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Comment by robrenaud | Hacker News Reader

> In this sparsely populated rural area, "I have at least two homes where I have to build a half-mile to get to one house," Mauch said, noting that it will cost "over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served."

Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?

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No - and this is our argument when applying for funds, I can deliver 2.5gbps (symmetric speeds) to someone for < $1.5k up to 15km away, and I have a roadmap to eventually hit 10gbps and beyond. Unfortunately we're not "fiber" though, so our projects are automatically deprioritized, even if we're like 5% of the cost.

What kind of transport are you using to hit 2.5Gbps without fibre at that distance?

802.11ad/ay on unlicensed 60ghz, our most economical option is to deploy Ubiquiti Wave Pros. We see real-world 2gbps+ speeds at 15km distances. We have Wave Pro, XG, and XR radios all throughout the network for multigig links, and 95% of our non-business installs are Wave LRs and Nanos. We can do up to 33gbps symmetric on 70ghz licensed bands on a single radio, and I have a number of 10gbps radios, but they're not cheap.

Sounds very optimistic to consistently deliver 2.5Gbps to that size of cell, your backhaul has to be huge.

It's not hard at all, we multipath all traffic across our mesh, we have multiple 10gbps fiber uplinks, and we're bringing up our first 100gbps circuit later this year. Most sites have plenty of capacity and we always try to ensure we have 2-4 paths out of every site. Unlicensed 60ghz is super easy to reuse, we drop 20dB once we're more than 0.2deg off the site, and since we operate in rural mountainous areas, our spectrum at each host location ends up being sparkling clean. Our APs have a 30deg azi/cell width, and we can do up to ~30 attachments on each. Best of all, Wave gear has a backup radio - if I need to take down/upgrade an AP, nobody ever notices, the stations all roam to a nearby AP on a 5ghz backup, and can usually still get around 300-600mbps or so.

I'll understand if you don't want to answer this or legally can't answer it. What does a 100gbps circuit cost a month? How about the 10gbps uplinks also?

We can't, we're under NDAs for all of that stuff :(

Roughly single-digit cents per megabit

How does that perform in heavy rain or snow? I've always been told that when dealing with mmWave, attenuation gets pretty bad when dealing with adverse climate conditions, and Boulder is surely no stranger to snow.

Great - our radios also have a built-in 5ghz backup that is seamless to switch to and causes no interruptions to gaming sessions or anything, but honestly we only see it in use under two scenarios: The radio is literally knocked off the mount and pointing at the ground (and is still getting ~100mbps somehow), or for our long-range links (5km-20km) during really major storms.

The backup is great and shockingly resilient, nobody ever notices when it's in use and it'll usually still get us 300-600mbps of throughput on average. I'd say we typically see about 5-10% of the network revert to the backup radio during a major blizzard/hailstorm, otherwise everything seems to do quite well with normal snow & rain.

> Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?

Over the lifetime of the structure (which can be upwards of 100 years)? Probably, just like the road, water, sewer, and electrical service to it. It’s another utility.

Water and sewer is probably well and a septic tank/leach field. The electrical service is probably at least that much though.

If the $30k comes from tax dollars that the government earmarked for rural fiber, I guess so?

If it was already affordable to connect those houses there wouldn't have been a need for federal funding (not to say that I think tax dollars should be spent that way or that the program was run well).

Not wanting to make it political, but what are the chances those federal funds are flowing anymore?

Right now ISPs are very concerned about the future of money they've already been promised and pessimistic about the future of such programs. It's possible that this could result in an increased unwillingness to expand into less profitable areas or even to maintain services there.

That said, some ISPs have been known to collect hundreds of billions in taxpayer money on the promise of providing service only to just pocket that money without providing it anyway so for consumers, the real world impact of ISPs losing that money isn't so clear.

Considering that we gave AT&T nearly $400 billion in the 90s to connect everyone in the US to fiber, I certainly hope they're no longer flowing. It was a giant grift. It's taken local fiber ISPs and WISPs (who seem to have been gobbled up immediately) and Starlink to make anything happen.

1: http://irregulators.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/BookofBro...

2: A more recent example from 2024: https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/the-42-...

My area has a similar density and a co-op did it for $80 a month 1 gig fiber to the home. We couldn't even get DSL, and the local telecomms even gathered funds locally earlier to build it, but then just kept the money. I am extremely skeptical of claims that rural areas can't get fiber, fiber is even cheaper to hang than copper is, and yet every rural area has telephone lines and power that were put up many decades ago with even less equipment available.

>local telecomms even gathered funds locally earlier to build it

Nationwide telecomms did that with funds for fiber to the premises as well. I have no idea why these telecomms can take the money and just refuse to provide the services.

Fixed wireless (11/24/60 GHz point-to-point antennas) is pretty good, and the hardware would be a few thousand, but I wonder if there's an issue with the funding where it needs to be actual fiber for some reason.

My first job out of college was at a fixed wireless ISP which was started by a guy with a story just like the OP.

This was 20 years ago now, but the service was very reliable using Motorola radios. Relatively low bandwidth (4-6mbps, not bad for the day) but you could on a good day do that at a few miles out.

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