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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

"Everything that we're doing is all underground."

This indicates that their local and state governments aren't (at this time) captured by the incumbent cable provider.

A captured state gov will pass laws to thwart new infra deployment, commonly written by ISP interests. A captured local gov will never approve deployment or slow-walk permitting in an attempt to bankrupt the upstart.

more explainers: New suburban fiber infrastructure means either trenching or pole hanging. The local gov issues permits for both but poles also require the cooperation of the pole owners. This last adds the PSC to the mix.

Recalcitrant pole owners are known to stall and kill infrastructure deployment - especially where going underground isn't an option. Some PSCs mandate that pole owners cooperate. Some PSCs abdicate that responsibility and are examples of regulatory capture.

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I’ve been hearing about “captured government” with respect to fiber deployment for two decades now and the folks on that soap box have made absolutely zero progress on improving deployment of fiber infrastructure in that time. Tilting at that windmill isn’t working, because for the most part that’s not the real problem.

Why isn’t the Bay Area a hot bed of fiber deployment? You think Comcast in Philly has more pull with Cupertino and Mountain View than Google and Apple? No! Internet in the Bay Area is shit for the same reason all the infrastructure in the Bay Area is shit. The government makes it slow and difficult to build anything.

Comcast installed fiber to my house back in 2018 or so. The permitting took months. And this was to run Comcast fiber on poles where Comcast already had their own cable lines. And my county is actually pretty efficient with permitting. It’s just that American municipalities absolutely hate it when anyone builds anything.

If you think internet in the bay area is shit then you haven't seen how bad it can get. Even other large cities within California like LA and SD are worse.

Having lived in all three mentioned areas, none seemed particularly bad unless your standard is fiber straight to home. And seemed like Bay Area had more of that if anything.

I am absolutely not defending Comcast here but its worth pointing out that every anecdotal bit of evidence about performance and reliability can be true.

Network performance in that last mile can differ by block and even by season. An otherwise functional run of coax might have intermittent ingress but only shortly after it's rained while cold out.

This isn't even counting all of the flaky performance anecdotes that really boil down to overcrowded Wi-Fi or poorly configured consumer gear or anything else that isn't strictly the fault or problem of Comcast.

In college, we had the combination of spotty wifi + 10 dudes concurrently torrenting Shrek 2 + jank Android tablets running rogue DHCP servers and taking router's IP + rats chewing through cables, yet every time the internet went down, they called Comcast. And it was never actually Comcast's fault.

I guess Comcast doesn't need to capture the local government in places where it's already illegal to build anything. But in other places it has definitely happened.

In most places, permitting is the most direct and immediate roadblock. If you don't start there, you won't make any progress on the issue.

I live in a blue state that actively encourages municipal and cooperative fiber deployment: https://mdbc.us. It's had approximately zero impact outside some rural parts of the state.

Well, "deploying fiber" does not equal "starting a residential FTTP ISP". A ton of fiber infrastructure is only offered B2B.

Maybe it's good enough that not very many people care. I moved around San Jose, Mountain View, Berkeley, and Sunnyvale, never noticed problems with Comcast or AT&T. Was expecting flakiness after hearing all these bad stories, but no, it was reliable.

What you don't get often is fiber-to-home, or great upload speeds. But most people aren't running big home servers.

CGNAT isn't a matter of cheapness. There are more Internet users than IP addresses. Someone has to draw the short straw, and that's the providers that came late to the party.

Now, if they're doing CGNAT and also don't have IPv6, that's just crap. They shouldn't be allowed to call themselves an ISP at that point.

Sorry for ninja edit, yeah I called CGNAT cheap because there are still ways to purchase IPv4 addresses, with caveats.

This was even a major hurdle for Google Fiber. The incumbent ISPs did everything they could to obstruct them from installing fiber, and it was fairly effective even against someone with deep pockets like Google.

In fairness, google tried to bypass all of the systems that already exist and are widely used for doing pole attachments.

Looks like they're somewhat rural which probably makes it way easier. I was a project manager for a Telco years ago and the process to get fiber run in an established city is crazy. Had no idea how much was going on under the roads until I had to plan out conduit boring projects.

It's not that easy. Poles vs trenches are a tradeoff discussion. FWIW I was once in construction digging trenches and I'm German, so I might be biased a bit.

