Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Boulder has a population of about 110,000 people [1]. Given "the estimated cost of the entire network is around $140 million" [2], the per-capita cost of this network comes to $1,300.

I pay $80 a month for my 300 / 20 service. In 16 months, I would be able to pay for my share of this network.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder,_Colorado

[2] http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_31941127/public-s...

View on HN

As Rayiner commented elsewhere in the thread [1] Boulder has a population of 40,000 households, which is the appropriate metric to use when people within a household regularly share a connection. It gets more expensive when you consider non-subscribing households, subsidized households, and operating costs. Payback periods quickly climb to 10-20 years or more, depending on how you do your math.

However, I think it should also be considered that a municipal broadband network adds value to a city in much the same way that a road network, electric grid, natural gas, or water/sewer network adds value. For a point of contrast, the city contains ~300 miles of roads at ~$5 million per mile, or a road network value of $1.5 billion dollars. That's about $40,000 per household! Other utilities have huge costs as well.

I believe that Internet access is becoming as important as transportation, water, and electric service for the economic health of a city.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17311782

Kinda makes it sound like they've got too much road. Property taxes are only a thousand or three per single family household, I believe.

The point I was trying to make is that utilities and infrastructure don't add up in ways that make budget decisions simple or that seem sensible when viewed from a simple calculation of total cost divided by number of households. If we did that same calculation for other utilities, we would not have many utilities at all!

Honestly, I'm not really sure how it's all paid for at the end of the day.

I think it's also important to amortize construction costs over the useful life of the infrastructure, not just how long it takes to pay back the loan.

That $40k of road is only $800/year over 50 years. (And I doubt all of it was even originally as expensive as your estimate, especially considering cost of land, which was closer to zero before there was a road there).

Of course, maintenance costs have to be counted, too, and in the case of fiber, it would, instead, be eventual upgrades.

It sure doesn’t seem that way :). Traffic in Boulder has gotten significantly more annoying over the last several years.

Perhaps too much road infrastructure has induced traffic?

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

I only visit Boulder, so I'm not positive, but it seems to me that they have tons of people coming in from the suburbs. Most of the people inside of Boulder, in my experience, tend to ride bikes and/or take public transit, but you need a car to get to some trails and you need a car to get into Boulder as a resident of the surrounding areas (or at least most people do).

Yes, a good majority of people who work within Boulder live outside of the city proper. The price of living is too high for many people, especially service industry folks. Public transportation isn't bad, but it's not great. We were recently promised a commuter train line from Denver, and were given the ol' switcheroo and instead the bus system was expanded.

I do not know of any trails you would absolutely need a car to get to. One of the more popular places to start a hike, Chautauqua, actually started a very expensive paid parking program to get people to stop driving there (parking is limited, complaints from residents over noise), and instead take the free shuttle from city center.

Anyways, my home internet is absolute garbage (I'm just west of HW36, so outside of the city by a block). My speed is 5.05 Mbps down, 0.47 up and there's no alternatives to Century Link in my area. I might as well use a cellular network.

You're lucky you have the cell network option :). I have similar speeds through a WISP but no cell signal.

Cell. is actually about 3x faster in a quick test, but latency is also about 3x as bad. In general though, cell isn't that great of an option full time, if you go anywhere, say a quarter of a mile west of where I am, as you'll be in the mountains with poor service.

It's just whatever the local subnet is for my neighborhood. Across the street, the DSL is much better.

That's the explicit strategy of the "slow growth" crowd running city council.

Nailed it.

The math is bleaker than that (see my other post, calculating $7,000 per subscribing household).

Also, out of the $80 you pay, most of it gets eaten up by operational costs. Charter's EBITDA is about 35% of revenues. So even if the city pays no taxes., it'll take 250 months to pay back your share of the network.

This is precisely the kind of long term investment that cities should make.

That's twenty years. There is a decent chance that mainstream high speed Internet will be wireless in 20 years.

Wireless has been perpetually behind star topology wired networks despite the fact that it tends to be much easier to upgrade a few antenna's and radios around a city then make people buy new modems every couple years. Worse, wireless is really spotty, I can barely get a data connection where I work and at my house with my carrier, much less a few Mbit/sec. Like WiFi, the advertised peek rates tend to be far in excess of what your likely to get most of the time.

