> In 1936, the REA was made permanent through the Rural Electrification Act. It was granted an initial budget of $50 million for the first two years, then $40 million a year for the following decade ($550 million in 1936 is approximately $10.3 billion today). Jul 12, 2021
snippet answer from Google search https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+muc...
I can't imagine how our government can justify subsidizing anything other than fiber to the home in the current year. As far as I know, there is very little ongoing maintenance cost and glass fiber is much cheaper than copper, no? Coax people are saying they can get symmetric gigabit up and down with docsis but I will believe it when I see it (low latency symmetric gigabit up and down, no data caps, reasonable pricing). Until then, we shouldn't give them any money.
I guess it costs more than you think to hire someone to dig a hole, put something in it, and then cover it back up again.
I paid a guy almost $2000 to fix a few feet of sewer line in my front yard. Very little work to do once the old line was dug up, the main costs were in pulling various permits, renting the equipment, hiring crew, etc. Now multiply that by a few miles and $30k starts to look like a bargain.
It's expensive in fuel and in the cost and maintenance of machinery designed to deliver the most energy. It's like paying for GPU compute time.
It’s also cheaper to do a group of homes then it is to do 1 as the cost of bringing the workers, the machinery and the permits is spread across all clients. That’s why we hear a lot of cases where someone has a fiber cable passing close by but the cable company did not see enough profit to finish the last mile (or they asked at the time of building and not enough homes signed up at the time).
I almost pulled the trigger on a $30k quote from Centurylink to run fiber to my home but they proved incapable of backhauling anywhere near what i was looking for. I didn’t give a shit about its amortized cost.
He doesn't want to _lose_ money on it, but he's an engineer and has evaluated the risks and costs and found them acceptable. He's doing it because because the incumbent ISP won't, because it's a challenge, and because he wants to to serve his community. Or so I've been able to gather.