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Comment by maCDzP | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how long it’s going to take to break even. It’s pretty expensive to install piping. Even if you use no-dig tech.

Also, if they go out of business the infrastructure built isn’t going to be taken away.

The problem being that a huge part of rising construction cost in infrastructure is poor documentation of current infrastructure. You have a lot of stops in production when you encounter unknown piping.

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I wonder if they could supplement their income by being an ISP? the "last mile" is (apparently) the single biggest cost in that industry as well. For the low, low cost of a few fibre lines (which can snarf down 100s of gigabits these days) you can provide "last mile" services to anyone at the end of your tunnel thanks to 5G. If you got even more fancy, design the system so you can drill into it anywhere along the way, and robotically add new taps (not to the fibre, but to copper or microwave lines) along the way. They have directional drilling already for drilling under highways or angled oil/gas pipelines.

That depends on the local legal framework. Many states have a one call program, and if you properly call the number anything you encounter that isn't marked isn't your problem if you go through it. (you still need to be careful as things can kill you, but legally you are not at fault for breaking anything that wasn't marked)

The hard part is in places where there are things of archeological interest. Most of the US doesn't have this as North America has a lack of easily accessible materials that will last and so the ancients mostly used things that didn't last. In most of the world (and parts of the US) ancient civilization often left things behind that are of interest.

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