vtthrowaway2519

I've got that, a couple of subsidized Tesla Powerwalls where the deal is they get to draw up to 50% of the juice during high load times. It's a pretty reasonable deal. From the customer point of view it definitely can take the place of a generator, GMP is pretty fast about bringing power back up usually so a few PW2s is pretty good even without solar. And unlike a generator PWs don't have regular testing/maintenance/consumables/noise/pollution. On GMP's side though the big point is to offset having to buy very expensive peak load power. It's already saved them a ton of money, old press piece for example:

https://greenmountainpower.com/2018/07/24/whoa-heatwave-savi...

I'll be a little curious if usage patterns are different this summer with more people home, but it's worked out well for them under typical conditions when there are big spikes in the afternoon/evening as people get back and turn on AC or the like.

>A couple of years ago, I got to watch the whole fiber installation process in action when I had Comcast Gigabit Pro installed in my house. Leaving aside the months it took to get county permitting, it took a team of guys a whole day to run it from the nearest splice point 1,700 feet to my neighborhood. Another half day to run it 200 feet to the pole by my house. Another half day to trench it under my driveway and into my basement. And another half day to install and configure the CPE.

That's an absurd amount of time. There must have been other considerations which made it unusual. When WCVT brought fiber to our area in Vermont it took maybe 5-6 hours to run the 1600 feet or so of our side road, and an extra hour for one house on the way with its own few hundred feet, using their larger scale trencher system + an air blaster if they needed to do a horizontal direct bore which could do 25-50' very quickly. Dig Safe had been by a day or two before just like for any normal ground work anyone would do, so all underground cables/pipes were already painted. The fiber ended up right at our place where we put it through a hole I drilled in the foundation. It wasn't any special ISP team either they had one of the local construction companies take care of the bulk part. Then one tech of theirs drove in, maybe 30 minutes tops to get that spliced and run to my rack. Then like, 5 minutes for the GPON CPE, max? They'd obviously done a proper job of calculating optical power attenuation ahead of time so no issues there. Seriously a -half a day- to install and configure CPE? That makes no sense at all, so it must be some Comcast thing, or something went wrong. GPON is binary, it's either within acceptable optical power range or not.

If you're counting anything LAN side beyond the fiber end point you shouldn't because that is completely independent from the WAN drop and represents an arbitrary amount of time that will be different for every customer.

Fair enough and thanks for the reply! I certainly didn't mean to suggests that WISPs should get any federal funding directly per se, more that one of the benefits of more fiber deployment would be more options for private higher speed "WISPs" (which could just be a techie on a hill who can put up a few cheap 400 Mbps class PtPs for some neighbors) so there might be coordination opportunities.

Per your comment elsewhere in the thread, I'd definitely like to see 100% of any NEW federal money in particular go to fiber. Even if it takes a while, every bit of incremental build out there is permanent progress, not wasted on dead end ancient copper.

Best of luck to you! I joined a vt governor's campaign back in 2010 in part because they were the only one to really focus on this issue. It's something I think could help the state significantly.

"Comcast era" is not accurate, nor is the limitation "made up". ADSL service in fact has been the best option for a lot of us in Vermont and other rural areas, and while DSL can be symmetric as a technology it gets hard in spread out deployments to keep up signal. There are real tradeoffs to make when total bandwidth (in the signal sense) is pretty limited, trying to get pushed over old copper.

Going forward yes, it'd be nice to see symmetric speeds get emphasized more and hopefully made standard for any future targets. Widely deployed decent symmetric links would open up a lot of new options for decentralization, though it's probably worth being mindful of the negative effect it could have in terms of botnets if some thought isn't put into it. And a mere THREE down is definitely pretty absurd at this point, some friends on 25 Mbps ADSL still get 10 Mbps up and an office that is close enough to the provider to get 50 Mbps down is at ~24 up. But having some asymmetry at all doesn't seem inherently unfair yet? Between wisps/starlink/fiber maybe symmetric can be the goal next definition update.

>If there are any folks here who own and live on land in Vermont I'd love to ask you more about how/where you're living and working, if you wouldn't mind.

I was born in Burlington and after leaving for a decade-ish moved back a good 11 years ago now. I've got a house maybe 20-30 min from Burlington, family has a farm up towards the Northeast Kingdom and I've got friends scattered around the state as well as projects I've done in various places. As I said in another comment on this topic, there is 1G symmetric fiber at my house now with a pretty great local company. There are other fiber efforts scattered around the state as well, like ECFiber who are based in South Royalton. Vermont broadband can definitely be very feast or famine in some cases, with fiber options in surprising areas but the instant you get a bit farther away you're down to rapidly degrading DSL and/or maybe cable. Verizon/ATT/Tmobile cellular coverage maps in Vermont are also a flagrant lie, don't count on anything in many places let alone LTE. Lots of shadows from mountains.

Basically, if you just pick a property at random based on other factors it'll be hit or miss. You can't -count- on broadband anywhere you want, though presumably Starlink will change that at some point since Vermont is fairly far north and low density. But if you do some research first you should definitely be able to find property with good options, tons of beautiful places including fairly rural ones where you've got good choice. You just have to take that into account in your research. And of course right now a lot of installations are on hold/backed up, you'll want to check on timelines there (it'll help if no in-home access is needed).

How do these munibroadband efforts dovetail with existing local fiber companies? I get access through Waitsfield & Champlain Valley Telecom and after granted a long delay on speeds they've been pretty aggressive about fiber rollouts in the last year or two. I'm down by Monkton and have 1G fiber. It's $105 a month, which is certainly more than BTV but this isn't a dense area at all either, and even when still on DSL they've always been really pleasant to deal with. I know there have been other fiber deployments in various places one might not expect at first glance in VT too, and the mountainous terrain is both an impediment to physical rollout but also offers some opportunities for WISPs.

Definitely excited to see more progress on this at last, and Comcast is certainly awful. I hope though that'll it'll benefit from and get boosted by what is here too.