Comment by newjersey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newjersey | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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