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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."
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
There needs to be more municipal fiber in usa. The "free market" hasn't worked.
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.
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.
so payback in a little more than 25 years, estimating inflation. what a great investment, *cough*
Public money is used for all sorts of infrastructure projects. You build roads because they are needed, not because you want to make the money back. Network infrastructure is getting just as important as any other infrastructure. This is unfortunately as recognized as it should be. In a perfect world the government would build an open fiber optic network with the goal of covering 100 % of the population. Building this as part of private infrastructure is of course not optimal, but it's good that at least someone recognizes the need.
Some many year many country research showed a 0.7% increase in GDP for every doubling in Internet speed. The cost of nation wide 1Gb fiber would be paid off in 1-2 years if we got even one 0.7% increase.
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.
All of us.
Cable internet speeds have brought massive amounts of new options for telecommuting, small businesses, etc.
I know one company using a VOIP service across NY state, and when the owner goes to Florida in the winter she is still connected completely. Such things are only possible because of faster Internet speeds, Gigabyte well i can't see the need beyond that but that's only because it hasn't been deployed fully yet.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
You are right that both sides in Congress are basically engaging in melodrama for the sake of the cameras.
I think Trent Lott remarked a few years ago that media everywhere was one of the best and worst things to happen to modern democracy. Sums it up pretty nicely.
And 64kb of ram is all any computer will ever need, too.
I'm not saying we necessarily need more now, or that we can afford it now, but let's not put arbitrary limits on future capacity based on today's experiences or make decisions that impede progreess. It doesn't hold up.
And 64kb of ram is all any computer will ever need, too.
I'm not saying we necessarily need more now, or that we can afford it now, but let's not put arbitrary limits on future capacity based on today's experiences or make decisions that impede progreess. It doesn't hold up.
The best way to figure that hugely complex problem out is with market forces, not arbitrary "well, we're gonna burn $150million and hope that the demand appears".
Past trends do not indicate that people will need or want gigabit internet for many, many, many years now.
Try that sort of thinking out with other infrastructure; why not invest in 4 lane roads to each house, and 500 amps of current to each house, and double-capacity storm drainage. I mean, the need isnt there NOW, but in the future, who knows, right?
then move!
I used to be
The only problem with that analogy is that people and goods travel for free on those roads or pay a fee/toll to the government based on usage. This fiber is not a public thoroughfare operated by a federal or state government.
Living in VT but not in that area, I am served by a relatively small (and also subsidized) independent telco. I've just recently been upgraded to about 6.5/1 Mbps DSL. I've heard they weill be expanding a fiber roll out, though not necessarily to the curb but close enough to allow higher speeds. However, I am still required to buy a landline (and pay all the fees and tithes associated with that) to get DSL pushing my monthly bill to about $65/month. The DSL portion is $40 + some fees. Not the cheapest, though at least from a download perspective it is fast enough for most things. Network reliability has been an issue but is improving as they replace aging equipment. Given its the boonies, the DSL price isn't crushingly bad, though $30-35 would be more reasonable. Its the landline that kills the deal.
600 people out of 17,500 recognize the 'need' - that's not many...
$8,500 per house is NUTS, plain and simple - and no, you won't make it up on volume.
Ken
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
Try that sort of thinking out with other infrastructure; why not invest in 4 lane roads to each house, and 500 amps of current to each house, and double-capacity storm drainage. I mean, the need isnt there NOW, but in the future, who knows, right?
So what you are saying is that you would be fine if they were dragging 10mbit coax to those rural houses? You do realize that the bulk of the cost is deploying the last mile, and there is little difference in cost whether they pull coax or fiber? Wouldn't want to use current technology to support the hicks out in the country. Just update the copper on the phone poles and give them DSL. (of course, you might end up needing to pull some fiber anyway for the DSLAMs they'll need to install to overcome circuit length limits) Question, if the cost was essentially the same to build your mythical 4 lane road to each house as the current 2 lane roads, would you still advocate building 2 lane roads simply based on cost?
Another day, another update to a Google android app.
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
No, the market does not show that. The market shows that most people are unwilling to pay more than the base price for Internet service, period, regardless of what the base service provides. Using those same standards, fifteen years ago, you would probably have said that 56 kilobit is more than most people will ever use, simply because nobody was willing to pay through the nose for ISDN.
The fact of the matter is that only a tiny fraction of people have service over a couple of megabits per second. Therefore, there is no market for content encoded at a higher rate or services that would require a higher rate. Therefore, there are no services that require a higher rate. History has consistently shown that as average service speeds increase, the need for bandwidth increases to match. Any argument that any given amount of bandwidth is more than most people will ever use is absurd, because it assumes a stagnant industry that does not exist and never has.
Part of living in the real world is anticipating future needs and prioritizing them when it is potentially beneficial. For example, those cities and towns that get high-speed fiber everywhere are going to draw in the sorts of high-tech people who drive innovation. Businesses that need those sorts of people are going to locate there because of that advantage. This will result in higher property values, more tax revenue, better schools, and a better standard of living even for people who don't care about those networks.
