How to Give Rural America Broadband? Look to the Early 1900s | Hacker News Reader

How to Give Rural America Broadband? Look to the Early 1900s

nytimes.com

72 pointsdredmorbius74 comments

I live in one of those unserved rural areas. Both AT&T and Comcast refuse to run a wire another mile down the road, and since they are the duopoly, tough luck. Fortunately we have a local wireless ISP and I get 12Mbps via a 2.4GHz radio link. It's nowhere near as good as wired, but I'm grateful. Another local ISP is working on laying fiber with federal grants but it will take many years.

The best analysis I've ever read on why US broadband sucks comes from the CEO of Sonic, a Bay Area independent ISP which is awesome. tl;dr: Michael Powell sold Americans out on false promises of 5 different media for broadband. Turns out only 2 really work.

https://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/09/02/americas-intentional-b...

But US broadband doesn't suck. I invite you to play around with this neat tool from Akamai:

https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/our-thinking/state-of-the-inter...

With a couple of notable exceptions (Sweden, South Korea), the US has as good or better average connection speeds & penetration of high-bandwidth service than its peer developed nations. Italy, France, Germany, Australia all lag the US, some substantially.

Personally, my cable-based service has seen regular step-ups in bandwidth with a much lower rate of increase in price.

If Powell had insisted on "open access" to last-mile ISP networks 15 years ago, would the capital investments in wired networks have played out as they did? Or would the market have looked like DSL in the US, nominally "competitive" by regulatory fiat, but stagnant?

Can you foot the bill for bringing it another mile down the road? I know you can do that for electric utilities and water to rural land, not sure about phone/cable.

If he can they'll quote him a figure in the 10's of thousands, and of course expect him to pay normal prices even after paying to build out their network for them.

Tens of thousands sounds about right for running new wires to an undeveloped rural location, but if power & phones are already up, it's ridiculous.

Hmm...are you sure? Think about the price of a mile of fiber. Then the cost to have it hung on existing poles (which will need specialized trucks and workers certified to work on live power poles) then the cost to have it spliced. Finally the cost to turn up the connection, terminate the fiber. I'm not sure about 10's of K, but I'd be surprised if this will cost less than $10k total even if done on the cheap (cable from eBay etc).

$10k isn't even close. It's more like $20-40k per mile all in plus pole attachment fees. On top of that you then pay for service.

If you have line of site you AND you can cut some deal with a person within line of site you can easily do a nice wireless connection with high bandwidth with 5Ghz. Ubiquiti products are nice and can do very high bandwidth. The key is line of site.

Sight.

The fact that he repeated the phrase three times in as many sentences made me wonder if it was a joke.

Doubt it. This is one of the more common Internet spelling errors (after your/you're). I'd let it slide if the greater body of text indicated the writer wasn't a native English speakr.

Even in poor weather?

I've got a 6km link (about 4 miles). Just had some snow, and have had some really bad weather, link has been nice and stable.

I'm using Nanobeam M5 16, they aren't installed properly so the link could be a lot better, but that's my fault and not the equipment.

Check out their forum at http://forum.ubnt.com and you'll see all sorts of situations, long, short, and mid-range.

Weather doesn't seem to be a problem. There's some signal attenuation in heavy rain / snow but all I've seen is a 20% bandwidth reduction, not a failure. The one time I had failure was with a heavy buildup of snow on the antenna.

My WISP sells 5GHz links too, and now that I'm typing this I'm not positive which I have. IIRC the physical link speed maxes out at 25Mbps or so but the WISP throttles me to 12Mbps, I think to reserve bandwidth for multiple users. I'm 2 or 3 wireless hops from a wired connection.

(Second the thumbs' up for Ubiquiti though; the last hop in my rural network is a Ubiquiti link because it was simpler than running a wire 300' from the tree where my WISP's antenna is. Works pretty well.)

How does the radio work? Do you need line of site to the tower? Mind sharing your experience, or name of such companies? My father uses satellite, it's the only option I was aware of, but it's painful. I would love to learn about other possibilities. I've searched for wireless ISPs but it's a bit difficult to tell which ones are any good.

> How does the radio work?

You need a sender at the Internet connection and a receiver at the end user. The radio link can be either dedicated to you (point-to-point) or shared (point-to-multipoint).

> Do you need line of site to the tower?

Preferably yes. It may work without line of sight, but at reduced performance.

> Mind sharing your experience, or name of such companies?

  http://www.wispa.org/

  http://www.wispdirectory.com/

  http://www.wirelessmapping.com/National-Coverage-Map-for-Fixed-Wireless-ISP's.php

> I've searched for wireless ISPs but it's a bit difficult to tell which ones are any good.

It's not like you are going to have lots of options. You take what you get. It will be better than satellite in any case.

Good bandwidth requires clear line of sight. (You can get ~2Mbps through tree cover at 900Mhz). A lot of rural areas, at least in America, also have local ISPs providing service this way. You can also make own wireless link ~5 miles with gear from Ubiquiti or the like. It works basically like 802.11 WiFi but projected in one direction, and some protocol details are different.