Pro poles / open air:

- very, VERY cheap and fast to build out with GPON. That's how you got 1/1 GBit fiber in some piss poor village in the rural ditches of Romania.

- easy to get access when you need to do maintenance

Con poles / open air:

- it looks fucking ugly. Many a nice photo from Romania got some sort of half assed fiber cable on it.

- it's easy for drunk drivers, vandals (for the Americans: idiots shooting birds that rest on aboveground lines [1][2]), sabotage agents or moronic cable thieves to access and damage infrastructure

Pro trench digging:

- it's incredibly resilient. To take out electricity and power, you need a natural disaster at the scale of the infamous Ahrtal floods that ripped through bridges carrying cables and outright submerged and thus ruined district distribution networking rooms, but even the heaviest hailstorm doesn't give a fuck about cable that's buried. Drunk drivers are no concern, and so are cable thieves or terrorists.

- it looks way better, especially when local governments go and re-surface the roads afterwards

Cons trench digging:

- it's expensive, machinery and qualified staff are rare

- you usually need lots more bureaucracy with permits, traffic planning or what not else that's needed to dig a trench

- when something does happen below ground, it can be ... challenging to access the fault.

- in urban or even moderately settled areas, space below ground can be absurdly congested with existing infrastructure that necessitates a lot of manual excavation instead of machinery. Gas, water, sewers, long decommissioned pipe postal service lines, subways, low voltage power, high voltage power, other fiber providers, cable TV...

[1] https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/illegal-shoo...

[2] https://ucs.net/node/513

>Poles vs trenches are a tradeoff discussion. FWIW I was once in construction digging trenches and I'm German, so I might be biased a bit.

when i got this far I literally thought you were making a joke about Poland.

There's a huge downside to poles where I'm based: permit shenanigans by pole owners that delay projects and allow incumbents to destroy competitors. Granted, some municipalities do the same thing. One local municipality I have to deal with responds to permit requests almost instantly, while another takes weeks of pestering to acknowledge even the most basic of permit requests.

For anyone starting out today, I would strongly recommend having a planned legal / regulatory strategy to fall back on in the event that excessive delays occur by parties you cannot avoid dealing with.

Meh, here in Germany you got the same issue with trenches. It takes ages to coordinate digging them, I think the worst example simmered for two years until the permits arrived. And then, it's a nightmare because you can't just cut off people's courtyards and parking spots for any time longer than absolutely required, so as soon as you're at depth you gotta cover the trench with steel plates so cars and pedestrians can cross...

The fiber installing crews around here go street by street and usually do one street section per day/or two.

Germany also does a lot more construction on main roads at night compared to what we see in North America.

More importantly, if they go on poles Comcast can "accidentally" cut their lines all the time.

Bell techs have done that and caused outages for customers a number of times. One outage ended up costing close to CAD$7900 to repair that they settled for due to it occurring on a weekend in a rural area during a snowstorm that required third party traffic control to meet the Book 7 requirements (on a weekend at the bottom of a hill in a snowstorm with insufficient visibility for us to work safely while doing a road crossing). Normally that would only be a $1k-2k or so, but traffic control, lack of slack due to the location of the cut and overtime for all parties involved really drove costs up. Less than 30 seconds with a pair of wire cutters can be downright brutal to repair if the conditions hit the worst case.

those days it's not trench digging (unless it's next to highway with machine that in one pass will trench and lay conduit/cable), it's trench drilling with something like this https://www.ditchwitch.com/directional-drills/

frontier installed fiber in my area using this method. relatively quick and no damage that needs to be "aggressively" paved over.

Can't do that in a century old city street with century old utilities in it. They dug up the sidewalk with shovels here as a result; though using machinery to move the soil they dug up and handle the asphalt that's covering the sidewalk along part of the street.

Yeah you can directionally drill across a front yard typically; but actual urban areas are just too filled with infrastructure.

before drilling there was a team that mapped and marked all underground utilities. some of the drilling went between front yards (this is where underground vaults are/were), but a bunch was done below sidewalks and across the streets.

> […] or moronic cable thieves to access and damage infrastructure

Manufacturers should print on the sleeve "fibre optic only. no copper". :)

> [Buried pros:] Drunk drivers are no concern, and so are cable thieves or terrorists.