Microsoft and an army of tiny telecoms are part of a plan to wire rural America
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
That's a bit of revisionist history.
Putting things into perspective, in the great depression there was a general banking collapse, cutting off credit to all businesses. But especially hard-hit were businesses trying to bring electricity to rural areas. Whereas credit in the late 20s was quite cheap, the spigot had been cutoff by the 30s, when rural electrification was just getting started.
One of the Roosevelt era projects was to extend government loans to support rural eletrification -- and this program was a great success.
But the reason it was a success was not because "companies in the 30s refused to build electricity" but because banks were refusing to lend money to companies to building electricity infrastructure.
And this was because the banks were extremely risk-averse after the banking crisis. Whereas the government could step in and make risk free loans (guaranteed with the full faith and credit of the taxpayer) to rural electrification.
Moreover the reason there were farmers collectives was because these were required by the government in order to get the loan! So that's a pretty strong incentive. Therefore it's not that private businesses didn't want to service rural areas, but the banking system collapsed (in large part due to federal policies) and then the federal government stepped in and provided a lending program that locked out private businesses from participating in it.
Fortunately by 1944, the requirement of only lending to cooperatives was lifted and that was when rural electrificaiton really took off.
You can read the act here: https://www.rd.usda.gov/files/UEP_IP_100-1.pdf
> Studies had long disproved the utilities’ figures. A 1925 survey in Wisconsin found that the cost of lines would be not $5,000 but $1,225 per mile.
The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (pp. 714-715). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
I'll admit that Caro is not always right, but I'd love some proof to the contrary.
But the reason entrepeneurs couldn't in the 1930s was that there was no financing available to do so, and the law allowing subsidized government lending only to cooperatives (shutting out private business) prevented them from doing it. In fact if no private business wanted to enter this market, why was there legislation to exclude them? Why not just lend to anyone who wanted to take on the project? Then if half the borrowers were coops and half were private business, so be it. Then we could look back on this, and if indeed most were coops, we could make the kind of affirmative statement you originally made. But as it stands, it's not a fair statement to make.
> The conflict over inclusion of the utilities was compromised by allowing them to be eligible for REA loans, but giving preference to non-profit bodies such as cooperatives.
And the actual bill text^[2]:
> The Secretary is authorized and empowered, from the sums hereinbefore authorized, to make loans for rural electrification to persons, corporations, States, Territories, and subdivisions and agencies thereof, municipalities, peoples' utility districts and cooperative, nonprofit, or limited-dividend associations, organized under the laws of any State or Territory of the United States, for the purpose of financing the construction and operation of generating plants, electric transmission and distribution lines or systems for the furnishing and improving of electric service to persons in rural areas...
> Provided, That the Secretary, in making such loans, shall give preference to States, Territories, and subdivisions and agencies thereof, municipalities, peoples' utility districts, and cooperative, nonprofit, or limited-dividend associations, the projects of which comply with the requirements of this chapter.
Yes, there is a clause stating a preference for cooperatives, but as Caro explains, making these cooperatives was not that easy for poor rural areas:
> The REA Act required loans to be self-liquidating; before a farmers’ electrical cooperative could obtain a loan, therefore, the REA had to be satisfied that the cooperative would be able to repay it, together with annual interest of about 3 percent, within twenty-five years. The crucial criterion the REA established to ensure this was population density: the agency said it would make no loan in any area in which the electrical lines to be built would serve an average of less than three farms per mile.
[1]: The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (p. 721). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[2]: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title7/chap...
The problem is that this loan program was biased against private business and promoted the creation of collective organizations, and predictably, private business did not take advantage of it but collectives did, and from that you claim that private business didn't want to take advantage of it. You see the issue here?
If they just said "Hey, the banks wont lend to this risky venture, so we'll step in and do it" and they offered the same terms to everyone regardless of their political organization, then it would be a different story. But that's not what happened.
The issue with that argument is that rural electrification was a problem before the Great Depression. It was an issue back in the 20's, the period in which you claim that credit was quite cheap. So why didn't entrepreneurs go out and electrify rural areas? Probably because of the prevailing notion that farmers wouldn't pay for electricity.
https://www.masterresource.org/insull-samuel/insull-rural-el...
Insull was later demonized by the FDR government and died penniless.
FDR demonized him after that event, that left 600K of Insull's company's shareholders penniless, for his financial misdeeds after he got rich from electrification.
