ARPA is funding cheap community-owned gigabit fiber to neglected neighborhoods

They seriously hijacked a well-known longstanding government acronym?

Technically-ignorant legislators strike again.

This is a bad name collision, given the domain (Internet).

I saw the headline, and immediately thought "Huh, what's their angle? Surveillance?"

Thanks

Not the ARPAnet

We the taxpayers gave the telcos hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars to bring this to everyone, and they... just blew it off and kept the money: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...

EUR40/month for a 8Gbit/s FTTH here in france. Private company by the way. Just saying, while I do have preferences about who builds infrastructure and how to regulate markets on that infrastructure, I recognize that the presence of a market as such isn't the problem.

Do you mean in a sense that you'd like to see such service provided as a necessity service and owned publically? I'm not sure I understand the private equity part.

It is due to isp lobbying for the most part.

Because corruption.

When nobody cares strongly about something, the lobbyist groups have a much easier time.

>- local, high paying jobs across the board (linemen, network engineers)

As opposed to linemen telecommuting from the other side of the country?

>- money kept locally within the economy rather than used to fund a C-level executives jet fuel costs

True, although this could turn out to a wash. There's operational efficiencies that can be obtained by a national company (billing system, support, etc.) that city-scale ISPs can't achieve.

>- strong motivation to improve the network and make it resilient

The city has "strong motivation" to do a lot of things, but based on how universal complaints about city services are across the country (from potholes to clearing homeless encampments), I don't think it's a slam dunk argument you think it is.

If you read the article, and then read the referenced report, you can see that long term planning is included, which also covers maintenance and upgrades. None of those are new issues or unsolved problems. It's not core to the issue of broadband access at all.

FTTH infrastructure is very low maintenance once built, its mostly passive fiber optic cables that don't degrade. The electronics on either end last a long time too.

The issue with FTTH is the build can be very expensive, you need to either work with an existing utility or dig trenches through an entire neighborhood, and each end user install is a mini construction project.

Thats why community FTTH makes a lot of sense, a small team does that negotiation with the utility, and uses that to be build a business case.

Privatizing the infrastructure doesn’t solve that problem. It only means that some entity will extract profits on top of the maintenance cost. A publicly-owned service can operate at-cost.

> So where is the funding going to come from for the hard stuff like long term upgrades and maintenance

form the price of internet service. That said, one of the really nice things about fiber deployments is that they need a lot fewer upgrades than coax. Fiber has way way way higher bandwidth, so once you've deployed it, the maintenance is cheaper than coax where the ISP has to do a ton of work to shuffle around bandwidth caps.

Did you miss the part where people pay for their broadband connection? Recurring income is usually used by internet service providers for ongoing maintenance.

Or do you think the price paid is too low to support ongoing maintenance? In which case ... that doesn't appear to be the case from other FTTP providers that have sprung up over the years ... it points to price gouging from monopoly incumbents.

The trick, which is hard to do, is to get AT&T and Comcast to realize that they can serve the customers better and faster over your network.

But that involves negotiation and there can be lots of finger-pointing, so companies don't like it.

Claro has had the goal of rolling out fiber island-wide for quite some time. We (In the rural foothills of Mayagüez) were the some of the first customers to receive this expansion several years ago. Are you sure it wasn't Claro?

Title made it sound like ARPA is comitting up to a whopping $65 to fibre, which doesn't sound like enough.

The government did exactly this. The telecom companies took the $400B and never delivered.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...

> I get it, the US is big, but I just can't understand still why the government itself doesn't invest heavily in fiber connections.

Massive corporate lobbying.

It isn't even just that they don't proactively invest in public Internet infrastructure, they (primarily though not exclusively the Republicans) also work to make it illegal at the local level as a protectionism racket for the telecom companies. The same telecom companies who have proven time and time again they have zero interest in actually competing and instead have mostly just carved up what amount to regional monopolies for broadband services.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/gop-plan-for-bro...

https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

https://broadbandbreakfast.com/sen-cruz-leads-gop-effort-to-...

The real reason it hasn't happened is because the vast majority of the USA has "good enough" Internet service.

As long as Netflix works, and email sends, people don't care too much.

WE love symmetric gigabits and spend all day downloading and uploading Linux ISOs, but the average American doesn't.

Even in places, like where I am, where fiber has appeared, it hasn't really changed how people use the Internet.

Or to put it another way, there's not yet been a killer app for symmetric gigabit connections, so there's not a terrible amount of demand.

The US has 1/3 the population density as Europe. I'm sure that helps to explain it somewhat.

