces the government burden and enables
| innovation and competition without the need for vast
| capital expenditures.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > It's not core to the issue of broadband access at all.
|
| What is?
| Arubis wrote:
| Upfront capital investment. Right of way.
| cavisne wrote:
| FTTH infrastructure is very low maintenance once built, its
| mostly passive fiber optic cables that don't degrade. The
| electronics on either end last a long time too.
|
| The issue with FTTH is the build can be very expensive, you
| need to either work with an existing utility or dig trenches
| through an entire neighborhood, and each end user install is a
| mini construction project.
|
| Thats why community FTTH makes a lot of sense, a small team
| does that negotiation with the utility, and uses that to be
| build a business case.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Privatizing the infrastructure doesn't solve that problem. It
| only means that some entity will extract profits on top of the
| maintenance cost. A publicly-owned service can operate at-cost.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| > So where is the funding going to come from for the hard stuff
| like long term upgrades and maintenance
|
| form the price of internet service. That said, one of the
| really nice things about fiber deployments is that they need a
| lot fewer upgrades than coax. Fiber has way way way higher
| bandwidth, so once you've deployed it, the maintenance is
| cheaper than coax where the ISP has to do a ton of work to
| shuffle around bandwidth caps.
| xyst wrote:
| I'll never understand why municipal run internet is illegal in
| some (most?) states. Maybe national ISP lobbyist groups are just
| that powerful or have the right amount of propaganda to influence
| the people in their direction.
|
| One of the many benefits I see:
|
| - local, high paying jobs across the board (linemen, network
| engineers)
|
| - money kept locally within the economy rather than used to fund
| a C-level executives jet fuel costs
|
| - strong motivation to improve the network and make it resilient
| gruez wrote:
| >- local, high paying jobs across the board (linemen, network
| engineers)
|
| As opposed to linemen telecommuting from the other side of the
| country?
|
| >- money kept locally within the economy rather than used to
| fund a C-level executives jet fuel costs
|
| True, although this could turn out to a wash. There's
| operational efficiencies that can be obtained by a national
| company (billing system, support, etc.) that city-scale ISPs
| can't achieve.
|
| >- strong motivation to improve the network and make it
| resilient
|
| The city has "strong motivation" to do a lot of things, but
| based on how universal complaints about city services are
| across the country (from potholes to clearing homeless
| encampments), I don't think it's a slam dunk argument you think
| it is.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It is due to isp lobbying for the most part.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| cf. The American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC)[0]
| tactics[1]
|
| [0] https://alec.org/
|
| [1] https://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/02/12385/how-alec-
| helps-bi...
| bombcar wrote:
| When nobody cares strongly about something, the lobbyist groups
| have a much easier time.
| dboreham wrote:
| Because corruption.
| thecleaner wrote:
| Hide it before Doge gets wind ?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Explain what you did last week or you're fired. Probably fired
| anyways, sounds like a communist iniative.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Well, who expects a private company be able to compete with a
| ARPA-funded system that gets an extra $26m to pull fiber optics
| throughout the county?
|
| The wording here is just a tad biased. Two companies, Charter and
| Verizon, are said to be, "regional New York State monopolies".
| Yet they're competing against each other. The county government,
| on the other hand, is truly the only government there, yet when
| it owns all of the fiber it is somehow encouraging competition.
|
| I'm not saying that government ownership of a collective resource
| is bad. Maybe it's the best option, especially in rural
| environments, but the tone doesn't seem very fair. $26m is quite
| a nice chunk of change, even today.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Its not economically efficient for both charter and Verizon to
| lay fiber to the same buildings so some kind of government
| mediated solution is always going to be required. Without
| competition markets aren't free.
| asow92 wrote:
| I live near where the article talks about and the ISP it
| mentions, Empire Access, is fantastic! I have $60/mo 1Gbps fiber
| with 1 to 3 ms latency.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| We the taxpayers gave the telcos hundreds of BILLIONS of
| dollars to bring this to everyone, and they... just blew it off
| and kept the money: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-
| broken-promis_b_5...
| ck2 wrote:
| Easily predictable anything federal government funded that is
| highlighted by the media as "quietly helping people" is about to
| be nuked.
