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
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.
Not sure what you meant by replying with the (otherwise relevant) article about violating subsidy conditions (usually done by serial abusers like AT&T) to a comment about Empire Access. I don't know what Empire Access usually does, but in the case mentioned in TFA, Empire Access will operate on municipal open-access fiber infrastructure, which the Oswego County (not Empire Access) will use subsidies to build.
They did lay some fiber, the problem is it was the fiber to supply their cellphone networks and not to directly serve customers, which allows them to gouge customers through mobile data without running afoul of any of the restrictions put on the fiber network the government paid them for.
'By packing or “densifying” the network, signals will be carried faster and more reliably, with bandwidth measured not in megabits but rather in gigabits per second.':
'Consumers expect 5G to offer a step change in network performance, relief from urban network congestion and more home broadband choices as near-term benefits.':
You should be upset at the government that gave the money and that didn't do the due diligence to make sure it's used for proper cause.
Secondly, it should be reconsidered that giving billions to profit making corporations so that they can make more money is a good idea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Private equity typically starts with rhetoric along the lines of, “Look at how much good we’re doing!” and then will ultimately end up a race to the bottom.
They don’t expect financial sustainability with reasonable returns, they expect significant profits over that and the product is typically gutted in this race to the bottom.
I mean, I'm sure there are some very nice, friendly, competent private equity firms, but certainly the classic view of how private equity works is taking a thing, raising prices and cutting costs until (ideally, from their pov) they reach some sort of maximum profitability point or (often) it just collapses.
You can understand why this might not be behaviour you'd want of your ISP.
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.
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
>- 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
"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."
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.
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!
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.
Generally when this is done _well_, you'll end up with multiple ISPs who'll compete on price, so they're essentially selling a commodity product with generally fairly low margins. For instance, a somewhat similar scheme in Ireland (NBI, a state-funded thing which builds FTTH in rural areas where it would not be economical for the other FTTH infra owners to build) has _56_ ISPs currently providing service on its infra (though some of these are regional).
Like, this isn't an exciting new idea; similar things have been widely used all over the world for rural broadband for years. The US is maybe a bit unusual in that the local monopolies were in some cases never really broken, so this is going maybe a bit less rural than would be typical. In many countries the local monopolies (Charter and Verizon, from the article) would be required to allow other ISPs to use their infra at a controlled price.
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.
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.
> 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.
Did you miss the part where people pay for their broadband connection? Recurring income is usually used by internet service providers for ongoing maintenance.
Or do you think the price paid is too low to support ongoing maintenance? In which case ... that doesn't appear to be the case from other FTTP providers that have sprung up over the years ... it points to price gouging from monopoly incumbents.
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.
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.
Claro has had the goal of rolling out fiber island-wide for quite some time. We (In the rural foothills of Mayagüez) were the some of the first customers to receive this expansion several years ago. Are you sure it wasn't Claro?
My poor ass area finally got internet service through a fiber co-op that is doing great now. Before this the people around here couldn't even get DSL because telecomms didn't want to spend the money upgrading any of the 60+ year old phone lines or laying down any fiber that wasn't for their cell phone towers that they can gouge people on.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The east coast and west coast states between them, however, have over half of the US's population and are mostly relatively dense. Transcontinental passenger service might be a little pointless, but clearly there is room for good-quality high speed lines. SF to Seattle, say, would be doable non-stop in about four hours on top-quality conventional (ie ~320km/h) rail. Less with high-speed maglev and other exotics, but now that China seems to have largely lost interest, I'm not sure if anyone is seriously pursuing those.
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.
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.
The UK has a particularly weird history with fibre; in particular it's one of the few places where G.Fast (ie super-VDSL; 500Mbit-1Gbit/sec over copper telephone line) saw significant rollout.
The UK's finally rolling out FTTH with fairly universal targets, but it did have an unusually messy journey there, arguably partially due to BT refusing to let FTTC die.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Ireland in the early noughties there was an initiative to roll out universal rural broadband (previously, apart from very small WISP operators, affordable broadband (by noughties standards) was only really available if you were within ADSL-range of a telephone exchange). In practice this ended up with the state spending huge amounts of money subsidising point-to-point WISPs, terrestrial cellular solutions, and, where unavoidable, satellite.