What is CBRS?
On January 27, 2020, the FCC authorized full use of the CBRS band for wireless service provider commercialization without the restrictions to prevent interference with military use of the spectrum. Under the new rules, wireless carriers using CBRS might be able to deploy 5G mobile networks without having to acquire spectrum licenses. [0]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Broadband_Radio_Servi...
Aristotle has 40MHz of CBRS (3.5GHz) spectrum and can also use up to 80MHz more of unlicensed spectrum (though that could suffer interference problems from basically anyone else that wants to use the unlicensed portion). The big three companies have more spectrum - T-Mobile has 335MHz, AT&T 246MHz, and Verizon 290MHz. Not only that, it's across more frequency bands which has implications for coverage. Low-band (below 1GHz) spectrum will travel farther and be less susceptible to disruption. AWS/PCS spectrum from 1.7GHz to 2.1GHz and 2.5GHz BRS/EBS spectrum will travel farther than 3.5GHz spectrum. And yes, the big three also have CBRS/C-Band 3.5/3.7GHz spectrum.
These companies are going to have an army of wireless technicians, a lot more spectrum, and the money to invest in deploying it. T-Mobile already has 30M eligible households for their home internet (around 20-25% of US households) and I'm sure it isn't perfect, but it will be improving rapidly over the next few years as they bring lots more spectrum online. Verizon has announced home internet plans as well (I think hitting 30M by the end of 2023 and 75M by the end of 2024 or 2025, but this is from memory here).
To make a simple comparison, Verizon is going to be averaging 174MHz of 3.5/3.7GHz spectrum vs Aristotle with 40MHz. To me, it seems like Verizon is going to be able to deploy a better home internet service. However, rural wireless carriers have put up a good fight in the past and often serve areas where the big three don't. Aristotle might also invest in equipment that simply works better for what their customers want.
For example, T-Mobile's home internet service just uses a router/modem that's the size of a WiFi router. There's no fancy large antenna or anything. Aristotle might work with their customers to install high-gain directional antennas much like rural people are used to installing for terrestrial or satellite TV. Localities might be more willing to give a small, local company like Aristotle access to their water towers in a way that they wouldn't give the big three access. Aristotle might also be better able to find a report with customers about the trade-offs of adding more capacity, cost, traffic management, etc.
But T-Mobile could copy that playbook in the coming years. T-Mobile has talked a lot on investor calls about seeing rural customers as one of their big growth areas over the next 5 years. If Aristotle can make it work with 3.5GHz spectrum, T-Mobile's 2.5GHz spectrum has better coverage and they have more of it.
I'm probably being overly pessimistic, but it just seems hard to compete with the big three wireless companies.
I still have my doubts that any wireless can ever replace the reliability and low latency of FTH.
I have no desire to have mobile internet experience from my gaming system or desktop computer. I will keep my Fiber thanks.
I also for Verizon have my doubts that the "no data caps" they are selling today will last as they get more customers moved off their wire services on to the more profitable wireless. This bait and switch is old hat for the telecom's it will be just a few years, if not a few months before they backdoor in some data caps due to the ever famous "network congestion" that will always plague high density wireless deployments
While the Big 3 have all the spectrum, they incompetently use is, and simply have it because they can afford to pay the FCC billions in the corrupt "auction" system the FCC uses to allocate said spectrum.
The Big 3 carriers have proven to be terrible network operators and people only use them because they have no other choice. Wireless carriers in the US have a lower approval rating than the US Congress
It also helps that existing cellular telcos already have heaps of 4G towers so customers are likely to be near one and get a good service (and in any case carriers usually don't provide fixed wireless services in areas where their network suffering from capacity issues). My mother incidentally lives right across the road of her serving cell site which makes the service even more reliable and speedy for her--and even if that was not the case, her carrier has been deploying hundreds of new 4G sites each year in our small 5 or so million population country so the service is improving all the time across the entire country. So there is a nice double win -- on one hand mobile subscribers benefit from much better capacity and improved coverage (much of which wouldn't have happened if it was not for fixed wireless) while on the other hand people now have more options for their home/fixed internet.
I was previously a skeptic of fixed wireless--but having seen how well it works for low end fixed wireless users while also improving things for mobile customers as well I am now entirely in favor of it. Fibre will still be the best option for high end users (such as >99% of the HN audience) and I can't see it going away anytime soon. There's too many families, small businesses, student flats, etc for which fibre would continue to be more cost effective option for the speed and QOS provided.