|
| I get journalists want to write about stuff, but if they keep
| this up they will likely cover their own imprisonment or
| colleagues over the next year or two.
| cj wrote:
| Meanwhile, in my neck of the woods in NY, we have Archtop Fiber
| who raised $350m from a private equity firm to build a fiber
| network and get everyone in our area to switch away from Comcast
| (only alternative). They're signing up entire neighborhoods for
| about $60/mo (and installing the necessary fiber infrastructure
| at the same time).
|
| I was excited to see the local investment in fiber, especially in
| such a rural area, but I'm a bit less excited now that I see it's
| funded by private equity.
| sammyteee wrote:
| Do you mean in a sense that you'd like to see such service
| provided as a necessity service and owned publically? I'm not
| sure I understand the private equity part.
| soperj wrote:
| Private equity isn't in it to help people.
| cj wrote:
| Private Equity is well known for exploiting markets for
| profits without regard for much else.
|
| They will do things like enter a niche market, buy up all mom
| & pop shops (or in the case of ISP, even replace an existing
| monopoly), then once they own the entire niche, commercialize
| the niche and extract as much money out of the niche as
| humanly possible (usually at the expense of customer
| experience, quality of product, etc)
| foobarchu wrote:
| Private equity is almost by definition profit driven. There's
| a high likelihood that they're using the low introductory
| cost to build out a network before jacking prices up and up
| in a bid to become the new monopoly.
| daveguy wrote:
| Not to be glib, but private equity loves to enshittify for
| profit. It's really bad in combination with necessary
| services.
|
| See also: dental, medical, veterinary
| richwater wrote:
| Everyone believes this weird narrative that the only thing PE
| does is buy successful businesses, load them with debt and
| then cause them to shutdown.
|
| The reality is that PE does not buy successful businesses;
| they are already struggling. No one else will touch it. Thus,
| when it comes time to recoup the investment, there is
| normally a sense of enshittification, which is reality was
| either already destined to happen, or the business would just
| close anyway.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I wish there was a news site that was dedicated only to reporting
| these sort of "quiet moves", as they seem far more interesting.
| DeepSpaceRadio wrote:
| I am in a county that has been laying lots of fiber with ARPA
| support. Prior to this, I could either use Starlink or a PTP
| antenna on my roof for internet. Now I get gigabit FTTH for $100
| a month. It's cheaper AND faster than my other two options.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| EUR40/month for a 8Gbit/s FTTH here in france. Private company
| by the way. Just saying, while I do have preferences about who
| builds infrastructure and how to regulate markets on that
| infrastructure, I recognize that the presence of a market _as
| such_ isn 't the problem.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Why not just subsidize consumers in these Areas using Starlink? I
| feel like money invested in physical links in the past has
| basically disappeared without much change to neglected areas.
| whalesalad wrote:
| The article touches on this. Starlink is not the answer. It's a
| short term solution.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| It doesn't say much, and to me it reads like an emotional
| anti-Musk take:
|
| > ignoring the LEO satellite platform's capacity constraints,
| high prices, erratic leadership, and problematic
| environmental impact
|
| I think capacity constraints are nonexistent for most uses,
| and capacity is increasing all the time. Clearly LEO has
| enough capacity because there are many other large
| constellations also launching. The price is not very
| different than Comcast or whoever, but with much easier
| installation, better speeds in most areas, and better
| customer service. The "erratic" leadership has no effect on
| the problem we're discussing, and in fact, Musk has done
| amazing work with SpaceX and Starlink.
|
| On the other hand we've already spent tens or hundreds of
| billions on traditional broadband to neglected areas and got
| very little for it. We would have been better off giving all
| those people the money directly so they can pay for satellite
| Internet.
| michaelt wrote:
| https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/starlinks-current-
| pro...
