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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

> I don't understand why we have to dig up roads to lay cables. Why can't there be a shared conduit for cables underneath or beside a road?

Because the city doesn't want to pay for it. And the companies, having the money to dig the road up don't want to make their competitor's jobs easier. So pretty classic market failure.

What needs to happen, IMO, is that the last mile should be utility infrastructure, and ISPs should connect to that. Then the ISPs pay the city for use of the last mile on a endpoint by endpoint basis. Lowers the barrier for new ISPs since they don't have to dig up new last mile, and the city is encouraged to upkeep the last mile since it's a revenue stream with a few high paying representatives of customers (so no tragedy of the commons), but the low barrier to entry for ISPs means that the city won't get too connected to individual ISPs.

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Okay but who is going to do that? My county is still working on bringing water and sewer to most places, and I’m less than 10 minutes outside Annapolis. Especially places that already have cable or fiber that was privately installed?

When there's a clear revenue source coming out of it, bonds make sense to pay for it.

And yeah, if you're in barely first world conditions where you're struggling to hook sewer up to your residents near a major municipality, you obviously have systemic issues that get in the way of proper utility work of nearly any scale.

20% of the country doesn’t have public water or sewer, including many fairly wealth areas. In vastly more of the country, existing water and sewer infrastructure is crumbling and needs replacement. Sure, you can pass bonds, but how do you get people to vote for those bonds when you also need to issue bonds for all this other higher priority infrastructure?

> 20% of the country doesn’t have public water or sewer, including many fairly wealth areas

Almost entirely rural. These people aren't digging up roads, but it's purely a right of way issue on the poles (if they're getting real high speed internet either way).

> In vastly more of the country, existing water and sewer infrastructure is crumbling and needs replacement.

Yes, the united states is devolving into a third world country when it comes to infrastructure. My scheme is obviously predicated on not being in one of the municipalities that are actively trying to run the concept of government into the ground.

> Sure, you can pass bonds, but how do you get people to vote for those bonds when you also need to issue bonds for all this other higher priority infrastructure?

So you don't get to have works like this until you have the basics of potable water covered.

Like for real, 10 minutes outside of Annapolis should be able to have sewer covered.

That's probably a misunderstanding. There are plenty of places that don't have public water, but that do have abundant potable water. It's just coming from a nearby well rather than a water treatment plant. Same with the sewer; they've got private septic systems rather than a public sewer system. This type of distributed infrastructure is less costly and more resilient than public water and sewer systems, though it's not suitable for cities or even suburbs.

I understand that, I have a house on a well.

That bit is covered by my first response:

> Almost entirely rural. These people aren't digging up roads, but it's purely a right of way issue on the poles (if they're getting real high speed internet either way).

The part you seem to take issue with is the part where I think I had reduced the subset to people who have an issue getting current infrastructure, probably because it hasn't been maintained properly (thinking of flint like situations). I'm admitting that there are cases where they have bigger utility issues and systemic problems managing those utilities, and probably don't have the bandwidth to deal with a new one.

I don’t think that’s a totally fair comparison. I grew up with well water and a septic system a bit outside of a rural town, and it’s not practically much different from living with city water and sewage now. You just have to maintain those systems yourself. Now if you could access the internet by digging a well, that’d be golden :p

Totally agree about cities owning last-mile fiber. Though I think more than that would be needed for rural areas where folks might not live in city limits. That’s where fast internet is most needed. I think my folks still only get 3mbps down and much less up living about a half mile away from where the cable company run ends

You don't even need to be outside a rural town. I grew up in the middle of a city of 100k+ people, in a county of 500k+, and we were on well and septic because of the uniqueness of our property and the fact that to get on city water required $30k-$40k of combined trenching (to get it to our property from behind the house across the street) and hookup fees.

Across the (small private) road in front of our house, 50 feet away, the neighbor was on city water. To the side of us, across the creek that bordered out property, was a large public High School (which I went to). To the other side of the property was an on-ramp to an elevated freeway. This is an hour north of SF.

That's hardly rural. There are still select properties on well water all around even in cities, it's just not always obvious.

Are you in Hartford County, MD by chance?

Why can't there be a shared conduit for cables underneath or beside a road?

Because the city doesn't want to pay for it.

What needs to happen, IMO, is that the last mile should be utility infrastructure, and ISPs should connect to that

...so, the cities won’t shell out to build conduits, but they’ll happily pay to build out conduits + fiber?

Well, they don't need to build out conduits + fiber, only fiber since the idea is encourage their monopoly over the last mile. They just need to do what is happening today on the private side and run a fiber (which is cheaper for each individual player). Then encouraging everything other than the last mile to be private sets up all the right incentive structures as far as I can see to solve a lot of problems of broadband internet access.

You can see this model in very similar markets, where some countries run the cell network as a national utility. But your actual carriers are a large choice of companies connected to that network that differentiate on service, price, and added on features, rather than the amount of capital available for infrastructure investment.

Well you need conduit to run fiber generally; so you would be doing both.

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