As more and more people moved off of POTS to wireless carries, the cost to maintain the system went up, and the willingness of the telco;s to maintain it dropped. Now to the point where in many areas you can not get a Plain Old Telephone line at all, even if you need it for something like an Alarm system, medical device, etc.
The same will happen for fiber I am afraid and everyone will just be left with mediocre fixes wireless only good for web browsing and email
In rural areas, US Cellular is the main carrier.
For wired, it's Frontier, which has been in bankruptcy for quite a while.
This arrangement also provides a fig leaf that insulates them from being told (regulated) to provide decent coverage in rural areas.
The reason I bring this up, is there was a quote in the article " "stringing lines across telephone poles is risky with storms an ever-present threat. He needs to include fixed wireless as an alternative when considering how to budget for connecting the entire state"
The problem there is that with CBRS or other bands available now, is that you still need fiber, the 5G Signal only travels so far, you need a huge fiber backbone network to connect all the cell sites together. There is really no way to have it all wireless, there's just not enough spectrum.
But... if say there were more. Well, then it is conceivable one could chain together cell sites using 5G IAB, but you would need probably 10 times more spectrum that what is available with CBRS now to have any kind of bandwidth that one would consider broadband.
Just an observation that I think gets sort of overlooked sometimes because it is based on technical knowledge of how wireless networks work. The reason there are really only the big 3 is because it is incredibly capital intensive to build out a network due to the number of cell sites you have to build in order to get the frequency reuse necessary to have broadband wireless and a huge fiber backbone network to connect all those cell sites back to an MTSO.
If anyone is serious about having rural broadband in a country as vast as the US, in my view, the only practical was would be with much larger amounts of spectrum allocated to the effort. Which could be done in a similar arrangement as CBRS with a military preemption arrangement.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/alphabets-laser-inte...
Lasers are even more directional, which is good for reducing noisy neighbors. But the farther the range the more difficult it is to hit a target. At a mile away it would be extremely difficult. In rural areas, we are often talking miles between farmers, let alone to internet POC.
>Bowles says a fiber-to-the-home alternative would’ve cost $5.5 million, taken at least four months longer to construct, and covered just over 600 homes.
This is the problem. If it was a wealthy neighborhood, no one would blink an eye at spending $5.5 million of government funding to string fiber to 600+ homes. But if it's rural people, especially the black or brown ones, then it's a questionable decision, and they should just get shoddy CBRS-based Internet instead at a $2m cost instead.
This is yet another take that money deserves to get sucked out of cities and pushed to car dependent, unsustainable areas.
The city where I live had a good, commercially successful fiber roll out going. The ISP literally stopped the progress of the roll out in the city for a couple of years, where it was actually affordable and paying for itself, because they got a massive government "grant" to put up fiber in a rural area just to the south.
If people want to live in rural areas and then shit on people living in dense areas, where quality infrastructure is actually possible for a reasonable price, let them pay for it!
It means they had money to fiber the rural area AND the city. They just chose not to.
You're talking about jobs and uses <10% of people in rural areas are actually doing. The majority of people are instead commuting 40+ minutes in to denser areas where there jobs are.
On the other hand, all I hear is propaganda about why cities are awful places and why exurbs/rural areas are so amazing. I'm tired of huge chunks of my money getting pulled away from where I live to subsidize people living these unhealthy, expensive lifestyles.
Energy workers are typically seasonal too, at least for fossil fuel extraction. Refineries are typically close to the cities.
How much human labor is required to "produce" water? Seems like gravity does most of the work there.
And seasonal workers still live near the job for a whole season.
I figure the folks who pick my vegetables ought have internet, same as they ought get paid fair for the work.
I guess there is just nowhere worth driving to all the time.
So don't get me wrong it's still massively subsidized, and we should stop doing that and make more parks instead (especially on the east), but it's not so polluting.
Suburbs use more than half their water on lawns; water that is treated and often pumped
Availability of renewable power is limited by neighborhood rules and acreage
Suburbs are fundamentally more like cities than agricultural rural ares in terms of the interdependence / non-self-reliance of housing units. (No, your aspirational basement workbench that isn't used to satisfy basic needs count for much.) They offer a simulacrum of rural life to, originally, white flighters, that doesn't count for anything.
