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vTel Deploying Gigabit Internet In Vermont At $35/Month
symbolset writes "Up to 17,500 rural Vermont subscribers of vTel, a legacy copper telephone company, stand to get gigabit fiber to the home. Funded by a $95 million U.S. grant and $55 million in coinvestment from a utility for smart meters, the 1,200 mile fiber network will cost $8,500 per home — if every subscriber takes the gigabit Internet. Currently the company is doing its best to convince people this is a product they need, but have seen only 600 takers so far. The federal grant is part of $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus funds that seem to have accomplished very little."
Looks like Google's master plan is springing into action
I hope you are happy to be funding high speed internet for some maple syrup-drinking loggers while our major cities are broadband wastelands. This is a great illustration of why we should not let government become involved in these types of things.
Memorable quotes for
Looker (1981)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/quotes
"John Reston: Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power."
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"The United States has it's own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way. With the Nazis it was funded by the government, but in the United States, it's funded by corporations and corporations they only want things to happen that will make people want to buy stuff. So whatever that is, then that is considered okay and good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it really serves people's thinking - it can stupify and make not very good things happen."
- Crispin Glover: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000417/bio
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"It's only logical to assume that conspiracies are everywhere, because that's what people do. They conspire. If you can't get the message, get the man." - Mel Gibson (from an interview)
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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William Casey, CIA Director
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"The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition (the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy) from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing - for you, too, are considered the opposition, or enemy - so that you cannot interfere. When the public does not know what the government or the CIA is doing, it cannot voice its approval or disapproval of their actions. In fact, they can even lie to your about what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it. As for the second advantage, despite frequent suggestion that the CIA is a rogue elephant, the truth is that the agency functions at the direction of and in response to the office of the president. All of its major clandestine operations are carried out with the direct approval of or on direct orders from the White House. The CIA is a secret tool of the president - every president. And every president since Truman has lied to the American people in order to protect the agency. When lies have failed, it has been the duty of the CIA to take the blame for the president, thus protecting him. This is known in the business as "plausible denial." The CIA, functioning as a secret instrument of the U.S. government and the presidency, has long misused and abused history and continues to do so."
- Victor Marchetti, Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History
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George Carlin:
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehous
At least we'll be able to watch Nero fiddle faster.
There is money for this which is good since our roads are crumbling and we won't be able to drive to work.
Governement should not subsidise anything. Ensuring proper regulation and competition is enough.
...). But seriously? $8,500 per home and that's if the home actually subscribes to the service?
Am I the only one appalled by such counterproductive use of tax dollars?
Don't get me wrong, I like fibre and hate the usual suspects (TWC, Comcast,
Thank you Google for forcing telecoms to start moving their asses and provide better internet at proper prices.
Can't wait those 20 years it will take before we get this in Canada too!
Why are we funding this kind of service in rural areas when the much cheaper to wire urban areas still don't have this sort of service? What's more, urban areas always seem to get the shaft on things like this where we're paying to subsidize other people's wasteful lifestyles, even as our infrastructure is crumbling.
Seriously, most of the tax revenue comes from the developed portions of the country, but most of the spending is done in less developed areas of the country.
Complaining about something from 2010, you'd think somebody would get an up to date information source.
Sounds like a giant waste of money to me. What else could you supply for $8500/home?
Tell that to my parents, brother and the two rural Michigan communities they live in. They've seen increased competition in their markets where no one was willing to bring broadband previously.
They used to have cable lines that literally ran right past their house - albeit about 100-200 meters away from the premises. They tried to pay the cable company to hook them up and were repeatedly turned down, even with an offer of $1500 for installation. (Heh, they were desperate for anything better than 56k dialup, I guess.)
Anyhow, in the past year and a half they've had four different broadband ISPs come into the area, all of which are funded by this pool of broadband stimulus. They have more options in their rural area than I have in suburban upstate NY. They also have competitive or better connectivity. It'll be interesting to see what happens once the funding dries up.
...dividing 8,500 by 35.