My ISP is in Nevada County, CA http://www.smarterbroadband.com/ San Francisco has a cool ISP doing this in the city: https://www.monkeybrains.net/

I live in rural Oregon. I have fiber to the house delivering gigabit speeds.

The local co-op exists because the phone companies didn't want to wire the area so the farmers did it.

Then they put conduit in the ground and started putting fiber in everywhere.

Oh, and when I have a problem they come out the same day. Once was a bad switch, once was a bad termination both on my end, but no run around.

how/where does one find potential areas they could move to with these types of facilities?

https://muninetworks.org/communitymap

http://www.ntca.org/awards-recognition-programs/certified-gi...

http://highspeedgeek.com/america-gigabit-internet/

http://www.broadbandmap.gov/analyze

http://www.bbpmag.com/search-5411.php

I could tell you where they are in the willamette valley.

Also, a friend is moving to John Day Oregon, and they also have a fiber network there.

Outside of Oregon I have no idea. Maybe search for telephone cooperatives in the areas you want to move to?

I wish there where a high-speed coop in the bay area. Comcast is ass. They managed to knock my 25 Mbits down to about 0.5Mbits yesterday, and when I complained, were like what? Did this bug you? You still have internet access! Works just fine! All for the low price of $70/mo with $5/mo annual increases. Unfortunately, my only alternative is AT&T and they're even slower.

It's ridiculous my first broadband connection 15 years ago in the midwest was faster than my $70/mo comcast connection. Plus it was symmetric!

Looxury! At this very moment I'm tethered to my phone for the 4th day in as many weeks because British Telecom is incapable of supplying DSL to the country for which they're the monopoly provider.

I'd be all about a fibre-optic cable on telephone poles, since they don't seem to be able to keep the existing copper ones under the ground connected to anything.

In Sweden back when DSL was new, local cooperatives were instrumental in raising the funds and proving the market to get the POTS copper monopoly[0] to upgrade phone exchanges to install DSLAMs.

In the US I see the biggest threat are communities where companies like Comcast have been granted exclusive rights to high speed communications infrastructure, and legislation that prohibits municipal efforts

[0] Which the government telecoms regular convinced the former phone monopoly to spin off into an independent company to encourage competition

Since the reclassification of broadband internet as a utility, "electric cooperatives" are able to use federal funds to get broadband out to rural and remote locations big companies won't go to because the setup costs outweigh their potential profits (in theory).

Early 1900s was more like the 1930s, when part of "The New Deal" allowed for electric cooperatives to exist.

I work in gov't as a contractor, where the USDA does large scale loans for of course the well known providers as well as smaller ones who apply. We're talking huge loans, great interest rates and their main requirements are, is it rural, is it unserved, census projections of populations to show there that will in fact be paying customers so the provider can earn money and pay back the loan.

So when the companies give the run around to unserved areas, it may be smoke and mirrors, it may be that they have applications in the hopper and are waiting, or were rejected.

And I'm just speculating (I'm thinking out loud here that's all) but I would NOT be surprised if a bigger company has as service area on lock down with their loan applications, who knows that might be a prohibitive measure that a smaller company couldn't jump in and get that area served with a similar loan.

If that were the case, that would annoy me because I like to hear when the smaller companies are providing fantastic service and being good competition for the conglomerates. It's getting to the point where a small number of companies own the pipes and now even content networks. Now I'm going to have to go research this and find out if that strategy is there to benefit the big Telcos.

Media and utility consolidation is nearly always a bad sign to me.

I live in a rural area and have fiber to the home from our electric co-op. It's amazing: $99 symmetric gigabit and rock solid service.

On the other hand AT&T is the phone provider here and selling DSL is the least of their worries. One of my clients (a block from the phone switch office) needed DSL as a backup to their fiber connection and AT&T can't provide it because their "equipment is already full". As I see it that's the damage of a monopoly; luckily for us we have proactive co-ops that can compete on projects of that size or we'd have no wired internet.

A monopoly must necessarily limit supply to increase profit. That means that turning away potential customers--even customers that spontaneously appear without advertising or recruitment--is an essential part of the business model.

Refusing to install another DSLAM means they can sell space on the existing ones at a higher price.

I don't get this argument. Why would a monopoly turn away customers? More customers mean more fat margins.

I do get why a monopoly would not want to invest more in capacity (for example DSLAMs). A dollar may have higher returns for the monopoly somewhere else, especially if the monopoly can't (immediately) sell all ports on the new DSLAM.

However, if there is free capacity (for example DSLAM ports), why would a monopoly turn away paying customers?

A perfectly competitive business operates such that price equals marginal cost.

A monopoly operates such that marginal revenue equals marginal cost.

This usually works out such that the quantity supplied is lower and price is higher than the market-clearing quantity and price under perfect competition.

This is an unstable point, because a competitor could enter, and capture some of the unrealized benefit of trade in the triangular area between the monopoly quantity and the competitive equilibrium quantity. If the business is a natural monopoly, and the incumbent does not act quickly to drive the competitor out, they could flip the market and drive out the incumbent instead. A natural monopoly under normal circumstances should occasionally see brief bouts of competition that are essentially deathmatches between businesses. Customers get greater supply and lower prices during these bouts.