Optical communication is the same way, there is massive bandwidth that isn't being used, so while it might roll out at 1Gbit, it wouldn't' surprise me that in 20 years a x8 stranded fiber network would be well into the Tbit/sec rate.

I think you are significantly underestimating just how long a timespan we're talking about here. Twenty years is a very long time. Twenty years back predates 802.11b. In 1998, our houses and apartments were all wired up with cat5. In San Francisco, at the time, we were thrilled to have Ricochet modems that asymptotically approached ISDN BRI speeds (for that matter, we were generally pretty thrilled to get ISDN BRI speeds to our apartments to begin with).

You don't have to expect breakthroughs to think digging new trenches might be a mistake; all you have to believe is that wireless network performance will continue roughly along the trends it's already been following.

But wired speeds are getting faster too, you need only compare your ISDN modem, with what is possible with DOCSIS 3.1. I used CDPD (early cell phone data service) in the late '90's and that was 19.2 kbit/s which was actually at least in the same ballpark as the POTs modems. So its not like wireless is getting massivly faster and copper has hit a wall. It seems that faster DSP's also help wired communications mechanisms..

There is a clear and obvious point of diminishing returns, which you can see from the fact that to a pretty good first approximation nobody uses wired connections to connect their computers to the Internet; everyone uses 802.11. Yes: wired connections will be faster. But past a threshold, it doesn't matter, and the ease and lower cost of deployment will win out.

There is also a decent chance that it won't be. We (in Boulder) have this same "should we continue the status quo in the present because better technology may be widely deployed in the future?" debate with public transportation vs. self-driving cars / hyperloop / whatever and municipal power infrastructure vs. solar + storage. It's always a tricky question (and I don't come down on the same side in each of those debates).

If the network has been paid back then it's a non issue. Wireless broadband has a host of issues and fiber makes it's adoption less pressing. Sure, if it rolls out in 15 years then the city might be out some capital, but it also gets 15 years use from that fiber network. So, unless it's coming in the next 5-10 years it's probably not worth considering.

It's coming in the next 5 years. AT&T and Verizon are already buying up the necessary spectrum and running trials with working hardware. There will be no point trenching fiber through everyone's yards when you can build a 5G cell in each subdivision for far less money.

I'll believe it when I see it. I don't mean that sarcastically, I mean it literally: when a few competitors appear to own sufficient spectrum, and trials with working hardware have been completed, I will believe it. Until then, I'm happy to pay some sales tax to improve existing well-understood but (in my opinion) under-deployed technology.

That would be awesome, and would have been awesome 10 years ago, but FCC have been successfully fighting against this for a long time so we can't make assumptions. Regardless, fiber will always have more bandwidth than radio, and we'll always need more bandwidth.

Agreed. Invest heavily in WISP technology if possible. Running fiber through bedrock sounds ridiculous.

That wireless still has to connect to a wire at some point.

A huge fraction of the cost of FTTH networks is last mile fiber delivery.

I agree with you, but governments will ask: is it better to back an expensive technology, or a cheaper one like wireless? Is it the government's responsibility to provide the state-of-the-art. or the minimum viable?

I'd prefer it if us Americans would believe in the former, but unfortunately I think our culture expects the government to do the latter (or nothing at all).

I enjoy the state of the art sewer system in my city. It keeps the brown stuff contained and properly disposed of. And it cost billions, with a 100 year replacement cycle that is constantly in progress.

I’m really glad that my sewer system isn’t expected to handle 1000 times the traffic it did 20 years ago.

It's entirely possible that within a year or two, it won't be state of the art at all, if the hype around 5g wireless speeds and bandwidth are to be believed.

Spending a significant amount of money on something that requires a significant install and maintenance (trenching bedrock, cut lines) when there are potential solutions just around the corner seems to me like bad policy.

I'm sure that there are other, more effective uses the government could put that money towards. Maybe the most efficient and beneficial thing for Boulder would be to not take on more debt, I don't know. Just don't be too quick to assume that all expenses and public works projects are net positives.

How does that 250 months number change if you bake in a 2%/year price increase to account for inflation?

Probably should be paid for relative to annual income, but yeah, seems like a reasonable expense.

Once it’s paid off, what is the maintience cost?

Will the city simply offer it as a competing service? Make it free for everyone and then tax?

Then there is cost of operating this network.

Repaid with 20 year dept. See the article and my other comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com