More than 10 years
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
When it's going to be throttled and/or capped eventually?
Seriously, maybe the spending IS the problem. Let's just take this hundred million we have to borrow and spend it on a bunch of people who will never appreciate the value of what they are getting because they don't fucking need it and couldn't imagine paying for it if they had the money burning a hole in their pockets.
I had VTel install fiber to my home in November, 2012 and was one the first in the area. There has been some pains in the deployment and it took 2 long years to get it. I finally got it when I saw the installers working on a neighbor's house (her sister works for VTel and is in charge of scheduling the deployment). Talked to the installers and they were at my house later that day :)
Depending on where you do a Speedtest.Net, I have seen 680 down and 750 up.
I live in Vermont. I get so sick of hearing that investing in infrastructure is a waste of money. Investing in America's infrastructure with why we all pay taxes. The 8500 per household is this years cost. Gigabit internet service will be in service for at least 30 years. While the rest of the nation has moved on to faster service i am certain Vermont will still be using this service. Thats the nature of rural America.
Seriously, how many of us really need this level of blinding internet speed? A lot of us may say we want it, but when it comes to paying for it, that's another matter. It's certainly not a basic right, and not something the government should pay for in whole or part.
Up to 17,500 rural Vermont subscribers of vTel, a legacy copper telephone company, stand to get gigatons of pork to the home. Funded by a $95 million of taxpayer funds and $55 million in coinvestment from a utility for smart meters, the 1,200 mile-wide pig will cost $8,500 per home - if every subscriber takes the gigabit Internet. Currently the company is doing its best to convince people this is pork they need, but have seen only 600 takers so far. The taxpayer pork barrel is part of $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus funds that seem to have accomplished very little - except turn people into Republicans.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
They are by far the best phone company I have every dealt with. They answer the phone on the first ring and will make changes to your phone service while on the phone. I dropped MCI for my long distance after they pissed me off to no end and went to VoIP. I called VTel and had them drop MCI from my account and she made the change while on the phone. I called MCI and told them to drop my account. The lady at MCI asked when I contacted my telephone company and I informed her I just got off the phone with VTel and the did it while on the phone. She argued with me that was impossible. I said then call them. A few minutes later the MCI lady called back and told me she has never seen service like this and I should and I should stick with them. I did as they are very customer oriented and the only other option in town is Comcast.
The standard argument against public transportation always forgets that the capability scales up easily and provides a lower cost ultimately. Most of the first objections against public transportation take the full cost of the service and instead of amortizing it over multiple years and a larger populace served says "why only 4000 people will ride the bus! Instead of spending 80 million on 4 thousand people, we could just give each of them 20 thousand to buy their own car and we'd be better off!! We don't need bus service!". But giving those people cars won't solve anything when another 30 thousand people want to use the bus later. But building the bus system with available excess capacity will help out in the longer term
.
It's the same way with building out and deploying this high speed network access. The cost is amortized over multiple years. Why is it that when the gov't pays for it directly, people get riled up but when the government sneaks it out as a subsidy or a give-away of public right of way access to monopolies provided by private corporations, no one realizes the actual cost of what is being given away?
I'm beginning to suspect that Plymouth Notch, Vt. isn't an actual location. The zip code locator can't find it, neither can Zillow. I'd be happy to move to a little hole in the wall in Vermont, if I could get gigabit internet.
BTW, good luck producing that food without the goods that come through our ports and the tools and supplies that are produced in our factories.
Plymouth Notch, VT is a village within the township of Plymouth, VT, zip code 05056. Its primary historical claim to fame is as the birthplace of president Calvin Coolidge (whose many policy shortfalls are more than made up for by the many amusing anecdotes about his taciturn nature). It was isolated for over a week when Hurricane Irene washed out the roads a year and a half ago, and is the home to Plymouth Artisan Cheeses. (www dot plymouth artisan cheese dot com)
It's just one town over from the Killington Ski resort, and as such is one of the wealthier towns in Vermont, on a per capita basis, but that's tending close to a renewal of the act 60 debate which no-one wants to get into here.
