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| ▲ | AnthonyMouse an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Jokes aside, I guess population density is just not the main factor in internet. It’s competition, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, and pop density is simply not a deciding factor. Sort of? If you're going to provide wired service in rural areas at all, doing it with fast fiber isn't a significantly different maintenance cost than using the old stuff, but it has a high one time cost to transition from copper to fiber. The cost of doing that is more like per-mile than per-customer, which makes the per-customer cost a lot higher where there are fewer customers per mile. There are areas rural enough that nobody would spend the money to run fiber even if there were no regulations at all. Whereas for NYC it's just unambiguously corruption and regulation destroying competition. |
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| ▲ | miki123211 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Building in rural areas is hard for physical / engineering reasons. There's more cable to lay, more distance to cover, and fewer people to use that cable and offset the costs. Building in dense cities is hard because we choose to make it hard. We could (and should) choose differently. Ironically enough, rural areas now have a ceiling on how bad service can get (because Starlink is a viable alternative). That doesn't work for dense EU/Asian style cities where most people live in 5+ story buildings. |
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| ▲ | matt-p 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Rural is complicated. You have more distance between subscribers, but it's much more likely to just be grass which you can mole plough into for about a tenth of the cost per metre of digging up sidewalk. I don't know about New York specifically but I do know laying new duct in central London is more expensive than it should be because the sidewalks are mostly now full. You need to close roads and track down them which is more expensive because you have to go deeper and you pay the city per day for the closure. The one thing that has enabled fibre deployment here is that the incumbent is forced to allow other ISPs to rent space for a regulated price in thier existing ducts. In Switzerland I believe init7 benefit from the same principle but the incumbent rents the fibres themselves not duct space. The only thing America needs to do is compromise the property rights of AT&T or build out city owned ducting. It's a bit socialist I guess, but look, it works. | | |
| ▲ | ErroneousBosh an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Rural is complicated. You have more distance between subscribers, but it's much more likely to just be grass which you can mole plough into for about a tenth of the cost per metre of digging up sidewalk. You've also most likely got existing telephone poles that you can dangle your fibre off, and (in farming country at least) you've probably got some handy grain silos to nail a microwave link to. Here in rural NE Scotland there are several altnets, and it's not uncommon to see a massive cluster of microwave dishes and yagis hanging off the corner of a barn somewhere. |
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| ▲ | psychoslave 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Edge cases are hard is not a bad rule of thumb. High concentration, and you have saturation issues. Extremely low concentration, and there is not much active elements to leverage on. Yes, as all rules of thumb, it falls apart in many situations too. But in that case at least the rule of thumb kind of recognize it will poorly scale at full generalization level. |
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| ▲ | spacebacon an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | inemesitaffia 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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