
A California ghost town can have fiber to the doorstep, but it’s not easy - nkurz
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/today-a-california-ghost-town-can-have-fiber-to-the-doorstep-but-its-not-easy/
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sathackr
The company in the article seems to poo-poo a local WISP, but Wireless ISPs
will continue to be the chief deliverers of last-mile broadband to rural areas
for a long time. Nobody is willing to foot the bill for a huge capital
buildout. It just doesn't make financial sense to spend millions to deliver
internet to a community with a 50 year ROI.

Disclaimer: I currently work for a WISP and have been involved with microwave
wireless internet for the better part of the last 20 years.

No, it's not gigabit fiber, but in reality, every person in America doesn't
need gigabit fiber right now.

Many WISP reliability concerns have far less to do with the weather than they
do the operators of the ISP. Many are inexperienced in reliable network
design, or have budgets stretched so thin they cannot afford quality
equipment. Most pay far more for the internet access they provide to customers
than the big boys.

I'm in a fairly rural county with a couple of mid-sized towns and cities
(largest city has a population of about 100,000). Wired internet is available
in most population centers, but dial-up and satellite is still all that is
available for huge swaths of the county.

I know of a particular neighborhood with new houses (Built during the boom
around 2005) that the local cable company had hardline right out in front of
the neighborhood. There were about 750 houses, most 2000+sq ft. For reasons
unknown to me, the neighborhood had a high percentage of government-assisted
families living in it. The cable company refused to run lines into the
neighborhood for almost 10 years.

~~~
scoot
> every person in America doesn't need gigabit fiber right now

That's a pretty bold claim. Granted, Gb fiber to the home has limited uses
outside of high bit-rate 4K / 8K TV; but to suggest that not a single
individual out of 320M in the US (never min the rest of the world) needs Gb
broadband? BS.

~~~
phil21
You can't even say 1gbps is close to "enough" in the immediate foreseeable
future (decade+).

The sheer innovation we're leaving on the table is insane to me with this
thinking. Can no one imagine any use for massive amounts of data moving around
the world other than consuming media? Have you not seen what is possible
between moving from 1ge to 40g in the datacenter between servers? It's not
logical to extend this thinking to the client eventually? I really don't
understand it.

I remember being a 14 year old kid on a 9600 baud modem, upgrading to 28k and
realizing _what just became theoretically possible_ and then watching it
happen before my eyes at a breathtaking pace. I doubt today's 14 year olds are
any less imaginative.

I guarantee if you had 10ge available to every home in the US for $50/mo you
would see start to see some cool stuff no one immediately thinks of. The fact
you can't get $100/mo gige in major dense metro areas (in the US - Think
Chicago, NYC, etc.) by now boggles my mind. What a huge competitive lead we
gave up for no reason. How have we bogged down in so much bureaucracy and
overhead that we can't make this profitable?

~~~
sathackr
I agree. If you build it, they will come. And who knows what or who 'they'
are. But while Google is spending millions putting fiber to every door in a
few select cities, huge portions of the country still only have dial-up and
satellite as options.

That doesn't mean Google shouldn't be spending millions to do it. That would
be the same argument as 'why are we spending billions to go to space when
people are starving' \-- I read an article once that I can't find now, it was
titled something like 'why we should do awesome things'. Of course, we should
feed the starving AND go to space AND do other awesome things.

My main issue was, the article and company seemed to imply that the local WISP
was impeding their ability to get funding to run fiber, when, for the last 10
years, that WISP was probably that community's only source of broadband. It
did not say if they actively fought them, or it was simply their presence that
was the issue.

~~~
jauer
A WISP (or any other provider) that provides 25Mbps download+some nominal
upload to a area (and reports that on their bi-annual FCC form 477) would
cause the area to be marked as "served" and thus ineligible for CAF funding.
IIRC the USDA BTOP program which funded a lot of middle mile projects had
similar restriction.