Source: I'm a vermonter.
There needs to be more municipal fiber in usa. The "free market" hasn't worked.
Optical signals sent over decent fiber optic cable can go for many miles without degrading, unlike signals over copper wire. DSL speed is strongly effected by cable length. Therefore, I prefer rural areas be wired up with long distance fiber optic cables before city dwellers get their DSL cables changed. I also say that 768 kbps is good enough, but if the incremental cost of going up to 1 gbps is several percent more in price, why not go all the way?
I bet you'd have opposed rural electrification in the thirties, too.
You make two arguments: The government shouldn't be borrowing, and Vermonters (and rural people in general) don't 'deserve' good internet.
Economically speaking, government spending is precisely what is needed right now. I could use phrases like 'zero lower bound' and 'effective negative interest rate, when adjusted for inflation' but instead I'll just say that when there economy is stuck because people still don't have any money to spend, and the government can borrow money for free the best thing the government can do is to spend money on infrastructure construction projects that will pay people who will turn around and spend that money instead of socking it away into wall street savings.
As to your second point, that the kind of "people" who live in places like Vermont will "never appreciate the value of what they are getting"... Well I can't speak for the rest of the state, but I'd love to be able to game with a ping of less than 1000. I'd love to be able to post on forums without having to wait for my latest download to finish. I'd love to be able to do anything without my housemates' netflix stream dying a painful death. I'd love to try out a dozen new distros and DEs. And I'd love to say FUCK YOU and your oh-so-entitled attitude.
Source: I'm a Vermonter.
All these posts about the evils of government spending and no one posting about moving to rural Vermont?
Regardless of whether it is a good use of money or not, it will be interesting to see the long term effects of putting Gigabit internet access into a rural area.
It will make the area in question far more attractive for tech workers operating from home. An influx of new residents could drive up house and land prices, and benefit the local economy. Of course this might not happen, but it will be interesting to find out if it does.
There's a lot of small independent tech firms in the Sierra Nevada's in California. (This is where Sierra software started out in fact). For anyone who is unaware, the entire mountain regions out here are pretty heavily rural, with most schools centralized into the larger towns (few thousand to maybe 10k people for the larger ones.)
Assuming Vermont has a similiar level of industry spread across it's rural areas, this broadband rollout could do a lot to spur relocation into the region for rural lifestyle techies who might otherwise be limited to expensive and subpar options in internet accessibility.
Combined with some of the more liberal laws to have been passed in Vermont in the past few years, it's looking more and more like one of the few bastion's of progressiveness left on the east coast.
Having recently added a sewer to my home and spending about $4000 in the process ($3000 for the hookup fees + $1000 for connecting to the city sewer), $8500 for running fiber to a house and hooking up to most likely a line on the utility pole seems awful steep.
With the sewer line, the city had to tear up the street, run a line down the middle, connect to another line about a mile away, and charged $3000 for that. The cost for running the sewer from the house to the street involved digging up my yard with a ditch-witch, connecting the line and then backfilling. The plumbers were done in a day, my guess is that the wages for the two totaled about $500 for the day, the other $500 covered profit, materials and tools.
By comparison, I have seen the cable company and also the phone company run new lines to my house and be done in about 30 minutes. Fiber can't be that much harder.
BTW, in both examples I am ignoring the cost of the central facility (a sewage treatment plant, a data switch) which are normally amortirized and paid for by usage fees.
Does fiber really cost that much to run? $140 million seems awful high for an initial capital investment.
It is always the collectivist argument like yours that seem to win the day saying we should build infrastructure with all of this EXCESS CAPACITY... you know we are 16 TRILLION in DEBT... right... there IS NOT EXCESS CAPACITY....
the government is BORROWING MONEY to pay for stupid shit like this... so stupid people like you can say shit like FUTURE PROOF... ( as any asshole who has ever had a cut fiber cable to their building knows is not true )
government is FORCE... don't defend it... they do everything bad... big business is holding its leash... start questioning and stop going around with a hook in your mouth
$8500 per fucking home?
