Comment by rwbcxrz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwbcxrz | Hacker News Reader

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I agree that the marginal cost of providing those services to rural homes is higher than urban/suburban homes. However, I think you're vastly overestimating the actual costs incurred, as many (maybe most) people who live in rural areas don't have most of those things.

I live in a mostly rural county in north-central Colorado. The county maintains ~250 miles of roads of which only 39 miles are paved (the rest of the roads in the county are state and federal highways).

Outside the few small towns in the county, there's no sewer or municipal water. Everyone has a septic tank and a well on their property that they're responsible for maintaining.

Same with cable/fiber. Unless you live in a town, your options are ~1.5Mbps DSL or ~5Mbps fixed wireless (if you have good line of sight to a base station). Neither the county nor any of the ISPs in the area have any plans to significantly improve services, so I'm really hoping that SpaceX gets Starlink up and running sooner rather than later.

Considering all that, I don't think that your calculated premium of $400,000 per rural home actually applies in most situations.

His point is to have urban level utilities would incur that kind of a premium, ergo if you didn't pay that premium don't expect urban utility service.

Right, and I absolutely agree with that. When I bought my house, I had no expectation that utility services would be the same. While my neighbors and I have some complaints about the quality of our internet service, we're looking for 15-25Mbps, not 100Mbps, and certainly not 1Gbps.

But GP's first sentence was mainly what I was trying to address:

> I am all for utility companies cutting service to rural areas, for cost savings or otherwise.

If my electric and gas providers suddenly decided that I was too expensive to serve and cut me off, I'd be out in the range of $20-30k to install batteries, a generator (since solar might not be adequate in the middle of winter), and to convert my heating from natural gas to propane.

Assuming it's a net operating loss for them to provide service to you, what would your preferred resolution be?

If you have cell service, look into a mvno such as Ubifi. It's made working from home as a software developer possible for me.

https://www.ubifi.net/

Thanks for the link! I've looked briefly at LTE internet service but hadn't seriously considered it because I'm just on the edge of decent cell service. While my phone usually displays 1-2 bars, it's not even enough to make voice calls. I think due to the topography in the area, my phone can receive signal from the tower but isn't powerful enough to transmit back. It looks like UbiFi also sells 4G signal boosters and external antennas, and that might just do the trick.

I picked up a signal booster, but ended up not needing it- I typically get 2-3 bars, but found a spot in the house where I get 4, and that's good enough for decent speeds that I never got around to setting it up.

Keep in mind that the signal booster isn't magic- it's just a relay with a bigger antenna than what your cell phone has. If you're brave enough, pop up onto your roof with your cell phone- if you get at least three bars up there, I'm guessing that the signal booster could do the trick.

I wish that AT&T or Verizon would offer these unlimited style data plans directly. It seems strange to me that something like UbiFi can contract out off of AT&T's network and offer a flat rate plan, but somehow, phone tethering and data-only devices like verizon's jetpack are always limited to 20gb and slow speeds.

Best of luck!

If you really want to make it work you can get a router with an external antenna connector and mount a yagi and point it towards the tower. Might take some trial and error but this is definitely a solvable problem w/ LTE

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