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It sounds like you really need to fix this.
It strikes me as a lot like EV charging. If we are really going to ban sales of fossil cars by 2030 then we need to make sure everyone can charge at home. If we don't it creates a huge divide and makes homes where you can't charge cheaply overnight much less desirable.
I'm surprised it doesn't work that way already with internet. They built some new "luxury" homes not too far from here a few years ago and couldn't sell them because internet access was only possible via 0.5mbps ADSL. Some became retirement homes until they managed to get a fibre line in, then they sold right away.
I just created this thread and moved almost all of the discussion about this subject here. Please keep the discussion civil. There is lots of useful data and information here for those interested in continuing the discussion. Enjoy.
This is exactly why I expect StarLink to impact rural realestate in a positive value way.
No power lines? Off grid solar is at least competitive with paying to extend electric service to the property.
No water system? Most properties can support a well and if necessary water filtration. In parts of Hawaii catchment rainwater is common for residential water.
No sewer? Septic and leech fields are common.
No low latency internet? Maybe a wireless isp. Maybe 4g or 5g. StarLink is a major game changer for this.
I know people that own 500k usd houses that the best they can get is 15m/5m from a wisp or 1.5m/256k dsl for one and 640k/256k for the other.
Harry
There are many reasons why fiber isn't installed everywhere including but not limited to political, economic, government, regulatory, stupidity, geography, lack of access to capital and the list goes on. Not only that, but new rural areas, with no easy fiber access, are being created all the time. Starlink will find a plethora of willing customers for decades to come.
Indeed. And we are spoiled here in the US. At least here, we mostly have access to capital (ie. being able to borrow large sums of money for a 10 year pay back), and yet even here I would posit that the main reason why more communities aren't converting/installing fiber is indeed lack of access to capital. I am directly involved in a company that builds out new fiber networks for entire cities (Netly Fiber) - they build and own the fiber network and then lease access to it to ISPs, municipalities, utilities, 5G operators, etc. Anyways, what we have found is that lots of people want to build fiber networks, on your dime. Getting the financing together is the hard part, even here in the US.
Elsewhere in the world, access to capital is even worse. Try to raise $40M to run fiber for a small city anywhere in South America and see how far you get. Arguably the most competitive advantage thing about Starlink is that SpaceX is financing it. They are able to raise billions of $$ in cheap equity and deliver broadband anywhere in the world. Think about it - they don't even have to pay interest on the money invested in Starlink. That's a real competitive advantage over even fiber builds that don't have access to as cheap capital as SpaceX does.
It's never that easy, but it can be done. Deregulate the market, open up existing infrastructure. That's what many other countries have done.
I mean the alternative is free money for Starlink so it's not like the cash isn't there.
Keep scrolling, it's all there. I'm not going to keep repeating it for your benefit.
Interesting article mentioning the changing nature of internet traffic. As we know P2P used to make up a large proportion of it. More recently OS updates were the major bandwidth hog, but it seems that game updates have overtaken them.
突然の大トラフィック……昔はOSだったが、今はゲームのアップデートに……IIJが語る「インターネットのバックボーン」【IIJ Technical WEEK 2020】
For reference the latest Call of Duty game needs around 250GB to install.
突然の大トラフィック……昔はOSだったが、今はゲームのアップデートに……IIJが語る「インターネットのバックボーン」【IIJ Technical WEEK 2020】
For reference the latest Call of Duty game needs around 250GB to install.
I have. They are arbitrary.
A financially viable solution that provides an adequate solution for vast number of use cases that satisfies a significant group of people have doesn't mean it's unacceptable because it doesn't mean 100% of all use cases.
In other words:
"Don't let perfect be the enemy of good."
-Voltaire (paraphrased slightly)
Such lack of ambition. If Starlink didn't exist would you just ignore the digital divide completely?
Yes. That's it exactly. You got me.
The FCC awarded $9.2 billion USD for Rural Broadband initiatives. SpaceX was given $885 million USD as part of that.
The vast majority of the remaining $ went into Fiber and HFC deployments, or around $8 billion USD. SpaceX was NOT the highest award, and this funding is over the next 10 years.
IMHO while not nothing, $88.5 million a year for SpaceX is rather small for what is being done. Even the total rural broadband award at just under $1 billion/year is rather small, and will not significantly increase access to fiber or HFC.