So many businesses that are the incumbent in a natural monopoly market try to solidify their position with an enforced monopoly, making competition illegal. This is usually sold as protecting consumers from market disruptions, but that is always a lie. It only protects the incumbent and their guaranteed economic profits from an intentionally underserved market.

I get the economic theory, but I don't get how it would result in the actions prescribed in your example.

> Refusing to install another DSLAM means they can sell space on the existing ones at a higher price.

As customers as either on fixed term contracts or grandfathered in on existing plans, I don't quite get how ports on the DSLAM could be sold for a higher price.

I suppose prices could be raised as contracts run out and old plans are sunset, or when an existing user cancels and a new one seeks service. Is this what you mean?

> A monopoly must necessarily limit supply to increase profit. That means that turning away potential customers--even customers that spontaneously appear without advertising or recruitment--is an essential part of the business model

I get that the monopoly would limit supply by not installing new DSLAMs, but turning away customers? Why would a monopoly do that if there were free ports on the DSLAM?

Possibly raise prices yes, but refuse to sell no.

My dad worked for the phone company for his entire career (late 1950's to early 1990's). He had some interesting stories about going into rural areas in the early 1960's and seeing how "universal service" was implemented in the 1940's and 1950's. The most common way when there were only a few service users down a side road was to hook the phone wire up to a barbed wire fence heading that way and use the earth for neutral. It worked but it meant if a farmer closer to the road picked up the phone the line past their house went dead.

I wonder what kind of bitrate you could get nowadays with barbed wire?

I think a lot of the problem is you would radiate like crazy, causing harmful interference. The same thing happens with power line data service.

A 99% Invisible podcast, The Devil's Rope, discusses this. As a result of already having barbed wire run all over the West to control Texas Longhorn cattle, it was far easier to provide phone service using it, than it was to run new cable. So farmers ended up being the most wired group of people in the late 19th, early 20th century.

Electrification of rural areas is well documented and was as painful to complete as broadband. Robert Caro writes on the topic in his biography of Lyndon Johnson. Note the extensive political wrangling and haggling that came down to individual land parcels

The thing I find interesting about the connection of rural homes was how much it set back the alternative energy field. Windmills had just started replacing gas generators (with the generators as backups) when rural electrification happened. 90 years later, and that same question has become relevant in a lot of developing areas.

Aspen and its upriver neighbors have proposed a $6M fiber to bring its broadband over a megabit. Aspen is 40 miles from I-70 which is a fiber corridor. I a common fantasy to move to the mountains, become a freelancer and hiking & ski bum. But if you are still getting AOL dialup speeds, it doesnt quite work. In Denver we are spoiled by 50+ mbs offered by multiple carriers.

Although I do know tech people who work from home in rural areas with just satellite. It's expensive and not ideal--and you give up things like Netflix--but it apparently can be done for a lot of circumstances.

No need to satellite, there's quite a few microwave point-to-point internet services depending on where you are.

I know someone living on the mountain above me who gets reasonable internet speeds from a link down in Portland.

If you can get line of sight, microwave works well.

Co-operatives are great for bringing services to the underserved, but they require the input of a particular kind and level of political engagement from the public that seems to be rare.

Other examples: http://b4rn.org.uk/ , various community buyouts of Scottish islands like Eigg.

We've been looking at house in rural Scotland and the situation with broadband is, in general, pretty bad - even with new houses it's not unusual for them to have poor (1Mbps) or non-existent broadband.

It's also completely unpredictable - one house we looked at gets 8Mbps and another 1km away (both in a rural area near to Auchterarder) gets 400Mbps! NB That latter one appears to be the one house in Scotland that can get BT Infinity 4.

> With high-speed internet, there are similar dynamics. Last year, the federal government declared that broadband should be treated like a utility, as essential as electricity or the phone.

That's incorrect. Net neutrality rules don't treat Internet like electrical or phone utility literally. There are many differences in practice. For instance utility rates can be regulated. Prices on Internet access aren't. It doesn't need to be regulated as much as other utilities, but some things certainly could be regulated, like for example when preventing anti-competitive abuse. If anything, FCC abysmally failed to outright ban data caps.

I've got a place in rural northern california and we don't get cell phone coverage, no where within a 20 miles, and of course there is no broadband. The forest service doesn't help put in towers, the rural telephony program only supports landlines, which don't reach out here. Easy process of putting up both cell phone towers and microwave repeaters would be huge. What's now is that the government makes it very hard to do, but it should subsidize it instead.

If you still have a copper land-line, there's a line-item on your bill for the Universal Service Fund. Originally, it paid for rural telecom (phones for farms), but there's been a lot of debate recently on whether the money should be used for bringing internet access to remote areas.

From a technology standpoint, fiber would be the only option. The distances involved are too long for DSL and coax cable.

They only use it for fixed line systems, not cell phones or microwave. Those are the ways people actually want to get connected in rural areas.

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