“Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US
arstechnica.com
“Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US
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Re: “Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US
#2This is a great bill. It creates a slight public subsidy for broadband, but the total amount of subsidy is minimized by tying it to digging that's already going to be done. This should be extended to power line and water pipe construction. No reason you can't put in some dark fiber while you've got someone up there hanging new power line (which I imagine is way more expensive).
Most importantly, it minimizes market distortion. Inatead of making it more expensive to deploy broadband (which is the ironic side effect of many broadband deployment policies), it makes it cheaper for competitors to enter the market.
Re: “Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US
#3[deleted]
Re: “Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US
#4This is a great bill. It creates a slight public subsidy for broadband, but the total amount of subsidy is minimized by tying it to digging that's already going to be done. This should be extended to power line and water pipe construction. No reason you can't put in some dark fiber while you've got someone up there hanging new power line (which I imagine is way more expensive). Most importantly, it minimizes market d…
More importantly: we already did this. Remember when they overhauled the highway system in a lot of areas back in the late 80s and through the 90s? While they were digging, they dropped a lot of fiber.
Almost all of the major routes we use today for teleco/internet routing were laid or substantially upgraded then. Almost all the dark fiber laid was laid then.
The hilarious part? Most of the fiber laid could do at least 40gbit, thus the cost of upgrading a lot of the existing backbone could be as easy as just swapping the line cards on either side.
IMO, we may not actually need more fiber (outside of last mile usage, which this bill is directed at), but just better use of existing fiber. If you're wasting fiber on anything less than 10 gigabit, please stop. It costs you next to nothing to upgrade compared to what it cost a decade ago: upgrading to equipment that can handle 10GBase-LR/ER/ZR or OC-192/STM-64 or better is worth every dime.
Literally, if the US government passed a law stating, say, any fiber over 5 miles long must have a line rate of at least 10 gigabit, and heavily subsidize upgrading equipment that is simply too old to handle it, a lot of Internet speed WTFery would go away in rural and suburban areas.
You'd be surprised how many LTE/4G cell phone towers, DOCSIS 3.x headends, or modern ADSL2+/VDSL2/possibly G.Fast DSLAMs do not have 10gbit or greater backbones. It's just absurd in 2017 that we're using stuff that is 90s era at best.
Re: “Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US
#5This is a great bill. It creates a slight public subsidy for broadband, but the total amount of subsidy is minimized by tying it to digging that's already going to be done. This should be extended to power line and water pipe construction. No reason you can't put in some dark fiber while you've got someone up there hanging new power line (which I imagine is way more expensive). Most importantly, it minimizes market d…
And you can even create a deployment tax that pays for the tiny cost at a later date when the conduit is actually used.
Re: “Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US
#6I think this bill is a great idea. All of my hassles with AT&T and Google wouldn't have come up if this law existed when my neighborhood in Austin was being built.
Time Warner installed cable when the homes were being built. Then about 10 years ago AT&T went through and installed their "fiber" (their words, not mine), and tore up everyone's lawn in the process. This last year Google came in... and just made an enormous mess[1]... but the good news is they did lay pipe that other services can run cables through.
[1] I've commended on this recently in other posts -- Google isn't supervising the contractors they hire in Austin and the work is getting done shoddy... and Google hasn't been doing much of anything to remedy the situation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878909
Re: “Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US
#7This is a great bill. It creates a slight public subsidy for broadband, but the total amount of subsidy is minimized by tying it to digging that's already going to be done. This should be extended to power line and water pipe construction. No reason you can't put in some dark fiber while you've got someone up there hanging new power line (which I imagine is way more expensive). Most importantly, it minimizes market d…
More importantly: we already did this. Remember when they overhauled the highway system in a lot of areas back in the late 80s and through the 90s? While they were digging, they dropped a lot of fiber. Almost all of the major routes we use today for teleco/internet routing were laid or substantially upgraded then. Almost all the dark fiber laid was laid then. The hilarious part? Most of the fiber laid could do at lea…
I think the idea is to get fiber into the last mile. Vast parts of the country are still under construction. New subdivisions are being built, and people are moving there from established northeastern/midwestern states. Requiring conduit to be put underground as you build the roads for a new subdivision, for example, would dramatically reduce the costs to deploy fiber in these places.
Re: “Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US
#8This is a great bill. It creates a slight public subsidy for broadband, but the total amount of subsidy is minimized by tying it to digging that's already going to be done. This should be extended to power line and water pipe construction. No reason you can't put in some dark fiber while you've got someone up there hanging new power line (which I imagine is way more expensive). Most importantly, it minimizes market d…
I agree entirely. If you're building a road or doing construction, why not put in conduits that allow installation or upgrades for years to come, rather than having to dig repeatedly? And if you have to re-dig an area because it doesn't have conduits, don't just bury a wire, install conduits.
This is directly the job of local government: to build infrastructure. And this wouldn't force the use of any particular service; rather, it would make it possible for many services to exist.
Re: “Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US
#9I think this bill is a great idea. All of my hassles with AT&T and Google wouldn't have come up if this law existed when my neighborhood in Austin was being built. Time Warner installed cable when the homes were being built. Then about 10 years ago AT&T went through and installed their "fiber" (their words, not mine), and tore up everyone's lawn in the process. This last year Google came in... and just made an enormo…
> and tore up everyone's lawn in the process
They just did this to mine and a few neighbors, even though they weren't supposed to. They had a Ditch Witch (DW) Directional Drill [0] that would tunnel under all the lawns, and only make a little hole every few houses. However, they didn't count on the coral rock, and the DW broke, so they had to bring in a bigger one which was going to take a week or two.
Well, they weren't getting paid if they weren't working, so instead of waiting for the bigger DW, they started digging trenches through the lawns. They did this to about 5% of them, with mine being the last one before the new DW got there. They did resod, but it's all dying because they just threw the dirt back in without putting the soil back on top, and everyone's tree rings and other landscaping are ruined.
All the neighbors are pissed. I had to explain to a lot of them what fiber even was. They still don't understand why I'm too excited to be pissed.
[0] https://www.ditchwitch.com/directional-drills#content-304
Re: “Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
More importantly: we already did this. Remember when they overhauled the highway system in a lot of areas back in the late 80s and through the 90s? While they were digging, they dropped a lot of fiber. Almost all of the major routes we use today for teleco/internet routing were laid or substantially upgraded then. Almost all the dark fiber laid was laid then. The hilarious part? Most of the fiber laid could do at lea…
I think the idea is to get fiber into the last mile. Vast parts of the country are still under construction. New subdivisions are being built, and people are moving there from established northeastern/midwestern states. Requiring conduit to be put underground as you build the roads for a new subdivision, for example, would dramatically reduce the costs to deploy fiber in these places.
This would only apply to projects receiving federal funding, which I don't imagine includes most subdivisions. Most likely just interstates, state highways, and maybe county highways. That wouldn't necessarily get fiber through your front door, but it should get it far enough out to provide a viable high speed option for rural households that are currently stuck with dial up or satellite.