Overall the award supposedly covers about 5.2 million homes, at a cost of $1,770 per house, which for people that build physical plant networks, that is very very low, and thus balanced out by lower cost deployments.
Charter Communications Inc won $1.22 billion to provide service to 1.06 million locations. Charter is a cable provider, and will most likely deploy HFC/DOCSIS based networks. Average cost is $1,151 USD per location.
SpaceX won $885 million to serve 642,000 locations. Average cost is $1,378 USD per location.
LTD Broadband LLC won $1.32 billion to serve 528,000 locations. I don't know for sure what they will build with, but based on their website they are WISP. This averages $2,500 USD per location. The speeds are low.... LTD Broadband
The Rural Electric Cooperative Consortium won $1.1 billion to serve 618,000 locations, this will be a GPON network (Fiber), and average of $1780 per location.
De-regulation might help a bit, but Fiber and HFC networks are a "natural" monopoly, and should probably stay that way to avoid massive capital expenses.
I still very much would like to see a municipal owned and operated layer 1 / layer 2 fiber network, with many providers competing to provide services on the network. This would work well in most decent sized towns and cities. Basically any place large enough to have municipal water suppliers.
The digital divide is not what you think it is, and it won't be solved the way you think it will. Cheaper connectivity that is decent is what is needed. The cheap lifeline cable connections here are a start. 25mbit/3mbit service for $9.95/month for qualified low income families.
Affordable Internet Program FAQs | Cox Connect2Compete
-Harry
I doubt that. I think you would be appalled. While there are some municipal fiber networks that work, most are disasters. They pay too much to build something that doesn't work. Then they pay consultants to tell them what they built and how to use it. I kid you not. No, you really do want for profit companies owning and operating things like this. It is better than government owned.
For everyone that belly aches about Comcast and Frontier, have you stopped to think how fast technology has evolved in the last twenty years? Twenty years ago, ISPs were still mostly dial up. Communication networks are expensive and thus have 20 year expected pay back periods. With communications technology changing about five times in the last twenty years, no wonder ISPs went bankrupt or couldn't keep up with the latest technology.
With fiber we now have a chance at a 20 year time horizon where the most expensive part of the network can actually stay stable and won't need to be replaced.
It's a shame that these initiatives just end up being free money for corporations. Why give any money to SpaceX when they are already going to cover those areas anyway? It's not like they need an incentive, it's their business model.
The rest seems to get wasted on companies with a history of failing to deliver, or systems that won't deliver future-proof networks and will need upgrading again in less than a decade.
Really, they are still using that old tech? Seems crazy, if you were building a cable network today it would make sense to use fibre. What is their reason for that decision?
Cable providers here are actually upgrading their copper networks to fibre because they can see that in a few years DOCSIS just isn't going to be competitive.
Indeed. They should have a choice, either build their own fibre networks and open then up to everyone, or open up their infrastructure so other people can build those networks.
The digital divide is not what you think it is, and won't be solved the way you think it will. Just making crappy internet connections cheaper won't resolve the problems, it will at best lessen them a little. Cost is certainly a big factor but schemes like giving people 3G modems have been tried and largely failed due to poor quality of the connections, ridiculous download limits etc.
That's because they tried to milk as much value out of their old copper networks as they could. They didn't want to spend any money upgrading it when they could just bumble along with DSL and incremental upgrades.
Places where they were building new networks, and places where they were looking at more realistic pay back periods (e.g. Japan) go on and installed fibre. We can reasonably expect fibre to be the choice of network for the next century at least.
I wonder, if POTS providers have the same attitude when the first phone networks were build in the US? Max 20 year pay back time or it's not worth doing?
Some Municipal networks worked well, some failed.
I could also see it as a limited franchise, similar to Cable networks, and well regulated.
The problem with pure for profit fiber deployments, is you get cherry picking and red lining of areas, which further reduces the livability and desirability of the areas skipped. A city water utility can not, and does not skip a neighborhood for service or re-pipe based on delinquency rates, but many telcos have done this.
Twenty years on the physical plant is quite reasonable if done logically. I saw way too many telco's go nuts in the early 90s with technologies that were not going to make sense long term.
Biggest example, most neighborhoods in the 60s, 70s, and 80s were wired with 9 pairs per 8 houses or 7 pairs per 6 houses, to account for some failure, and a few people wanting second phone lines.