Of course none of this was remotely good enough long-term, and the _current_ strategy is to just roll out fibre everywhere. The US (or at least this particular programme) is wise to start with fibre; you'll only end up there anyway. Money spent on gap-filling half-measures like terrestrial or satellite cellular is money wasted.
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.
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.
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.
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"
> 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.
> even though they spent $2,400 per connected household
Starlink is $349 up-front, then $120/mo. That $2400 pays back in under 2 years!
And Starlink requires a continual investment in launching new satellites to replace de-orbited ones, meaning the prices won't come down. Once that fiber is in the ground, maintenance is minimal.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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
They seriously hijacked a well-known longstanding government acronym?
Technically-ignorant legislators strike again.
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
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.
Not far off. POTUS owns a few goats as a tax write off for Bedminster Golf Resort [0]
[0]. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-golf-goats_n_5d546ebce4...
> 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.
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...
[dead]
Perhaps it's a cloaking device designed to make it Musk-resistant? I'm guessing he's familiar with the real ARPA.
This is a bad name collision, given the domain (Internet).
I saw the headline, and immediately thought "Huh, what's their angle? Surveillance?"
Thanks
Not the ARPAnet
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.
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.
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...
Not sure what you meant by replying with the (otherwise relevant) article about violating subsidy conditions (usually done by serial abusers like AT&T) to a comment about Empire Access. I don't know what Empire Access usually does, but in the case mentioned in TFA, Empire Access will operate on municipal open-access fiber infrastructure, which the Oswego County (not Empire Access) will use subsidies to build.
I'm pointing out that by now we should all be enjoying fiber to the home; it should not be remarkable.
They did lay some fiber, the problem is it was the fiber to supply their cellphone networks and not to directly serve customers, which allows them to gouge customers through mobile data without running afoul of any of the restrictions put on the fiber network the government paid them for.
Oh but don't worry about it! Remember how they all said 5G would replace wired internet completely?
'augmented reality, “the internet of things,” and seamless streaming to the mainstream':
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/5g-explained
'By packing or “densifying” the network, signals will be carried faster and more reliably, with bandwidth measured not in megabits but rather in gigabits per second.':
https://hbr.org/2019/03/5gs-potential-and-why-businesses-sho...
'Consumers expect 5G to offer a step change in network performance, relief from urban network congestion and more home broadband choices as near-term benefits.':
https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/consumerlab/r...
(All these are articles published between January 2018 and October 2020)
You should be upset at the government that gave the money and that didn't do the due diligence to make sure it's used for proper cause. Secondly, it should be reconsidered that giving billions to profit making corporations so that they can make more money is a good idea.
I am, as all taxpayers should be.
I'm not disagreeing with you, however, Empire Access is neither Verizon, AT&T, nor CenturyLink.
Clearly, because they're actually delivering.
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.
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.
Wait everybody on HN says Europe is a technological backwater. How can this be?
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.
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.
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)
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.
Private equity typically starts with rhetoric along the lines of, “Look at how much good we’re doing!” and then will ultimately end up a race to the bottom.
They don’t expect financial sustainability with reasonable returns, they expect significant profits over that and the product is typically gutted in this race to the bottom.
Private equity isn't in it to help people.
I mean, I'm sure there are some very nice, friendly, competent private equity firms, but certainly the classic view of how private equity works is taking a thing, raising prices and cutting costs until (ideally, from their pov) they reach some sort of maximum profitability point or (often) it just collapses.
You can understand why this might not be behaviour you'd want of your ISP.
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.
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
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
It is due to isp lobbying for the most part.
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...
Because corruption.
When nobody cares strongly about something, the lobbyist groups have a much easier time.
>- 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.
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?
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.
> It's not core to the issue of broadband access at all.
What is?
Upfront capital investment. Right of way.
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> 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.
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.
"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...
I see - so it depends on private companies profitably providing service to rural residents.
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.
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!
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.
Generally when this is done _well_, you'll end up with multiple ISPs who'll compete on price, so they're essentially selling a commodity product with generally fairly low margins. For instance, a somewhat similar scheme in Ireland (NBI, a state-funded thing which builds FTTH in rural areas where it would not be economical for the other FTTH infra owners to build) has _56_ ISPs currently providing service on its infra (though some of these are regional).