How many of them will actually use bandwidth beyond a few tens of megabits?
Pure idiocy.
Funny thing is, we've got private EMS, for-profit hospitals and a volunteer fire department here. Seems to work well.
Why not toss more federal money at Detroit and off absolutely free gigabit Ethernet to every taxpayer in the city.
Think that might help turn Detroit around?
Ken
I'm currently running 3 Mbps DSL at home. It's been adequate for almost everything I do (though I've recently upgraded my TV, and might want to upgrade my internet connection to get a better selection of programming than the 750 Mbps cable company broadcast system gives me.) YouTube runs just fine on my DSL, since 3 Mbps is faster than real-time (if only YT had a play-faster choice like most PC DVD playing programs do!) I seldom watch live TV; the Tivo catches more programming than I actually get around to watching, though maybe Netflix download speeds will become annoying enough that I'll upgrade to 6 Mbps. The only thing I do that's really been limited by download speed is update Linux, and that's only a problem because I don't have enough RAM to leave all my virtual machines open in the background while doing other things.
Sure, there's lots of stuff you can do with extra bandwidth, but if all of it's "watching TV on a competing content provider", I don't see how that's a big economic advantage. 1.5 Mbps was a big step up from 384 kbps, which was a big step up from dialup. 3 Mbps was a fairly small step up from 1.5 Mbps, and mostly just improves my video watching speed (and means that I never bother running YouTube in low-res.) It hasn't been transformative.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Doubling internet speed only gets you an economic advantage if it lets you do new stuff, or do old stuff better.
Yes, Old People In South Korea have 100 Mbps internet at home. What are they doing with it besides online gaming that they couldn't do at 1 Mbps?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You need a telephone bundle otherwise its north of $70/month with dryloop. With a 12 month commitment to waive installation fee(not so bad). They will soon be adding TV services.
This blog assigned me the name "Anonymous Coward" but I didn't choose the name. The news is that a first 600 customers have been fibered and are taking GigE service, with the next 16,900 customers to be fibered over next 18 months using 70% federal funds, and 30% private funds. Every customer of this rural telephone company will get fiber to the home, with GigE available.
1) The $95M also covers LTE across the sate of Vermont including extreme rural areas as well as dedicated connections to many schools, libraries, clinics and other"community anchor institutions" across the state. It is far more than the 17,500 homes. It was very expensive to run fiber to rural homes, but the real figure for that part was about half the $8,500 quoted.
2) All 17,500 homes will get the full gigabit. The original article implied that only 600 of the 17,500 have subscribed. Actually, only 600 have it so far because that's as fast as VTel can install the links; all 17,500 will be connected to fiber in the coming months. The backbone is in but a crew has to go to every home, run fiber under the lawn as necessary, install the box and bring the connection inside.. VTel is actually the local incumbent phone company and is running the gig fiber to all. Those who take broadband for $34.95/month get the full gigabit connection.
As stimulus projects go, this is a good one. The network is superb: 100 gig backhaul multi-homes, extra fast home routers, 2 terabytes of cloud space for everyone, ...Most of the Federal subsidy is passed along to consumers as a lower price, not retained by the company.
Whether it is good public policy to spend ~ $4,000/home in the future for great rural Internet is a subject reasonable people will differ. But when there was stimulus money to be spent, this was effective use.
Dave Burstein Editor DSL Prime and Fast Net News.
according to computer world,
"Google is spending $84 million to build the infrastructure necessary to serve 149,000 Kanas City customers. That's $563.75 per customer, for you math majors. (If that sounds like a lot of money, consider that the infrastructure gives you 100 times faster Internet for the rest of your life for the price of an iPad. Still, customers don't have to pay for it up front -- Google is doing that.) And it gets cheaper per customer with each new person that signs up. "
Not sure how the cost in vermont can be eight to nine times as much (4-5k per subscriber per you). Your original statement is idiotic.