From what I've seen this mostly spoils the traditional telcos (e.g.
Centurylink & Frontier) because CAF (replacement for USF) won't pay for their
upgrades (usually something like adding a VDSL2 DSLAM in a cabinet somewhere
and running fiber back to their CO) when a high-performing WISP is in the
area. Of course some little telcos that do FTTH are also affected.

~~~
sathackr
Interesting.

Many WISPs like to exaggerate their coverage area to look bigger than they are
(I don't get why it seems to be the goal of every small company to appear
larger than they are...but that's another topic). I wonder how much damage
this is doing by preventing CAF funding for areas a WISP claims but can't
actually provide service to?

IMO a WISP will always be a temporary solution. They serve as a good filler
until it is financially feasible for a wireline(this includes fiber) provider
to service the area. A WISP can put $15,000 in equipment on a tower they pay
$750/month for and cover 300 square miles of land. Add a 1GB connection to a
Tier1 provider and you're still well under what it would cost for a wireline
provider to even do the paperwork for the same area.

After the wireline provider comes into the area, the WISP can serve as a check
to keep the prices reasonable, but the RF spectrum just isn't there to serve
large amounts of data.

WISP coverage shouldn't preclude CAF funding, IMO. Most WISPs would probably
say otherwise as it is not in their best financial interest to promote
legislation that would fund their competition.

~~~
jauer
Oh, I forgot to mention... there is a mechanism for providers to challenge
coverage to get CAF funding because all sorts of providers overestimate
coverage--there was a Ars article a few months ago about a Cable provider
telling someone they served a area but it turned out to only be one side of a
street or something.

Map of CAF2 areas: [https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/maps/caf-2-accepted-
map](https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/maps/caf-2-accepted-map)

I've seen some interesting back and forth on grant applications that depend on
a area being unserved. The bigger companies have regulatory and GIS staff to
say "hey, we totally serve this area. Don't fund competitor X" while they
smaller companies bring letters from town administrators and residents saying
"hey, we tried to buy from company Y but they said they couldn't serve us /
could only could provide 768k DSL because degraded copper plant".

------
mschuster91
What I don't get for the last mile: usually homes are connected to a central
sewer system, which usually consists of pretty huge-diameter pipes. Why isn't
it possible to run fibre through the sewers?

Instead, people have to rely on DSL over rotting old copper pair lines
(FTTC)...

~~~
amazon_not
Possible, but not cheap. It's much cheaper to install aerial fiber.

~~~
mschuster91
Americans and their trend to wire everything and their dogs aerial.

One snowstorm or one drunk idiot crashing his car into a pole and it gets
expensive as hell to get everything working again. Not to mention the looks of
dozens of operators (cable, electricity, telephone, fiber, private networks,
traffic light controls, ...) hanging their cables on poles alongside the
street.

~~~
amazon_not
I said cheaper, not better :)

You can obviously do buried fiber, but it may or may not be cheaper than sewer
fiber in cities. Aerial is cheaper to install, but as noted has its downsides.
It depends on the circumstances whether aerial is cheaper in the long run or
not.

Aerial will however in most circumstances be cheaper than sewer fiber, even if
you have to patch it up once I a while. Good design helps in that, even if you
do end up repairing it.

------
beachstartup
this is the only thing holding back virtual armies of tech workers from moving
to the country, which would greatly relieve the cost of housing in major
coastal metros (tech hubs).

a mass exodus and spike in housing supply is exactly what we need. too bad the
broadband providers aren't making it happen.

i fear this is a problem that the broadband market won't solve, because it's
run by a few oligarchs.

~~~
sithadmin
>this is the only thing holding back virtual armies of tech workers from
moving to the country, which would greatly relieve the cost of housing in
major coastal metros (tech hubs).

What?

Aside from the fact that there are tons of instances in which remote work
simply isn't as effective as showing up at the office, I suspect that most of
us in the tech sector in a major city _actually enjoy living in the city_.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Even in Silicon Valley, most tech workers choose not to live in a city. Most
live in suburbs.

Speaking for myself, I'd move 10-15 miles outside a 50k-ish population town in
a heartbeat if I could work from there.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Because even a bog standard 125K a year salary will only go so far in SF.
Sunnyvale/Milpitas/Fremont etc are much more desirable in that case

~~~
ForHackernews
> even a bog standard 125K a year salary

This is a friendly reminder that the median income in SF is around $47k [0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Education.2C_hou...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Education.2C_households.2C_and_income)

~~~
nitrogen
As someone who knows very little about SF neighborhoods other than the stories
of tiny $1mil houses, how/where do people earning $47k/yr live in SF?

~~~
beachstartup
in rented rooms.

also, in rent controlled apartments leased in earlier decades.

there are plenty of people paying <$1k to rent 2 bedroom apartments in SF.
that's why there's such an imbalance on the units that do come up for rent.

