In the early 2000s iirc they were given billions to build out rural broadband. They kept it. Rural broadband still doesn't exist to speak of.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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We did the same for urban fiber. It's never materialized, either. And, the USDA has been providing funding and loans for rural broadband for quite awhile.
It's almost like the foxes are running the hen house, as the old saying goes.
Hamilton built the framework. It's been foxes since John Adams.
I’ve read there’s lots of “dark” fiber in cities, but I don’t know if it’s true. I do know that AT&T has a fiber line that runs through my neighborhood, yet I can’t get fiber internet. Really stupid.
"Whats this?"
"Thats the fiber line."
"Oh, cool. Can I get fiber?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"We'd need some federal grants to run some fiber first."
"But the fiber is right here."
"We need that for other people to get fiber."
"Well, why can't I access it too?"
"Ugh! I told you! We need public money to our multibillion dollar company to use this fiber line thats already here!"
"I don't understand....."
"You wouldn't."
AT&T has a copper wire connected to my house but they refuse to offer me any service at all because they "dOnT oFfEr DsL aNyMoRe." Shitty DSL is shitty DSL but it's better than nothing. At least I have access to Cable but I know plenty of people who don't. That shit should be illegal.
I have the same situation almost. We have fiber from Telia delivered to the basement of our apartment building where it’s converted to cable by Tele2, who rents access to Telia’s fiber. Neither of them were willing to sell me or the organisation that owns the building access to fiber, even though it would have required only activating an outlet on whatever fiber switch thing they have in the basement.
Tele2 also has a monopoly on internet access; it’s that or 4G/5G.
This led to the absurd situation where we have a special coax outlet, followed by a cable modem right next to the fiber switch to supply the intercom system with very very expensive and terribly slow internet.
I do know that AT&T has a fiber line that runs through my neighborhood, yet I can’t get fiber internet
The local exchange carriers (LECs) typically change from plain olds telephone system (POTS) to fiber at the neighborhood level. Coax carriers also.
Fiber to the neighborhood is already there. It's not hard to run a line across a neighborhood to connect whatever on either side.
The difficult part is getting from a neighborhood connection to each individual home. It's a flower pot install on each property, all connected together underground, and it can't fuck with gas, water, sewer, etc.
Seems like they could connect something wireless to the fiber to provide internet to the home.
The entire cellular network, particularly T-Mo 5G unlimited, would put it to shame. If one wants better then Starlink.
The way to do wireless would be to form a neighborhood ISP, put up a tower, then wireless P2P to each home. I've seen it in a few places. More common is citywide wifi.
That's called a WISP
It's also not hard to use that fibre connection to the neighbourhood to provide DSL. That's precisely what it's made for: Use that copper last mile and have whatever on the upstream side. And there's plenty of DSL hardware that doubles as POTS and/or ISDN hardware, you can upgrade the whole neighbourhood to "DSL available" by installing such a thing, connecting all the lines to it, and then remotely activating DSL when people sign up.
Over here they're actually moving away from that, opting for voip instead and using DSL over the whole frequency spectrum.
As soon as those decades old and severely degraded copper lines are replaced in all of those old neighborhoods where fiber is slowest to roll out, DSL can provide a higher cost and subpar service on a deprecated standard. That's exactly what we need with a surplus of capacity on modern hardware already deployed in the field.
We'll all have broadband in no time if they'd just listen to you.
Earthworks are expensive, doubly so if you need specialised techs because fibre isn't easy to install much less splice. If you get fibre to within 200-500m of the property G.Fast will deliver 100Mbit to 1Gbit, which is way faster than most people are willing to pay for. And that's old tech in fact most plans for FTTH are actually FTTF, that is, fibre only reaches the property border, then you get a copper cable from there using XG-FAST, a single-user DSL installation. Expect something on the order of 8Gbit/s. Which is an amount of speed most people's PCs can't even deal with, 1Gbit NICs are still the norm with 2.5G making inroads. Gigabit ethernet has been sufficient for the vast, vast, majority of people for a good 20 years now.
Things might be a bit different in the US because suburbia and those ludicrously sparse neighbourhoods, yep going directly to fibre at least to the property border probably makes sense there. But in the city? Provide fibre to a block, the rest of the infrastructure can be reused. It's not cheap to run fibre through apartment building hallways, either, and no running Ethernet on those copper lines is a much worse idea, ethernet can't deal gracefully with interference, crosstalk, and otherwise shoddy copper.
American taxpayer is always paying for major CapEx for most industries then turn around and price gouge us.
Most amercians see to be fine with it since they live in a free market economy where private sector funds investment.
free market economy where private sector funds investment
If that's how it actually worked we might accept it. But, today there's little distinction between public and private: Corporations own our government.
I don't think that the United States Department of Agriculture is involved in subsidizing urban fiber.
Yeah. That's wasn't very clear. The USDA has been funding and providing loans for rural broadband. About $1b, IIRC.
Thanks for the pointing that out.
Almost a trillion dollars. It was like 980 billion...yea...
Yup, they took the 90s era broadband grants and just pocketed them because they knew that the Bush era FCC wouldn't pursue the matter.
because they knew that the Bush era FCC wouldn’t pursue the matter.
There's been many FCC's since then that could have and should have enforced. Both parties have been sucking on this front... spending money in ways that only benefit mega-corps with no ability to punish those same corps.