In the peripherial Europe, like the United Kingdom, fiber optic became available only in the last couple of years, definitely not early 2000s. There are still places within 80KM from London, near main train lines, where you can't get more than 50Mbps, so while probably most of the population of Europe has access to fast Internet, your statements are not entirely true. In 2012 average internet speed in the UK was 7Mbps and now it's probably around 75Mbps.

In 2023, only 64% of EU27 households had access to FttP (although 79% had access to gigabit-capable networks, and 93% to ‘next-gen’ networks (VDSL/DOCSIS 3/FttP)).

‘Gigabit connectivity for all by 2030’ is an EU policy goal.

Ref: Broadband Coverage in Europe 2023: Mapping progress towards the coverage objectives of the Digital Decade (2024). URL: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/digital-dec...

> And it doesn't matter which country I am, because this is common in most countries.

I’ve spent a lot of time hiring and working with people across Europe and I can assure you that cheap 10Gbps symmetric fiber is absolutely not common across Europe.

In some of the countries where we hired we had difficulty with people getting any reliable connection at home, let alone high speed fiber. (Company supported WFH but reliable internet was a requirement).

I think you’re probably projecting from your own local experience into the entire EU, which is not accurate.

Where I am at which is around 598 people per square mile, fiber optic is being installed or has been installed for several years by AT&T allowing up to 1Gbps symmetric link. To put it in perspective, New York has a density of about 27,000 people per square mile. Rural areas have about 100 people per square mile. So where I live, I am between low and moderately dense with fiber. It's not that bad.

My answer to that: it's a combination of a belief and lobbying.

The belief: the federal government can't do anything correctly, and wastes taxpayer money.

The lobbying: Comcast, and regional telephone oligopolies lobby to keep all governments, local, state, national, from providing internet services. The motives here vary, but probably come down to keeping a local or regional monopoly.

An unfortunate synergy, essentially.

Most of Europe has a culture of government-owned utilities and infrastructure, correct?

Here in the US, that does exist but is less prevalent. Some government programs end up costing too much while delivering too little, these get a lot of media attention and become the focus of too much political debate, and now nobody trusts the government to get anything done. (Despite all the government programs that do get run well.)

That said, I've long thought that the ideal arrangement for last-mile Internet should be that the local government (perhaps county) owns the fiber, contracts service and maintenance to a local company, and sells access to the fiber and customers to companies like AT&T and Comcast. Then companies can compete on service and price rather than which board members they can bribe.

But that's quite a bit more work than just telling Comcast that they can have exclusive access to all of the homes and businesses in the township and charge whatever they like.

5G home internet is good enough for 90% of people, so nobody cares to spend money for a product almost nobody is asking for

I blame national ISPs using their money to buy up lobbyists and cozy up with the legislators. I know in Texas it’s outright illegal for cities/municipalities to setup an ISP. They have to rely on national providers to pick up the slack.

In reality, these companies have under the table deals with each other to avoid competing in a vast majority of regions, largely rural areas. Leaving them with shitty and unreliable internet service.

Explain what you did last week or you're fired. Probably fired anyways, sounds like a communist iniative.

I used Starlink for 2 months after the hurricanes last year. If it's the only broadband you can get, it's obviously better than dial up, but it isn't very good compared to any modern wire based services. The bandwidth rises and falls based on where the satellites are, and I had at least a few times per day where the service would cut out for a few seconds to a couple minutes. Again, based on how good your view of the sky is and where the satellites are. It might be absolutely perfect if you live on a hill in a desert, but living in real world most-of-America with hills and trees without a 100 ft tall tv antenna structure to mount the dish on, it isn't all it's cracked up to be.

In Ireland in the early noughties there was an initiative to roll out universal rural broadband (previously, apart from very small WISP operators, affordable broadband (by noughties standards) was only really available if you were within ADSL-range of a telephone exchange). In practice this ended up with the state spending huge amounts of money subsidising point-to-point WISPs, terrestrial cellular solutions, and, where unavoidable, satellite.

Of course none of this was remotely good enough long-term, and the _current_ strategy is to just roll out fibre everywhere. The US (or at least this particular programme) is wise to start with fibre; you'll only end up there anyway. Money spent on gap-filling half-measures like terrestrial or satellite cellular is money wasted.

How about WISP technology for rural areas as something in between Starlink and expensive fiber infra?

Long term (10-20 years) I think fiber will provide better service per dollar. The hard part is the upfront cost.

The article touches on this. Starlink is not the answer. It's a short term solution.

Its not economically efficient for both charter and Verizon to lay fiber to the same buildings so some kind of government mediated solution is always going to be required. Without competition markets aren't free.