Like, this isn't an exciting new idea; similar things have been widely used all over the world for rural broadband for years. The US is maybe a bit unusual in that the local monopolies were in some cases never really broken, so this is going maybe a bit less rural than would be typical. In many countries the local monopolies (Charter and Verizon, from the article) would be required to allow other ISPs to use their infra at a controlled price.
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.
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.
> 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.
Did you miss the part where people pay for their broadband connection? Recurring income is usually used by internet service providers for ongoing maintenance.
Or do you think the price paid is too low to support ongoing maintenance? In which case ... that doesn't appear to be the case from other FTTP providers that have sprung up over the years ... it points to price gouging from monopoly incumbents.
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.
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.
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.
Claro has had the goal of rolling out fiber island-wide for quite some time. We (In the rural foothills of Mayagüez) were the some of the first customers to receive this expansion several years ago. Are you sure it wasn't Claro?
My poor ass area finally got internet service through a fiber co-op that is doing great now. Before this the people around here couldn't even get DSL because telecomms didn't want to spend the money upgrading any of the 60+ year old phone lines or laying down any fiber that wasn't for their cell phone towers that they can gouge people on.
The full title is:
> ARPA Is Quietly Funding Cheap ($50-$65 A Month) Community-Owned Gigabit Fiber Access To Long Neglected Neighborhoods
Title made it sound like ARPA is comitting up to a whopping $65 to fibre, which doesn't sound like enough.
I wish there was a news site that was dedicated only to reporting these sort of “quiet moves”, as they seem far more interesting.
This is really good!
In this time and age, fast and reliable access to the internet should be a given, particularly on developed countries.
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.
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...
> 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-...
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.
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.
The US has 1/3 the population density as Europe. I'm sure that helps to explain it somewhat.
Also the ridiculous lobbying by the major telecomm companies.
But it has some biggest cities. Is such fast fiber available there?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The east coast and west coast states between them, however, have over half of the US's population and are mostly relatively dense. Transcontinental passenger service might be a little pointless, but clearly there is room for good-quality high speed lines. SF to Seattle, say, would be doable non-stop in about four hours on top-quality conventional (ie ~320km/h) rail. Less with high-speed maglev and other exotics, but now that China seems to have largely lost interest, I'm not sure if anyone is seriously pursuing those.
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.
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.
The UK has a particularly weird history with fibre; in particular it's one of the few places where G.Fast (ie super-VDSL; 500Mbit-1Gbit/sec over copper telephone line) saw significant rollout.
The UK's finally rolling out FTTH with fairly universal targets, but it did have an unusually messy journey there, arguably partially due to BT refusing to let FTTC die.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
5G home internet is good enough for 90% of people, so nobody cares to spend money for a product almost nobody is asking for
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.
Hide it before Doge gets wind ?
Explain what you did last week or you're fired. Probably fired anyways, sounds like a communist iniative.
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.
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when you have the gigabit, it is easier to notice that unwanted data is being sent
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.
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.
In Ireland in the early noughties there was an initiative to roll out universal rural broadband (previously, apart from very small WISP operators, affordable broadband (by noughties standards) was only really available if you were within ADSL-range of a telephone exchange). In practice this ended up with the state spending huge amounts of money subsidising point-to-point WISPs, terrestrial cellular solutions, and, where unavoidable, satellite.
Of course none of this was remotely good enough long-term, and the _current_ strategy is to just roll out fibre everywhere. The US (or at least this particular programme) is wise to start with fibre; you'll only end up there anyway. Money spent on gap-filling half-measures like terrestrial or satellite cellular is money wasted.
How about WISP technology for rural areas as something in between Starlink and expensive fiber infra?
Long term (10-20 years) I think fiber will provide better service per dollar. The hard part is the upfront cost.
The article touches on this. Starlink is not the answer. It's a short term solution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
>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...
> 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.
> even though they spent $2,400 per connected household
Starlink is $349 up-front, then $120/mo. That $2400 pays back in under 2 years!
And Starlink requires a continual investment in launching new satellites to replace de-orbited ones, meaning the prices won't come down. Once that fiber is in the ground, maintenance is minimal.
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.
> 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.
> even though they spent $2,400 per connected household!
FTTH is extremely expensive to _install_, but once it's there it's pretty cheap to maintain compared to copper.
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.
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.