Giving the need for transport, and the great distance everything is from everything else, driving is unavoidable. What gets sacrificed then is the spontaneous interactions with other human beings and tiniest casual trips, as the big essential stuff saturates the road's and peoples time for traveling.
It's a terrible way of life.
1. Spectrum/Viacom contracts with NYS to install internet for all rural NYS citizens
2. Spectrum/Viacom committed Über-Fraud by taking the money and running while making only "token" installation that weren't even rural (e.g. some "installed" rutal locations ended up being in urban Brooklynn and this was published to the state)
3. The state discovers this fraud and prosecutes resulting in Spectrum/Viacom being "permabanned" from doing business in NYS forever (one of the ONLY things Cuomo did right).
4. Spectrum/Viacom cries like the weak corrupt bitch that they are but Cuomo tells them to suck eggs. Unless they pay a massive billion dollar fine. They crawl back and pay the fine.
5. Cuomo then takes the money and pays Spectrum's competitors (and Spectrum in a highly restricted set of regions) to install "Fiber EVERYWHERE!"
Now on nursing homes, getting fresh with his female staff and biggest of all, the SAFE act, Cuomo himself should be perma-banned from politics forever. But on this one did the right thing - once, only once. One out of a dozen bad acts is not enough to redeem him.
Now I have multi-GB/s fiber - better than what I could get in Silicon Valley. Though I still have ZERO cellular - I literally have to drive 10 miles for marginal LTE (1 bar service) and 40 miles to get 5G. But that's OK.
Thankfully that also means there will not be any self-driving EVs near me any time soon (the technology is unviable right now without a data-center connection with better than 10 ms latency which is only possible with 5G - LTE can never do better than 30 ms).
I agree with your point though rural NY can be pretty rural too if not in the same category as Alaska and large areas of the West.
We could see the same thing happen again, but instead of roads it's Internet. Living in the country sounds nice, but I can't imagine myself going back to dial-up. And I don't know if there's all that much cheap rural land anymore unless you're in a sparsely populated state, though. I grew up in the country, and awhile back I drove the old school bus route I used to take. Some things were the same, but there were a lot more fancy big houses than I remember twenty to thirty years ago.
I'd be perfectly content with packages getting delivered only two days per week to better amortize the route length. It's the delivery companies that are pushing these every day routes, presumably so they don't have to be in the storage business.
https://sebsebmc.github.io/starlink-coverage/index.html
If we're gonna spend 65B, could we throw 100M at buying everyone in the delta a dish?
If I had one complaint with it, it's probably the hardware itself. For $500, the installation kit is fairly barebones. On top of that, the router is pretty obviously "beta hardware" too, as well as the software and even parts of the dish itself. I'd be a little disappointed if I opened a Comcast installation kit with the same trappings, but I'll give Starlink some credit for pulling together such an impressive infrastructure/consumer hardware product at a non-alienating price.
Is CAT6 all that common? 100m runs seems pretty limiting in a rural setting. I think even the fibre that was strung up to my house in a fairly dense inner city neighbourhood has a longer run than that to the hub.
Is it possible to provide power to signal repeaters with POE to get around the ~100 meter limit?
Yes, but at that point you may as well just run fiber. These days, the SFP modules are cheap (20km SFP for ~$80).
The loss of signal on a CAT6 cable will be much greater then on fiber. When too much noise is introduced on a CAT6 cable, speeds will drop considerably. Packet loss will be quite high.
It is questionable whether their network could immediately handle 100k additional households, and by the time they scale the network to handle this, it is likely their existing 90k users will have continued with the yearly double digit bandwidth usage increase, eating much of the added capacity.
https://www.lightreading.com/4g3gwifi/starlinks-network-face...
Starlink works because they're building a constellation of thousands of satellites. Previous satellite internet companies had comparatively few satellites so they needed to restrict how much you could use the internet with low data caps. Starlink still has capacity constraints.
Terrestrial wireless infrastructure is likely to be cheaper for the amount of capacity you get - especially when you consider that most of the cost will be shared with existing mobile networks.
With terrestrial wireless, it's relatively easy to split cells when you need more capacity. Wireless cells can cover hundreds of square miles in rural areas.
That's not to say that Starlink doesn't have a place, but it isn't a cheap service. $100/mo and $550 sign-up cost isn't cheap internet. $100M wouldn't buy a Starlink Dishy for even 200,000 people, never mind the monthly cost and never mind the fact that we're already spending $885.5M on Starlink.