|
| Capacity issues are a common problem for wireless internet
| users, because the bandwidth provided by a base station /
| cell / satellite is divided among its users. Corporations
| have trouble resisting the temptation to over-sell their
| capacity, as adding subscribers on the same equipment is
| pure profit.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Not to mention - latency. So many people get caught up in
| bandwidth but if your latency is in the toilet your
| experience will be miserable. I would much rather see my
| packets shoot through a glass tube with minimal latency
| than literally travel into outer space and then back down
| to earth (assuming no mesh routing is taking place
| between the satellites). Literal latency nightmare.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| When it comes to low orbit satellites, that thinking is
| wrong. It's an extra 2 milliseconds or less, four times.
| It's not enough to matter.
| marcusverus wrote:
| Per the article, Starlink is not the answer because:
|
| > Capacity constraints
|
| Take the author's word for it
|
| > high prices
|
| Odd criticism of Starlink, given this article cites a project
| in Oswego County, NY as a success... even though they spent
| $2,400 per connected household!
|
| > erratic leadership
|
| This is journo for "I don't like the CEO's politics"
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| >This is journo for "I don't like the CEO's politics"
|
| Or, it's an accurate description of Elon's team using
| blackmail to get what they want.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/us-could-cut-ukraines-
| acces...
| marcusverus wrote:
| > U.S. negotiators pressing Kyiv for access to Ukraine's
| critical minerals have raised the possibility of cutting
| the country's access to Elon Musk's vital Starlink
| satellite internet system, three sources familiar with
| the matter told Reuters.
|
| "U.S. negotiators" (not Elon Musk) threatened to cut off
| Ukraine's access to Starlink, ergo Elon Musk is erratic.
| Insightful.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Doesn't really matter. Fiber is unequivocally better than
| satellite. We should not be optimizing for "oh hey starlink
| exists, fuck rural customers they can just use that" that
| is the situation we have been in forever with Hughes.
|
| There is no reason to not have fiber crisscrossing every
| county in our nation.
| marcusverus wrote:
| > Doesn't really matter. Fiber is unequivocally better
| than satellite.
|
| Oh, word? How much of other people's money are you
| willing to spend to give random people in rural New York
| access to marginally better internet? $2,400 per
| household is no problem for you, clearly. Where's the
| ceiling?
|
| > We should not be optimizing for "oh hey starlink
| exists, fuck rural customers...
|
| Please go back to reddit.
| kingnothing wrote:
| I used Starlink for 2 months after the hurricanes last year. If
| it's the only broadband you can get, it's obviously better than
| dial up, but it isn't very good compared to any modern wire
| based services. The bandwidth rises and falls based on where
| the satellites are, and I had at least a few times per day
| where the service would cut out for a few seconds to a couple
| minutes. Again, based on how good your view of the sky is and
| where the satellites are. It might be absolutely perfect if you
| live on a hill in a desert, but living in real world most-of-
| America with hills and trees without a 100 ft tall tv antenna
| structure to mount the dish on, it isn't all it's cracked up to
| be.
| mysteria wrote:
| How about WISP technology for rural areas as something in
| between Starlink and expensive fiber infra?
| wmf wrote:
| Long term (10-20 years) I think fiber will provide better
| service per dollar. The hard part is the upfront cost.
| Arubis wrote:
| If they want to keep going down this route, they'll keep it
| quiet. Now is a rough time to be doing work with the US Feds that
| benefits the proletariat..._especially_ if it could compete with
| something Elon is involved in.
| Over3Chars wrote:
| Don't let Elon hear about this. Whoops!
| Vivtek wrote:
| I think they might be rolling out here in rural Adjuntas, Puerto
| Rico, which to be absolutely honest I would not have expected in
| a million years.
|
| Certainly a guy came by this week measuring for, he said, laying
| fiber optic cable. Just to put this into perspective, our barrio
| is the least populous in Adjuntas, which is the least populous
| municipio on the island. For my own perception, as a displaced
| rural Hoosier, it's still really densely populated, which means
| it's probably a reasonable cable investment, all else equal, but
| still. Astonishing to see it.
| AnAnonymousDude wrote:
| Claro has had the goal of rolling out fiber island-wide for
| quite some time. We (In the rural foothills of Mayaguez) were
| the some of the first customers to receive this expansion
| several years ago. Are you sure it wasn't Claro?
| 2jhrf09834 wrote:
| when you have the gigabit, it is easier to notice that unwanted
| data is being sent
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