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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."
Sounds like a giant waste of money to me. What else could you supply for $8500/home?
...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.
The cost of the service will depend mostly on demand. Homeowners aren't likely to pay $150,000 for the service.
But a business would.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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?
Not really, by subsidizing these things and having them done by Federal contract the incentive to get the most efficient work done is greatly reduced. If these people were paying out of their pockets, rather than mine, I'm curious if they'd still be expecting a level of service that's substantially higher than what's available in the city for half the price of what is presently available in cities.
To put it another way, here in Seattle I'm spending about $60 a month on a 5mbps internet connection. Which is nearly double the cost for 1/200th of the speed. The bridges are crumbling and the streets are in poor repair, but thank god that the rural folks get to siphon off my taxpayer dollars so that we don't waste any of it on fixing those bridges before they crumble in an earthquake. Or God forbid we spend it on the infrastructure that they use when they have goods shipped into or out of the US.
The issue isn't investing in infrastructure, the issue is how that investment is being done. Rather than spending that same money in more densely populated areas, it's being used to provide high speeds to a much smaller number of people.
What's more astonishing is that bridges collapse from lack of maintenance funds and we're investing in giving a small number of rural voters faster speeds than what's generally available anywhere else.
In short, it's not the infrastructure investment that's a waste, it's the priorities that lead to waste. If there were at least plans for getting the urban areas wired up, I don't think people would view this as wasteful. But ultimately rural residents chose to live there, and one of the downsides to living in the middle of nowhere is that things like this are harder to provide economically.
By your logic government should not pay for public roads. It should all be privately owned toll roads. And get rid of the public fire department, you can pay for that if you need it (or they can buy your house when it catches fire- it worked in ancient Rome). The purpose of government is to act as the collective will of the people, and having public roads/sewer/water/police/internet is the best way to do it.
Why? Because in Vermont we know how to demo these things. I've had broadband since 1999 because a small local company with 300 customers showed how entrepreneurship works and installed it. With its tough weather and geography, Vermont has been a test bed for a lot of advanced projects. We'll discover how it's done most effectively, then you can apply it to the urban infrastructure.
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.
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.
By your logic government should not pay for public roads
It should all be privately owned toll roads.
As opposed to the no-competition toll roads that my taxpayer dollars just paid for around I-495? After 5 years of construction and untold millions of tax dollars, I now have the privilege of paying $5 to a state-granted monopoly to use the new road that I paid for. Thats TOTALLY better than what a private solution might have been, right?
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?
There is money for this which is good since our roads are crumbling and we won't be able to drive to work.
Maybe in your state. In my state, the road I drive on every day got a new layer of asphalt last summer. The extension and expansion project for the highway I drive on every day was finished late last year, with brand new concrete. The bridge I use to cross a river every day is less than 5 years old. The bridge the other 1/3rd of the metro area uses to cross the same river every day is being replaced as I write this. Replaced, not repaired. One entire span was torn down last year and the brand new replacement is making rapid progress this year, despite the weather. When it's done, they'll tear down and replace the other span.
In the past 3 1/2 years, 802 bridges in this state were repaired or replaced. The schedule called for 5 years.
Crumbling bridges and highways are problems in mismanaged states. In states with competent road planners and honest contractors, the jobs get planned, started, and finished, on budget, under the projected schedule, and to high quality. The new bridges even have substantial earthquake resistance built in, because there's a fault near enough to be a problem. It hasn't tripped in over 100 years, but every time it does, it's massive.
Where am I? In the heartland of America, in a state with one Republican Senator and one Democratic Senator and a Democratic governor. Red or blue, the representatives in this state know what government is FOR. The ancient Romans and ancient Chinese knew this: if there is one and only one thing government is for, it's road construction. Why other people don't get what's been known for literally thousands of years, I'm sure I don't know. Missouri knows though.
And Missouri too is using federal grant money and state matching to build rural fiber. I bet ours gets done and works.
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.