$65B looks like a big number, but if we're talking 25M people it's only $2,600 per person and that pays for less than 2 years of Starlink per person (including the $550 startup cost). Plus, Starlink won't have capacity for 25M people. Elon Musk has said that they'll probably be able to serve the 500,000 preorders and that things get more challenging in the several million user range - never mind 25M users.
If we're talking 43M people like Broadband Now estimates or the 120M that Microsoft estimates, it gets even more clear that we'll need more than Starlink.
Starlink is a good way to serve extremely rural customers who likely won't even get decent wireless signals and it's a good way for SpaceX to get large government subsidies for providing service to rural areas. Starlink isn't a private company solving a problem for the public. It's public money being offered for a solution to a problem and SpaceX wanting to go after some of that money and hopefully create a decent business out of it.
By a large measure when you look at the actual costs and not just the amount they charge the customer. The dish's actual cost is >$1,000. So $100M really buys dishes for less than 100,000 people.
I know it's probably misguided, but still.
Facebook... has never not.
It takes 2 to tango. Always.
If there is likely to be only one social network (broadly speaking), then does that opine on whether that network can choose to be ad+tracking funded and free, or paid? And is it in the best interest of the public to force it to be the other, too?
I think it's immaterial. You can't legislate Power's Law into submission.
Winner take all type market are the dictionary definition of Power's law. They produce the most exhilarating wins (eg. Google, Facebook) and the most brutal losses (Yahoo! , MySpace).
Another thing about Power's Law and this type of markets is that they receive almost all the attention, whereas stuff like constructions, pipelining, ports, airports don't get the same attention
And I think it would be a hard sell to convince me that saying "If you run a company with greater than Y users / market share / etc. then you must offer a paid option that optionally disables all tracking."
You'd just move the problem elsewhere (eg. in another sector of the economy or within government)
The government can mandate whatever is within the bounds of the laws its passed (and its constitution). Unintended consequences are a reason to wield power judiciously and incrementally, not a reason to avoid wielding it at all.
Critical infrastructure indeed.
I support more broadband options and in general I like TFA, but this is the sort of thing that undermines the argument. There is no easier "topography" in which to bury lines or over which to beam LOS than completely flat alluvial plain. The lines can be simply plowed into the ground and the antennas only have to clear the treetops.
Even in the rare cases when a section of cable must be replaced, it's still just plow it into deep soil rather than bore through rock the whole way.
According to Wikipedia:
The Delta has some of the lowest population densities in the
American South, sometimes fewer than 1 person per square mile.
It’s not like unrolling a spool of fiber is rocket science either.
I wonder if there are consumer laws that make that infeasible.
Urbanization and the shift to mechanization of farm technology during
the past 60 years has sharply reduced jobs in the Delta. People have
followed jobs out of the region, leading to a declining tax base. This
hampers efforts to support education, infrastructure development,
community health and other vital aspects of growth. The region's
remaining people suffer from unemployment, extreme poverty, and
illiteracy.There's a lot of factors that go into running underground cable, heck even above-ground can be problematic too!
I believe Telus buries their cross-country fiber cables at least 18 feet underground, far below anybody even coming close to excavating it, due to the sheer amount of financial damage that could be caused by a fiber cut.
But yeah, it would be pretty cool to see done.
Plus that reuses existing infrastructure.
Trench blasting can be expensive at times, but its not an unknown quantity for infrastructure projects[1]. That expense of installation can be weighed against, as you mention, service cuts of more vulnerable surface lines.
[1]See the first video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZc2gAMxFzg
> a large number of people or things, typically formed or organized for a particular purpose.
For example, this wireless technology is not difficult to deploy and maintain. By allying with large companies, we're just contributing to wealth inequality.
Instead, develop community college programs in these areas to encourage technological development. Recruit microsoft et al as training partners, not owners, and let people start their own ISPs.
Why is it that the moment government subsidizes big business in the name of social welfare, everyone fawns over it?
EDIT: All this is is a wealth transfer from government to companies (that conveniently tend to support the party currently in charge!... how nice) to own yet more infrastructure in a place that predominantly votes against the incumbency. No wonder no one likes the federal government.
I believe that's what the article is about.
Evangelicalism comes in all shapes and sizes.