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Comment by iron0013 | Hacker News Reader

There's truth to that, but affordable rural high speed internet is possible. Paul Bunyan Communications in northern Minnesota, for example, runs affordable fiber optic service deep into the country. My friend lives 25 miles from any town, and they happily ran fiber out to his house. The main difference between Paul Bunyan Communications and other rural providers who claim that such a thing is "impossible" seems to be that Paul Bunyan is a Co-operative: https://paulbunyan.net/cooperative/our-history/

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+1 - VTel [0] provides symmetric gigabit fiber to rural communities in Vermont for ~$80/mo. Again, they are a co-op. The other benefit is that their customer support is spectacular.

[0] https://www.vermontel.com/

Did your friend have to pay installation costs for the fiber? If so, do you know how much it was?

I don't know. The website says that there's an $85 activation fee, and my friend's income is such that a large installation fee would have been impossible for him (just like most folks in the north woods!).

I genuinely don’t understand how this is possible/profitable. $80/mo is just shy of $10,000 in $10yr. Even if all of that is marginal profit (e.g., the costs to them after running the lines once are zero), there’s no way that pays for the crews to lay even 10mi of fiber.

Something has to be missing here.

I asked a customer service rep about it on the online chat. Here's what they said (I doubt they'd mind me posting it here):

16:10:46 Thank you for contacting us. An operator will be with you shortly.

16:10:46 Guest: Is there an installation fee for Gigazone internet?

16:11:08 Guest: Hi, I see that there's an $85 activation fee, but is there also an additional installation fee?

16:11:40 Operator JJ joined the chat

16:11:47 JJ: Hi there!

16:11:51 Guest: Hi!

16:12:13 JJ: There is no installation fee. It is rolled in with the activation fee which is waived if you sign a 6 month contract.

16:12:54 Guest: That's great--I was discussing this with friends and we can't figure out how it's possible! How can you afford to run fiber optic out into the country and charge so little for it?

16:14:36 Guest: Part of why I ask is because almost no other rural areas have this figured out

16:14:56 JJ: Well, there's a couple of ways. For a long time we required our members to have phone lines along with our internet service as there are a number of government grants that we can qualify for as long as we're building rural telephone infrastructure. That's the reason we still are required to require phone service in some of our service area.

16:15:13 Guest: I see, cool

16:15:52 JJ: Secondly, we're a co-op and committed to the community. If we plow a fiber line to your home and you end up moving some time in the future, the line remains for some other lucky co-op member in the future. It's kind of a "long-game" mentality.

16:16:05 Guest: Makes sense, thank you!

+ as a local co-op they value paying for local labor differently from noname national monopoly corporation.

The missing factor may very well be taxes and corporate accounting. If the ISP is writing off the cost of running the lines as a capital expenditure and are further able to reduce their tax burden from amortization over the life of the lines that $80/mo could conceivably be all profit.

> Paul Bunyan Communications in northern Minnesota, for example, runs affordable fiber optic service deep into the country.

I'm in a city of 872k people and can't even get fiber. The fastest I can get at home, without going business, is 75mbps.

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