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Comment by TradingPlaces | Hacker News Reader

$65 billion going into rural broadband over the next 5 years. Not finalized, but my read is the feds want fiber. They are wrangling over maps right now.

https://www.commerce.gov/news/fact-sheets/2021/11/fact-sheet...

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I'll bet 70+% of the money that ends up allocated will find its way into established isp pockets with absolutely nothing to show for it in return.

This is it exactly. I've got clients I work with in two federally recognized under-served areas that ISPs have gotten government grants for supporting.

And yet, when you try and talk to the ISP about problems with the 2.5-down-.4-up DSL line they provide their literal reply is "You're lucky you have a dialtone."

This is at a location 1.7 miles down the road from a school that has gigabit fiber.

The existing programs are a joke. Nothing short of competition is going to get the ISPs to fix their problems. Centurylink has lost about 7k/month on customers switching to StarLink just on this one road. Maybe someday they'll consider fiber, but until then Starlink is a godsend.

I am guessing your are in an urban environment, if it is not too urban two miles is a great half year weekend project for laying fiber yourself.

Believe me, I've thought about it. Unfortunately it's a county-owned road.

The local power co-op is considering the idea of considering burying the powerlines, so I'm keeping a close eye on that. I wish I could get them interested in the idea of adding fiber internet to their services, but I'm told they can't do it anywhere they have above-ground power because of an agreement stating that CenturyLink gets to be the only ISP on the poles.

Competition doesn't work, ISPs only care about high-profit dense areas. I bet that they are happy about services like Starlink because regulators are less likely to force them to provide service in remote areas because an alternative exists.

Corporate handout.

Standard operating procedure seems to be, promise the world, update the maps with lies, then announce a stock buy back plan with the profits.

It seems like everywhere wired up for electricity should be able to have fiber. Or are repairs still so intensive that it really needs to be buried?

Fiber on utility poles is absolutely a thing, and it's usually far cheaper than buried fiber, not to mention easier to repair.

Here in the USA, the main reason that doesn't happen is incumbent providers. Whoever owns the poles is very unlikely to grant you access to hang fiber on them. The one exception is public utilities, they are generally required to offer open access, however, there are all kinds of rules about space between existing utilities and new ones. Unfortunately, you don't just have to deal with the local government because of incumbent providers, who are already hanging their wires on the existing utility poles. Phone and cable providers have incentive to make sure that the process is as arduous as possible and they will put up bureaucratic roadblocks and drag their feet at every opportunity.

This is just what I came to understand by spending a lot of time researching what it would take to start a rural ISP. It's a project that I abandoned after Starlink was announced.

I live in a place in the US where a couple of the public utility companies are rolling out highspeed internet through their utility lines. Not exactly sure if it just means they're laying-down/hanging-up fiber as they go through the process of servicing existing lines, or if there's a way they actually transmit through the lines themselves, or combination of both.

Whatever these two companies are doing it, i haven't bothered looking into it since we already have 4-5 options and we're already happy; TDS (fiber), Comcast (fiber), T-mobile 5G, Wow (?), can't remember the last.

Who would have thought they could all flourish even when you give customers options? /s

https://www.kub.org/fiber-shopping/

https://www.lcub.com/broadband-home-landing-page/

We already built out fiber in the '90s under Clinton and most of it's dark still.

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