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A comment on Washington state removes all barriers to municipal broadband. Parent comment

Re:Washington state removes all barriers to municipal broadband by doikor on Sunday May 16, 2021 @02:20PM (#27175799)
> Maybe they were waiting until the same upgrade would cost $2M instead of $6M.

Most of the cost is the actual digging/laying new fiber. The price of that does not really go down over time (instead the cost of labor goes up over time usually). The actual fiber and equipment is a very small part of the cost.

This happened at my parents town. They were looking at setting up their own municipal ISP and after some research/quotes it ended up costing X which was too much. They tried again a decade later and the cost for roughly the same system was 1.5X so even more out of their budget.

The other case is the fiber already existing and the ISP refuses to upgrade to enable higher speeds then that is just pure greed.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Washington state removes all barriers to municipal broadband by toomuchtodo on Sunday May 16, 2021 @03:21PM (#27176220)
The trick is to seize on when existing infra projects are being done (major roadwork or perhaps replacing water, sewer, or buried power) and throw the conduit and fiber down at the same time, as the incremental cost is trivial. This is referred to as Dig Once policy.

Fiber is cheap. When you dig, install fiber!

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/otps/policy_brief_dig_once.p...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Washington state removes all barriers to municipal broadband by m463 on Sunday May 16, 2021 @06:53PM (#27177879)
It's also interesting that (well, like copper) fiber speeds have been upgraded again and again using different transcievers (the gbic thing)
[ Parent | on HN ]