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Comment by matthewfcarlson | Hacker News Reader

Right? There was an article here earlier about running fiber in rural Michigan. Kudos to the dude doing it and I agree that internet access is important. But 30k per house seems like a very wonky investment. At 100$ a month that would be 25 years to pay back, which could be feasible depending on what we are doing for internet in 25 years. Still seems ridiculous. If you wanted to pay 30k per household to build super fast internet for everyone in Seattle or Austin, people would laugh you out of the room.

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I don't get it. Why is fiber to the home so expensive? I think in principle, it makes sense for us to pay for rural broadband the same way we paid for rural electricity. The problem is some companies took the money but didn't deliver the results, no?

> In 1936, the REA was made permanent through the Rural Electrification Act. It was granted an initial budget of $50 million for the first two years, then $40 million a year for the following decade ($550 million in 1936 is approximately $10.3 billion today). Jul 12, 2021

snippet answer from Google search https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+muc...

I can't imagine how our government can justify subsidizing anything other than fiber to the home in the current year. As far as I know, there is very little ongoing maintenance cost and glass fiber is much cheaper than copper, no? Coax people are saying they can get symmetric gigabit up and down with docsis but I will believe it when I see it (low latency symmetric gigabit up and down, no data caps, reasonable pricing). Until then, we shouldn't give them any money.

Any kind of utility is expensive; fiber is no worse than electricity, water, or gas. The difference is that all those utilities were installed before we shot ourselves in the foot with 10,000 pages of regulations written by incumbent monopoly lobbyists.

Which is why a lot of fiber roll-outs happen when electrical, water, or gas lines are already being replaced.

> Why is fiber to the home so expensive?

I guess it costs more than you think to hire someone to dig a hole, put something in it, and then cover it back up again.

I paid a guy almost $2000 to fix a few feet of sewer line in my front yard. Very little work to do once the old line was dug up, the main costs were in pulling various permits, renting the equipment, hiring crew, etc. Now multiply that by a few miles and $30k starts to look like a bargain.

Soil is as heavy as almost any construction material and being underground, you're paying for potential energy.

It's expensive in fuel and in the cost and maintenance of machinery designed to deliver the most energy. It's like paying for GPU compute time.

If the main costs were permits, equipment rentals and crew, then your math is way off. By definition, those are mostly fixed costs so the first foot is phenomenally expensive. A crew can easily dig 1/2-1 mile per day, so maybe 4 days instead of the one to dig a few feet. If 1/2 the cost was equipment and crew and the other half permits, that puts us at a $5k total.

It’s all about where you pass the cables. If you need to dig up the street then 30k is not a lot of money to do the installation. If you can install the cables on already existing poles, then that reduces the cost a lot.

It’s also cheaper to do a group of homes then it is to do 1 as the cost of bringing the workers, the machinery and the permits is spread across all clients. That’s why we hear a lot of cases where someone has a fiber cable passing close by but the cable company did not see enough profit to finish the last mile (or they asked at the time of building and not enough homes signed up at the time).

What’s the increase in property value by now appealing to tech/knowledge workers? Would you personally move to a place that only offered shitty DSL?

I almost pulled the trigger on a $30k quote from Centurylink to run fiber to my home but they proved incapable of backhauling anywhere near what i was looking for. I didn’t give a shit about its amortized cost.

This might be an odd notion considering the average HN commenter but hear me out. It's _just_ possible the guy running that ISP isn't doing it to grow into a VC-backed unicorn with an exit strategy of getting scooped up by a FAANG in 5 years.

He doesn't want to _lose_ money on it, but he's an engineer and has evaluated the risks and costs and found them acceptable. He's doing it because because the incumbent ISP won't, because it's a challenge, and because he wants to to serve his community. Or so I've been able to gather.

But running an ISP requires a metric ton of capital upfront. No matter the motivation, how do you get that capital?

I can't speak for the guy running this network so I don't know if he has investors or creditors or what, but I live in the same area as he does and can say that if you have a high-paying tech job well into the six figures and live in a LCOL area like this (AND don't blow it all on hedonic purchases like luxury pickups), it's not hard to amass a surprising surplus of cash in a surprisingly short amount of time.

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