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Comment by Timmah | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if laying cable is one of your biggest challenges, but I assume it would be along with right-of-way.

What do you think about the idea of using the sewer system to lay either fiber or 10+gb copper? Before you think about how gross that is, consider the advancements in drone robotics. You would need to devise a cable-laying robot that could traverse the sewer via remote control. Mount fixtures to the top of the pipes and string the cables through, connecting neighborhoods.

This would require convincing the city to lease you the right-of-way and put up a bond to cover any repairs to damage caused by the cables. But it would solve both the bandwidth problem and the "those are our telephone poles!" Problem. What do you think?

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We're using fixed wireless. Advances in that technology have made high speed broadband feasible in areas with high wireless interference like LA. We believe wireless is the best path for what we're doing. It doesn't require interfacing with existing infrastructure anywhere but at the towers/APs, it deploys and redeploys quickly, and can provide competitive speeds and beyond.

More importantly, it gives us the freedom of building our own infrastructure, since access to public infrastructure is prohibitively expensive--by design, it seems.

Water utilities are (justifiably) very protective of their infrastructure. Justifiable because of the extreme expense in closing a street, excavating, and repairing anything that happens to their buried infrastructure. I've seen the one in my city reject a stormwater pipe because of a couple small pieces of crusher dust. I can't see them being positive towards the deliberate installation of another biofilm-forming-surface inside their pipes. But YMMV I'm only speaking from experience in my small neck of the woods!

I don't disagree. I think that a full mitigation plan could help. For example showing that fiber can be easily chopped up if a pipe clogged. Maybe biofilm could be mitigated with an electric charge on a conductive outer sheath? I can't see how a single cable or 2 would ever require digging into the street.

Even a single cable in the sewer can require digging up the street if the cable causes an obstruction in the pipe.

Rule #1: Never install new copper in the outside plan.

That being said, there are companies specializing in installing fiber cables into sewers. They use tracked robots to install steel bands inside the pipes that keep the fiber cable in place. It's not cheap, but it is cheaper than ripping open the streets in a city.

There are also techniques to install fiber cable into water pipes.

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