A One-Traffic-Light Town with Some of the Fastest Internet in the U.S | Hacker News Reader

A One-Traffic-Light Town with Some of the Fastest Internet in the U.S

newyorker.com

126 pointsfortran7745 comments

"In the most rugged terrain around McKee, the crews relied on a mule named Old Bub to haul the cable two or three miles a day. “We’ve got mountains and rocks and not the greatest roads, and there were places we couldn’t get a vehicle to,” Gabbard told me. “Farmers here have been using mules for centuries. It just made sense that, if a place was hard to get to, you went with the mules.” Old Bub, he said, was able to do the work of eight to ten men."

Laying fiber with a mule named Old Bub, now that's a story I never expected to read.

Ha! It sounds like something out of cowboy be-bop.

I’m so delighted to see the promise (as in, potential) of the Internet playing out properly.

So often, the stories of the Internet are how it failed to become what we’d all hoped (open, naturally regulating, democratizing). Well, we all know that didn’t happen.

Good Internet, coupled with adjusted attitudes towards employment will allow the US to take advantage of the vast amount of land we possess. We don’t need to crowd into cities. We can reconnect with a more natural way of living. And semi-ironically, technology will be what allows that.

A boy can dream . . .

Dream, and then do. Do you live somewhere without municipal fiber? If so, champion the cause! It pays dividends to your local community, and clearly has the potential to increase quality of life.

https://muninetworks.org/content/muni-fiber-models-fact-shee...

We've got it here in Centennial Colorado. Symmetric Gigabit

https://coloradosun.com/2018/09/13/municipal-broadband-citie...

While waiting in a temp apartment to move into a new home in a hinterland satellite of LA (a fairly large one, ~350k pop or so), I was delighted (and somewhat skeptical) to learn that AT&T had a U-verse package with 1GB/1GB fiber for like $90 a month - uncapped no less. For 90 glorious days I sat there incredulously running speedtests of all stripes, trying to get the bandwidth to back off at various times of the day. But it was not a tease; steady 800-900 mbps real throughput night and day.

Sadly it was only available in a small strip adjacent to a highway, and once the house was ready (out in a farther suburb) I had to relinquish this moment to sweet reverie and go back to my Charter life as a humble 100/20 megabit peasant.

Why do so many people believe that? Here in Maryland, there are towns with municipal broadband in rural areas on the eastern shore. (Maryland has a fairly extensive public fiber backbone to which rural towns can connect.) There is no tech related business activity or jobs. The only economic activity is farming and tourism. In fact, due to the way Verizon built out here in the early 2000s, there are many quasi-rural areas that have had fiber since 2005-2006, but still have no municipal water or sewer. It doesn’t seem like it’s done anything for the local economy.

We cannot even bring tech jobs to second tier cities, what makes anyone think that technology will enable that for rural towns? Kansas City has had fiber for almost a decade. Can we point to data showing that any of the economic benefits have been realized? What about places like Chattanooga Tennessee? Are they doing better than similarly situated small towns?

These seems like “build it and they will come” techno-Utopianism.

Well, in the article, they did mention creating 600 hundred work from home jobs in 500 years. It did require effort though, not just the existence of good internet.

But it does seem possible to bring jobs to rural America.

Chattanooga is not a “small town”. The Chattanooga MSA has almost 550,000 people. Its home to a lot of industries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattanooga,_Tennessee

Unfortunately, some of the same people who would benefit the most from “subsidies” are the ones who continuously vote for politicians who want to cut them out.

When I visit relatives in “flyover” country, I definitely think about buying a ranch and working remotely. It’s so weird to me that I can get Gigabit all around the Wyoming/Utah/Montana area that’s better, faster, and cheaper than what I can get in the Bay Area.

Traditional economics tells us it should be the opposite, which means it’s probably a political issue and not a market one.

Well there are less toes to step on out there to establish fiber lines.

Underground rated fiber cabling is around $1300 a mile on Amazon in 1000 ft spools, and I bet you can get a much better deal than that if you buy in quantity direct from Corning. At that point it's mostly labor and a mule is a darn clever way to save on labor costs. Also, rural folks are used to physical labor. Another advantage to laying fiber in a rural area, especially out west, is that you need to negotiate with far fewer landowners than you would in a more densely populated area, and many of them will probably let you lay the cable for free in exchange for a connection.

The real cost is in politics and labor. Materials are extremely cheap comparatively.

It is 100% a political issue.

From what I've read running fiber in San Francisco is a nightmare. You have to get a bunch of permits approved, do an environmental survey because you have to install a box on the street, and get local approval for that box. Then you have to do the same for the next block.

