Laying fibre is really expensive - in really rural areas it could be $100k+ per subscriber, so you will never see a return on investment for doing that
And yet, a local company in my state just ran fiber to 5000 homes in my area for what I told was 1 million. They used directional drilling, it was cheap and easy. Then all the sudden my local phone and cable company “also” put in fiber.
So while I’m in a suburb, I know for a fact these guys are all over the state and growing, including rural (and so is the local telco/cableco). I challenge that 100k number, that’s bullshit telco numbers. The word is unprofitable, it is unprofitable to run fiber when you are the only competitor.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Rural could mean a km out of town there’s a few km of houses spaced out by an acre or two along a well maintained road.
Or it could mean over an hour from the nearest town, down first a well maintained road, then a gravel road, then a dirt road surrounded by dense forest and/or lakes/swamp, there’s a community of 6 families each 5km from their neighbours.
If the total distance is longer than 100km (60 miles), it’ll need a repeater/amplifier, which also needs power.
At some point it becomes more worthwhile to establish a wireless connection, but even then you either need a satellite (at geosynchronous orbit, which has high latency), a constellation of satellites at a lower orbit, or a series of towers with line of sight of each other (or line of sight plus atmospheric bouncing).
We’re not talking about the average case, but there are extreme cases that I wouldn’t doubt cost a large amount that will never be recouped via reasonable subscription fees.