Comment on SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 7 months agoFiber should be deployed to rural addresses like yours (and should’ve been a long time ago). Instead, that money was funneled to the likes of Time Warner and Comcast who never even followed through on their part of the deal. Now, SpaceX is getting funneled the cash.
I’m super thankful that WA State supports and gives assistance to counties building out public LUDs for fiber access, many paying attention to rural communities first. I escaped Comcast two years ago because of it.
It can’t, and the taxes you would pay to support fiber to my home would be extreme.
But fiber to a local wireless solution? Sure. But even that’s not possible for everyone, and they were expensive and unreliable until starlink started showing up. LEO internet has its benefits.
We can definitely afford it, especially with LUDs plus federal subsidies. That’s literally what they’re for.
I’m sure we could afford it from muskrat’s government contracts ( our tax money )
Except that US ISPs have already been provided upwards of $80b to roll out a fiber optic backbone for rural connections, and have instead largely pocketed the funds and sat on their hands.
It has largely fallen to smaller communities to incorporate their own local ISPs and manage their own roll-outs, as such projects aren’t viewed as worthwhile for private companies.
Honestly, if Australia could roll out a national fiber backbone (almost a decade ago!) across the same approximate landmass as the contiguous 48 states at less than 10% of the overall population; there is no valid reason that the wealthiest nation to have ever existed can’t also do so.
Even if a Federal program (not under this administration, obviously) was to just run fibre parallel to the existing interstate highways, and leave the last (20) miles to local utilities - it would be cheaper, faster and more reliable than LEO - and without all the additional negatives that come with that!
Honestly, if Australia could roll out a national fiber backbone (almost a decade ago!) across the same approximate landmass as the contiguous 48 states at less than 10% of the overall population; there is no valid reason that the wealthiest nation to have ever existed can’t also do so.
Did Australia lay a national backbone as you said, or did they connect individual neighborhoods, or individual homes? Because all three of those are very different situations with very different costs associated.
I mean the US has had a national fiber backbone since 1995, but that doesn’t really mean anything about fiber to the home. I’m not sure rolling out a fiber backbone 10 years ago is anything to brag about. However, extending the backbone to connect neighborhoods would be extremely helpful in lowering the costs to get fiber to the home, if that’s what they did in Australia, then that would indeed be laudable. If at the national level, they payed for fiber rollout to every home or every street… Well that would surprise me, but that would also be awesome!
So yeah, what did they do?
The actual history of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) is actually needlessly complicated - primarily due to a (somewhat) successful sabotage attempt by our Conservative government in the early 2010s.
But basically, every single new home is built with Fiber to the Home, and every single metropolitan and suburban home either has Fiber to the Home (or Premises), or at the very least Fiber to the Curb through a remediation process to replace the Conservative-implemented Fiber to the Node boondoggle.
We also have a number of neighbourhoods stuck with HFC (again due to Conservstice sabotage) which while still delivering 100+ Mbit connections - are a bit of a technical dead end and will need to be remediated at some point in the future.
Basically, nbnCo serves as a national broadband wholesaler providing high speed connectivity (100, 250, 500, Gigabit) to something like >95% of the population.
The most remote communities are also serviced either through a fixed wireless option or satellite.
Basically though, unlike the US we don’t have a significant number of people still on dial-up and haven’t had so for a very long time.
Time Warner and Comcast need to have all that grant money clawed back. They contracted with the taxpayers to deliver a service and they didn’t even make a good faith effort to start.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I don’t disagree, it should be deployed to rural areas. It’s never going to happen though, it’s just not profitable.
Sure, electrical infrastructure was deployed to the whole country, but it doesn’t need to be replaced and upgraded as frequently as Internet infrastructure does. Even if some rural areas do get fiber at some point, don’t expect the infrastructure to be upgraded regularly enough to stay comparable to denser areas.
You’re never going to find a company willing to do that job. We could do it at the national level, but I have my doubts that the country is headed in that direction.
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 7 months ago
That’s what the subsidies are for. Plus, fiber does not necessarily need to be upgraded after installation (especially rural, where there’s less customers in general). It’s not copper or coax, it doesn’t have the same limits, and can usually handle terabit speeds.
But yes, without the local, state, and/or federal governments supporting it, people in rural areas won’t have a choice.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yeah I’m not in favor of that, not again. The US has provided funding to ISPs to be used explicitly in expanding rural broadband access, we’ve done it on multiple occasions. Every time ISPs simply pocket the money and do nothing.
Fool me once, twice, three times…
So hey, if the US wants to have the FCC do it themselves, just hire crews to lay fiber, then sure. It’ll be inefficient and expensive, but it would say least get done. But I’m not in favor of giving a dime to the existing ISPs…
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 7 months ago
You miss my point. My original comment says as much, that the subsidies all went to big telecom, but it should have gone to local utility districts for local buildouts of fiber. I’m literally sending this message from my LUD-funded fiber that my state subsidized, and my ISP is a local company exclusive to my county’s fiber network. It’s fantastic, and what should be getting the funding instead of Comcast, Time Warner, and now SpaceX.