During the 90s when a lot of people decided a second phone line was better vs busy signals, the telcos ran out of pairs. Instead of pushing a digital technology (ISDN-BRI) to better use the single pair (two concurrent phone calls, ability to bond for data at an amazing for the time 128kbit full duplex), they instead installed SLC/DLC units, ran T-1 lines to them, and more copper in the neighborhoods.
This broke the copper path from the CO to the subscriber, and resulted in many neighborhoods not being able to get DSL until much later when the telco would bolt a DSLAM onto the side of the SLC/DLC stand. These remote DSLAMs mostly sucked because they would feed the DSLAM with a pair of T-1 lines for 15+ subscribers. Eventually Fiber was run to many of the DSLAMs, but since the POTs technology for the phone lines out of the SLC/DSL and DSLAMs supported very long line lengths (2+ miles in some cases), these stands were not very suitable for modern VDSL2/g.FAST high speed DSL.
Basically it resulted in a technology transition point both too far away from the CO, yet too far away from the subscribers.
The telco's did this because they were still thinking that the copper in the ground or on the poles was a long term capital investment, but the switch upgrades and license fees for ISDN was a short term cost.
Of course the telco's also made other miss steps, like using wax paper insulation in Tucson for underground cable....
Fiber, with minimum number of splits is a very future proof technology. Heck even zero splits can be viable gives a huge ability to change the electronics at any point as needed.
That being said, as this entire thread has discussed, Fiber to many locations is decades away if not longer, and StarLink is an amazing filler.
-Harry
I'm definitely no internet expert but here are a couple of real-life examples to show why I think "fiber everywhere" won't work out:
1. We live in a far northern suburb of a major city (ATL) with over 500 homes. Upper-middle class. Underground utilities. It was built ~25 years ago. We have Comcast cable. A large telecom (single letter stock symbol!) decided to run fiber in the neighborhood a few years ago. They didn't trench but rather bored underneath driveways, etc. (not sure what that technique is called) and came up for air at each lot. Even with all the funds available to the company and plenty of potential customers, they stopped after doing half the neighborhood (not my half!). They're supposed to start on my half next year. If my neighborhood didn't meet their ROI requirements, how in the world would a couple of homes out in the sticks???
2. My SIL lives in the sticks on several acres. Power and POTS but no cable. The local power company, in a low-density county west of SAT, decided to run fiber on their poles recently to serve customers. SIL got it because her husband works for the power company. It took six guys in three trucks to manage the install. Maybe it was teething pains but I just don't see how that method would be economical at large scale. However, I think that the power company setting up "wireless nodes" occasionally on their poles would be economical with the last mile being shared wireless (something like 4G or 5G but tuned for internet access). That way they could run fiber to their nodes and drop off a wireless transceiver at any house that opted in.
1. We live in a far northern suburb of a major city (ATL) with over 500 homes. Upper-middle class. Underground utilities. It was built ~25 years ago. We have Comcast cable. A large telecom (single letter stock symbol!) decided to run fiber in the neighborhood a few years ago. They didn't trench but rather bored underneath driveways, etc. (not sure what that technique is called) and came up for air at each lot. Even with all the funds available to the company and plenty of potential customers, they stopped after doing half the neighborhood (not my half!). They're supposed to start on my half next year. If my neighborhood didn't meet their ROI requirements, how in the world would a couple of homes out in the sticks???
2. My SIL lives in the sticks on several acres. Power and POTS but no cable. The local power company, in a low-density county west of SAT, decided to run fiber on their poles recently to serve customers. SIL got it because her husband works for the power company. It took six guys in three trucks to manage the install. Maybe it was teething pains but I just don't see how that method would be economical at large scale. However, I think that the power company setting up "wireless nodes" occasionally on their poles would be economical with the last mile being shared wireless (something like 4G or 5G but tuned for internet access). That way they could run fiber to their nodes and drop off a wireless transceiver at any house that opted in.
Yes, AT&T paid $50B for DirecTv and now want/need to dump it for $20B since they have no ability to raise money to invest in new infrastructure. Their bad decisions have come home to roost and startups with clean balance sheets can outraise AT&T to build fiber, but alas, not on a large scale. It’ll take hundreds of startups, which will take time, but it’ll eventually happen. Meanwhile we’ve got Starlink!
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