Jessica Rosenworcel is handing out money right now. I saw her speak in 2023 and she was quite enthusiastic about all the money they were handing out. I looked at the structure of it and its the same as what they were doing during Bush's and Obama's administrations. Its a farce and it will just pad the bottom line of the major telcos without building one more mile of physical plant. Just like all the other times. Until some type of limit on payment is implemented similar to erate which is now under attack nothing will ever happen other than the money will disappear.
Either limit payouts until proof of implementation is established (and customers are purchasing and getting the service advertised), or severe and heavy fines (many times over what was given to them) when FCC reports are filed by consumers and the ISP is found to not be meeting their requirements/plans/service minimums.
These bills have been passed multiple times over the last couple decades and the result is always the same. In places like NY, they claimed to have run fiber to millions of homes but they never actually connected it to any of these homes, it just runs along under the street out in front of them, therefore they can claim these homes are "covered by fiber."
And the fuckers want ten grand from the homeowner to jack it in. The drop won't even be owned by the homeowner afterward either. It's literally criminal.
And in the late 2000's. And again a few years later. And as of last year they, the FCC is once again throwing money at them without any real oversight. I worked for a ISP in 2010 and we couldn't get any of the money because a bank had first lean on the company USDA demanded that before any money could be approved. AT&T got money for our area and their footprint shrank the next year when they cut off dial-up customers in the area.
To boot, Thats happened like at least 3 times now. Lmao
Idk who built it but the place I used to live in BFE definitely has broadband now.
Because of the FCC's hilariously out of date definition, many places have theoretical broadband access (one 10mb pipe shared amongst dozens of households).
We need to stop giving money to ISPs. Give the money to municipalities so they can offer municipal broadband.
Can confirm, my ISP is fiber out in a rural area, run by the rural electric company from a couple counties over and it's pretty decent. Not top of the line stuff, offers either 100 megabit or 1 gigabit symmetrical for a home plan, but it's much better than the fixed point wireless that was the best previous option and maxed out at 100 down/20 up for the highest tier plan, and that was only if you could get clear line of sight to the transmitter (Would sometimes go down if it was raining hard or it was windy or something as something could block line of sight or misalign the transmitter/receiver on one end of the connection or the other)
not top of the line
1 gig symmetrical
Mf I'm over here with 100/10 dsl in a suburban market, and you're like 'meh could be better' to what I am like 'I would literally kill for that'
A competing company offers faster speeds but last time I checked, it was around $300 a month for better speeds while retaining 'small business' service (to sidestep data caps). My isp has gig fiber... 4 miles away... and isn't expanding it. Kill me.
and you’re like ‘meh could be better’
well he's not wrong. Where I live, I have 8/8... gbps... Which is likely near top of the line for residential... but I know of a few places in the USA that have even more. Hell I've seen a property in rural Tennessee that has 10/10gbps.
it was around $300 a month for better speeds
Yeah no... I pay 165 for my 8/8.
I cant say enough great things about these rural electric companys rolling out their own fiber. I had an interesting opportunity a while back to do contracted field work for a bunch of small midwest/gulf state electric companies, and was absolutely blown away by the work they're doing.
The first one I worked, I was extremely confused by the communications on all of their poles thinking ATT came through and delivered the nicest fiber id ever seen to cows and corn until I came across the linemen casually splicing fiber on the back bumper of their bucket truck. ATT was copper only in the area, even in the small town they werent even trying - the electric company was dominating.
The whole mood was wild really, most of these companies were co-ops that were tied into the community already, and its really the community that decided the co-op should do internet too. I never got to be an actual customer of any of these, so i never got to know what it feels like to tell ATT to kick rocks and then actually be able to do something about it. But every single customer and employee was feeling it and it wasnt hard to get them grinning about it.
The options available to them were also something to behold. Its their poles. Communications always go under power, and normal communications companies kinda sorta just work with what they get after the electric company uses all the space they need. These guys can rearrange their electric lines to make way for communications all in the same day. ATT would probably get bogged down under 8 months of red tape if they tried to do that.
One of these co-ops would even use space on their poles for directional wifi antennas. Some rural houses would have a half mile driveway, and the power line has long since been buried, so they just beam internet wirelessly from fiber on the main road and skip the expensive buildout to lay fiber for one person. I got to chatting with one guy that had this setup. His house was downhill from the road, so right next to his house they ended up installing the absolute tallest wooden utility pole i have ever seen, i dont even remember the footage, but all that was on it was a single 10 inch wifi dish at the very top. He still got a few hundred both ways, those directional antennas were impressive, and they just power them off their own electric grid.
It really was a daily eye opener of how it could be if these shit ISPs didnt control everything. I strongly encourage everyone to look up to see if youre served by one! You might be surprised, they sometimes whittle in close to some larger cities, if you live in some newer neighborhoods on the outskirts....but man look at me ramble
But municipals don't have lobbyists to write laws and buy politicians.
Simple. Let them get government handouts, by being nationalized.
Make necessary infrastructure municipal utilities... Water, gas, electric, telephone, Internet... If you need it to participate in society, it shouldn't have a profit motive attached, period.
Kill your ISPs. They are more trouble than they are worth.
Meanwhile, in an affluent suburb of Pittsburgh, two companies are pulling new fiber, where there is already a provider and fiber lines. Why? Because of this. No one chooses Comcast unless they are the only game.
I'm surprised they're allowed to do with with Comcast being headquartered in Philly.
Pittsburgh is like 5 hours from Philly.
I'd assume they have the whole state locked down via the state legislature.