I can easily think of lots of general-purpose uses for gigabit connections. They mostly involve removing the need for local storage of everything. Right now, it isn't practical to just shove your movies, applications, etc. up into the cloud, because the performance is 1–2 orders of magnitude slower than your local hard drive (in the best case scenario). With gigabit, that bottleneck goes away. It would also enable 3D Blu-Ray quality streaming video over gigabit fiber (64 Mbps peak data rate). Heck, 3D Blu-Ray quality videoconferencing would become feasible at that point.
That said, probably the biggest reason for moving to gigabit fiber has nothing to do with gigabit and everything to do with replacing the aging copper infrastructure that Internet service currently depends on. DSL is crap. It provides service only near the CO or specially equipped RTs, it runs over aging pairs, many of which are in sad shape and get crosstalk every time it rains, etc. And cable modems have signal strength problems from aging lines, seriously limited bandwidth that's shared among everyone on your local loop and seriously limits what can be done in terms of things like VOD, etc.
Fiber has none of those problems. It is a next-generation infrastructure that will be robust for decades, replacing one that breaks down constantly. The long-term cost of continuing to maintain a legacy copper network will eventually be more expensive than the cost of building out a modern fiber network. The only real question is where the tipping point is.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I live on the end of a fairly long piece of copper, for an urban area at least. The best ADSL speed I can get is around 4.5 Mbit. To get more than that speed what are my options? And if you're going to replace my copper with something, why not replace it with the best, most future proof technology?
$8,500 is a good investment for a technology that should last for the foreseeable future. Just don't ask each person to pay that full price right now.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Bad analogies.
The best way to figure that hugely complex problem out is with market forces, not arbitrary "well, we're gonna burn $150million and hope that the demand appears".
That's exactly what we did with the internet, in case you don't recall: we spent a bunch of government money building it, and voila, demand appeared. Obviously, we started small: we didn't build the internet out to every home in America, we started by just building a nationwide data network that connected universities and government institutions, plus some companies. Al Gore played a role here as many may recall. It proved useful and popular, and expanded from there.
Past trends do not indicate that people will need or want gigabit internet for many, many, many years now.
Try that sort of thinking out with other infrastructure; why not invest in 4 lane roads to each house, and 500 amps of current to each house, and double-capacity storm drainage. I mean, the need isnt there NOW, but in the future, who knows, right?
Wrong. 4-lane roads cost a fortune and use up a lot of space. 500-amp service to buildings requires big, expensive wires. Storm drainage costs a lot of money to build. Gigabit fiber doesn't cost anything at all.
You're probably about to call foul on the last point, but the truth is, people DO want something better than what's commonly available now. DSL sucks: 1Mbit isn't enough for a single Netflix stream, and faster speeds are usually expensive and not available in many places due to technical limitations of DSL. Cable is a lot better, but it has two serious problems: 1) it's shared among all your neighbors on a local loop, so you don't get full capacity all the time, and 2) it's owned by the cable monopoly, which in most places is expensive and has terrible service (Comcast anyone?). So many people in the US only get these two choices: slow-ass DSL, or expensive and crappy cable. Clearly, we need to upgrade to something better. What then? Well, it's pretty simple: fiber. You say we don't need gigabit speeds, but that's irrelevant; it's not like there's a much-cheaper fiber out there with 1/10 the speed. Either you get gigabit speeds or you stick with DSL/cable like we have today. If you're going to do the work to lay some new wire, you're naturally going to choose fiber, which gives you gigabit speeds. It's a lot like computer RAM or flash memory sizes: if you think you only need 256MB of RAM for whatever you're doing, too bad, because they don't sell computers with so little RAM any more. It's so cheap there's no point in selling less, so either you get 1GB+ or you get nothing at all. Or flash cards (like for cameras): maybe you think you only want 128MB, but they don't sell those any more, they only come in 1GB+ sizes.
nonsense, governments turn into police states or collapse or change economic models, in shorter timescales. Certainly the U.S. government can't plan or execute on such a timescale.
You have a private company answering your 911 call when your relative has a heart attack? I seriously doubt that.
Heh... It'll set you back 4-5k per subscriber to roll out 40/20 or similar service to them. Seriously.
Actual connectivity of any kind is not cheap. The telcos shell out that money for urban and suburban areas because they're expecting to see a return on that investment per subscriber in 4-6 years' time or less. They can't expect that in rural areas, so they don't roll this stuff out. The ONLY reason Verizon Wireless is contemplating LTE in the rural areas where they're expecting to blanket the state in LTE coverage is that it's going to be there for the moblie customers anyway.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Market forces. Tell me which market forces are in favor of sinking $8500 to provide a service that grosses $35/month. It'll take over 20 years to pay for $8500 at $35/month. Of course, that's assuming 100% of the $35/month goes against principal. In reality, only a small fraction of that gross will be net, and the $8500 will have an interest rate slash opportunity cost. So the $8500 probably amortizes sometime closer to never.
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.
None, just like there's no market forces in favor of spending the money required to build roads in rural areas. That's why we need government, to provide infrastructure that companies only interested in short-term profits would never be interested in. Internet access isn't profitable by itself when you look at the costs that way, however its profitability to society and the greater economy is immeasurable.
You are an idiot.