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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

You did it before for electricity and telephone.

Not completely. There are still tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of Americans who never got electric, telephone, or even water service available in their homes.

Every six months or so there's an article in the Navajo Times about the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority managing to hook up another couple of dozen homes to electricity, but there are still many thousands to go.

There was a photo published during the pandemic of children gathered on top of a hill sitting in the dust and sun with their laptops because it was the only place they could get a cell signal to do their schoolwork.

Tens of thousands of American homes have no running water. I've visited many in Texas, West Virginia, New Mexico, and even California.

Time to get out of the Silicon Valley bubble.

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It's not a silicon valley canard to overwhelmingly expect electricity and running water in the US. The difficulties faced by the Navajo are not representative of the country at large. The major service providers have preferred to put in place regional monopolies, rather than extend their fiber capabilities, that is the root of the issue.

I did research in Silicon Valley, there is no optic fiber. We have expensive comcast, or ATT or now Starlink.. or now 5G. I wish we had more options(high speed internet) for end users.

This really depends where you are physically located, the infrastructure available varies neighborhood by neighborhood, and in some cases block to block.

Some have two GPON fiber providers, others have one XGSPON provider, and yet other neighborhoods are served only with coaxial where it was easy to get to in the 1980s when the coax networks were built out, and copper services otherwise.

ATT and Sonic both have extensive fiber networks in SF.

In South Bay there are only few options

> Not completely. There are still tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of Americans who never got electric, telephone, or even water service available in their homes.

…

> Tens of thousands of American homes have no running water. I've visited many in Texas, West Virginia, New Mexico, and even California.

> Time to get out of the Silicon Valley bubble.

Only 10e4-10e5? Even writing as a Brit who chose Berlin over Silicon Valley when Brexit happened (so I don't think I'd count as "in the Silicon Valley bubble" in the first place), I'd call that a rounding error against the USA population.

Don't get me wrong, that ought to still be an embarrassment for the USA to leave anyone behind[0], and it feels like a bigger embarrassment the closer it gets to the last person; but also, that's a minority of even just the Navajo enrolled tribal members, who are themselves a minority of pre-European American groups in the USA, who are themselves a minority of the USA.

[0] I like the space program, but I can also empathise with all those that didn't care about the Apollo landings because of the rather more pressing issues they personally faced on the ground due to endemic lack of equality; I can't find the original quote I'm thinking of, but this has similar vibes: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1969/07/26/the-moon-hours

I'll never forget the story of Paul Bunyan telecom out in I believe it was Montana who used federal funds to build to cabins at a cost of like $10,000+ per cabin to lay copper (back when that was a lot of money) under the right to service clauses of the FCC.

It turns out that servicing 100% of the population isn't practical when people choose to live in very remote areas. I agree that it would be onerous for carriers to have to service 100% of the population with any kind of service, but I disagree with the current standard on non-copper services which amount to something like 80% of population within a given metro zone. It biases too hard towards city living, especially as we are seeing more and more people move away from cities.

Rural broadband in America is extremely difficult in most parts of the country, way harder than it needs to be. And don't get me started on WISP vs hardwire, hardwire is the only real internet and don't let anyone fool you otherwise.

Source: 10 years in the belly of the beast of telecom.

> It biases too hard towards city living, especially as we are seeing more and more people move away from cities

Urbanization is progressing.

Suburbia are not sustainable and should not be encouraged. As you just noticed, it takes way more money to service their infrastructure, and they bring in far less tax revenue to pay for it than dense mixed use developments.

I think some clarity in terminology may be required here.

Those cabins in MT are not in anything that could ever be called "suburbia".

Suburbia has its problems (many of them), but we're talking about a different class of living here: actual rural living, with neighbors a mile (or miles) away, no infrastructure other than dirt roads etc.

It turns out that servicing 100% of the population isn't practical when people choose to live in very remote areas.

Mostly correct. However, not everyone chooses to live in a remote area. The Navajo, referenced above, are among the people who were forced to settle in a particular area, at the point of a government gun.

Moreover, if it wasn't for people living in remote areas, people in the cities wouldn't have food.

> Moreover, if it wasn't for people living in remote areas, people in the cities wouldn't have food.

We need to be careful with the words here.

Not much in the way of food is produced by people who live in what I would term "remote" areas.

Lots of food is produced by people who live in what I would term "rural" areas.

We can and should and must provide improved communications services to rural areas - I think we have a moral imperative to do so. The remote areas, however, are a different story. If they happen to end up being serviced by e.g. Starlink then great, but I don't think we have the same moral imperative there.

Most food is produced in rural areas with infrastructure, not remote areas. Farmers frequently live in town. Agricultural production costs are sensitive to logistics, so doing any kind of intensive agriculture in genuinely remote areas is expensive. You don't want to be too far from a rail spur if you are a farmer.

The only agriculture on remote land at scale is cattle ranching, which has the advantage that cattle can move themselves.

83% of the population lives in urban areas and it’s only increasing (projected to hit 90% around 2050).

In the US people can and do choose to live many, many miles from the nearest infrastructure in remote areas, especially in the western US. I used to have a place in the mountains of Nevada originally occupied since the 19th century that was 15 miles from the nearest utility service. Many of the remaining off-the-grid places are like this and would require creating a new right-of-way across private and government lands as there are no formal roads to many of these places. The taxpayer cost would be astronomical relative to the benefit. (The established "roads" everyone uses are informal common law trails which don't exist as far as the government is concerned.)

It's way higher than thousands, at least for water. Millions of people in the US have their own wells for water and septic systems for waste water.

That's still running water. I'm talking about homes with zero options for water. Not even a well.

And sometimes (like in New Mexico), thousands of homes are cut off from water infrastructure because some rich guy doesn't want a pipe running under his golf course.

Where has this happened in New Mexico?

If people want to live in the hinterlands and avoid the conveniences of society, well that's up to them. Why should anyone else pay for their lifestyle choices? If they want to live off the land (and off sewer, water, electric and telephone utilities) they can go do it. Otherwise, these rugged individualists need to suck it up and move closer to town.

There are plenty of places in Bellevue, Washington mere blocks from major Microsoft offices where only copper is available, and the VDSL2 on offer is intermittent due to the lead clad copper lines having water infiltration and being past their standard service life.

Getting Lumen, Astound, Verizon, Comcast or any of the other vendors who have fiber under 100 feet away to even quote a directional bore is a multi-month process, then the number they give you is a "fuck you" 6 digit price, and they certainly won't let you pull a permit from the city, hire your own contractor to do the directional bore, then pull cable through your conduit.

When you have such large numbers I can’t expect that there are zero people without these services. So to me this is a specious argument- we certainly did blanket the country with electricity and phone service. There will of course always be households without. I hardly see this as a “bubble” view.

The point is that fiber penetration is still nowhere near copper/POTS penetration in the US. Not even close, despite decades of subsidies and tax breaks to the telcos to make universal fiber a reality.

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