Want fiber Internet? That’ll be $383,500, ISP tells farm owner | Hacker News Reader

Want fiber Internet? That’ll be $383,500, ISP tells farm owner

arstechnica.com

14 pointsedoloughlin7 comments

Funny how the ISP charges the person for the whole setup, but then keeps that setup to serve future clients.

The only scenario where it's acceptable to pay for that sort of installation is if you own it and share profits made out of it.

15 years ago it was common to get a "fk you" price quoted by a cable company or other provider when they don't want to serve you.

Back then, few people called their bluff, but today the internet is more valuable than it was before. Now, for instance, if you spend $50,000 to get fiber optic to your house, your property value goes up by at least that much. In many places that are a buyer's market people are finding they can't sell a house at all if it only has DSL.

Similarly if you work from home doing computer stuff, faster and reliable internet (i.e. not DSL) can greatly improve productivity and lower your stress.

For more and more people you find it is a no-brainer to put $50,000 on their home equity line, so what happens is they say that want it anyway, and then "big internet" finds some other excuse why they can't provide service.

Lately there have been huge increases in the "fk you" prices being quoted because the last thing big ISPs want is for people to raise their expectation.

The average US single family home price is around $200k[1]. It's not going to go up in value by $50k because of fiber, even if you could expand your home equity line by enough to get it (and in my neighborhood where the median is something like $400-500k, you'd get laughed out of the bank). What you mean to say is "in a microscopically tiny portion of the housing market where high-tech convenience is a driver of housing cost, and housing costs are several times the national average, a $50k expenditure to call the cable companies bluff might make sense".

[1]http://www.realtor.org/sites/default/files/reports/2015/emba...

Most people don't work from home so it seems unlikely people can't sell their home because they don't have fiber.

Yes, but people want to have internet and cable and often the difference between having a good wireline connection and not having it is 500 feet.

If you bought the 46th house in a subdivision with 45 U-Verse ports, for instance, you are SOL.

The difference is not "fiber vs cable" but "DSL vs everything else". However if you are going to build new infrastructure today, fiber is the only thing that makes sense in terms of cost v. capability.

Well, network engineers have to plan the network, then get land use permits to dig, a directional drilling company has to actually dig in the fiber, install premise equipment, circuit engineers build the circuits, test the circuits, setup any network monitoring and service level assurance.

I am pretty sure all those services don't just happen.

From the article, the ISP in question receives $175 million per year from the Federal Government to run "rural" internet.

A different provider (whether they also get money from the government is unclear) quoted essentially the same run at 1/9 the price.

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