British counterpart: https://b4rn.org.uk/

There seems to be a sweet spot where there isn't enough existing infrastructure or dense property ownership in the way of a rollout, and the key obstacle is getting cost-per-mile down.

It also requires a small number of people committed to making it happen as a public service.

EPB (the local power company) in Chattanooga, TN, has been offering 10 Gbps residential[1] for some time, now.

[1] https://epb.com/home-store/internet

For only $300/m too.

I'm seriously considering moving there. Costs are low across the board. No income tax, inexpensive real estate, gasoline, and electricity. Biggest downside I see is the humidity.

I don't think Chattanooga has some special exemption from federal income tax.

Sorry, I should have said no state income tax.

The downtown area in Chattanooga has a pretty nice revitalization in the last few years too. There’s a startup incubator there that appeared to have decent momentum. It surprised me as a kid I lived near there in the 90’s and it definitely had a "run down ex-manufacturing town" vibe. But I’d be much prefer moving there than the Bay Area if I had to choose.

Amazing story of government programs at work combined with local, individual initiative. New Deal legislation making the co-op possible, Obama era $$ and the leader of the co-op deciding to make it happen.

http://archive.is/lzwUD

This is fantastic. So many times we try to address symptoms like opioid abuse and poverty instead of attacking root causes like a lack of opportunity and jobs. It's fun to see how infrastructure improvement like this can change lives.

Opioid abuse is not a "symptom" created by lack of jobs. Where did you get that from?

It is. People with hope in their lives and something to work for don't try to numb themselves with drugs.

This is just not true man. I want it to be true. It looks good on paper. But let me tell you... People will waste their lives on drugs, alcohol, sex and all number of vices whether there's a good job available or not. Happily. And they'll spit in your face, lie, cheat & steal all while telling you everything you want to hear. Some people just suck, and there will always be this group of people, opportunity & prosperity be damned.

This paper indicates a relationship between a lack of economic opportunity and opioid addiction: https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/259261/ASPEEconomicOpp...

I understand that you may have strong personal feelings about individuals who use drugs but I would encourage you to not make claims based exclusively on those.

There will, indeed, always be those people. But there will also be people who want to make good lives for themselves and their families, if they can only see a way to do that.

I'd bet there are more of the latter.

It has a lot more to do with pain management than jobs.

Unrelated, but I’m perplexed by the use of “coöperative”–I’ve never come across this spelling.

Relevant link: https://www.wordnik.com/lists/the-new-yorkers-style-manual

The New Yorker is weird like that.

They also insist on misspelling 'ensure' as 'insure': https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-univer...

I think they're just abusing their poetic license at this point, with the amount of times they choose to use archaic spellings and meanings of words, and I wish they would actually stop.

> They also insist on misspelling 'ensure' as 'insure'

M-W agrees, and not even marks it as archaic: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insure

Ensure and insure carry different connotations, as detailed at the bottom of the Webster link.

Likewise here: https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=assure

Though they differ only slightly, and in the concrete example in the article "insure" still fits, IMO.

The New Yorker is kind of well known for being virtually the only significant English publication which uses a diaeresis (the ¨) where almost everyone else uses a hyphen or just two repeated letters [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ö#In_English, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

>Those two dots, often mistaken for an umlaut

Hmm maybe it's because it looks exactly like an umlaut and is often placed exactly where an umlaut would be placed?

The diaeresis and umlaut are literally exactly the same Unicode character and the symbol or diacritic itself can be called either. The difference is what it does to the vowel — it’s a diaeresis if it indicates a repeated vowel, and an umlaut if it modifies the vowel sound.

Just to note, a diaeresis isn't always the same vowel repeated. The most common example is "naïve", and it also occurs in names like Chloë.

Whoops, you’re right, my explanation missed that!

Many of the N.Y.C. media outlets have style guides that may seem odd to other native speakers of American English. The one I find amusing is their insistence on using periods in acronyms and initialisms where no one else does.

Of course, N.Y.C. is probably just as correct as NYC, but they do it even when it is manifestly wrong.

One example is I.B.M. The major N.Y.C. media all spell it with periods, even though IBM itself does not use them.

Another is the SOS Morse Code distress signal, which the New Yorker spells S.O.S. with periods, seemingly in the belief that it is an initialism.

SOS is not an abbreviation or acronym or initialism at all. It is not even three separate letters when sent in Morse Code. It is a "prosign", which means that it is a single long Morse character, not sent as three separate letters with pauses between them.

It would be properly typeset with an overscore above the three letters, and no periods, as shown in the Wikipedia article. The overscore indicates that it is a single long character, and the letters are just a way to remember it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOS

Also "fibre-optic" and excessive use of hyphens (eg in numbers like forty-two). The New Yorker uses weird styles.

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