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'Dig Once' Bill Could Bring Fiber Internet To Much of the US (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If the U.S. adopts a "dig once" policy, construction workers would install conduits just about any time they build new roads and sidewalks or upgrade existing ones. These conduits are plastic pipes that can house fiber cables. The conduits might be empty when installed, but their presence makes it a lot cheaper and easier to install fiber later, after the road construction is finished. The idea is an old one. U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) has been proposing dig once legislation since 2009, and it has widespread support from broadband-focused consumer advocacy groups. It has never made it all the way through Congress, but it has bipartisan backing from lawmakers who often disagree on the most controversial broadband policy questions, such as net neutrality and municipal broadband. It even got a boost from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who has frequently clashed with Democrats and consumer advocacy groups over broadband -- her "Internet Freedom Act" would wipe out the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules, and she supports state laws that restrict growth of municipal broadband. Blackburn, chair of the House Communications and Technology Subcommittee, put Eshoo's dig once legislation on the agenda for a hearing she held yesterday on broadband deployment and infrastructure. Blackburn's opening statement (PDF) said that dig once is among the policies she's considering to "facilitate the deployment of communications infrastructure." But her statement did not specifically endorse Eshoo's dig once proposal, which was presented only as a discussion draft with no vote scheduled. The subcommittee also considered a discussion draft that would "creat[e] an inventory of federal assets that can be used to attach or install broadband infrastructure." Dig once legislation received specific support from Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.), who said that he is "glad to see Ms. Eshoo's 'Dig Once' bill has made a return this Congress. I think that this is smart policy and will help spur broadband deployment across the country."
dig it?
..In new construction or total replacement of old roads
Most existing areas, especially rural, still can't get good internet
LTE is fast enough for me.
Misleading headline. Saying "Dig Once Bill Could Bring Fiber..." implies that there is currently a bill undergoing consideration. The article says that the same guy has been proposing it over and over for 8 years.
You could also say "If US Politicians stopped being twats, it could bring internet to people." Or "If people stopped killing people, the world would be better." Or ...you get the picture.
...in a 1000 years or so, perhaps yeah
You should start your own country!
I shall name my cuntry Seamenland.
Or, you know, you could just eliminate the laws that prohibit/restrict Municipal and/or County fiber projects. Two counties I know have PUDs that have deployed fiber to pretty much every address also serviced by their power connection. Residents then have the option to choose Internet service from several different providers (Zayo and Level 3 will also do transit over it), and TV service from several providers, and it's all very reasonably priced and reliable.
Of course, the big boys (Verizon et al) Hate it, because it dramatically lowers the bar to their competition.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
While I'm not terribly familiar with the responsibilities of levels of US government, this seems like something appropriate to being dealt with at the local body or possibly state level. Why is the federal government involved?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Anyone around here here have any practical experience with long runs of conduit in rural areas? I'm all in favor of it if it works. But how do you keep the conduit from filling up with water ... at least in places where it rains now and then? And what happens when that water freezes and expands? And is there a problem with critters homesteading in the pipe? And sediment? And what happens where it crosses active slip-strike fault lines? In other words -- What could possibly go wrong?
Also, shouldn't this be a state and local thing, not a federal government thing? I have no problem with the feds doing the R&D and laying out best practices. But if the Feds pay for this, they'll probably have the entire country including every swamp in Florida and dry lake in the Mojave conduited with mil-spec pipes and full time inspectors and mandatory 20 year replacement cycles. While it's probably a better investment than 22 goddamn aircraft carriers, Or the planned massive rollout of overpriced and underperforming F-35 aircraft, I'm not sure it should be that high on our list of national priorities.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
First i fail to understand why any honest politician would not want broadband everywhere for all people to use. Next make that pipe large enough so that numerous competing companies can offer broadband services thus causing competition and that should drive prices downward. As far as free, municipal access that would be wonderful and bring many poor neighborhoods into the modern world. The basic idea is to protect the public from wallet vampires who seek endless paths to extract money from the public.
I shall name my cuntry Seamenland.
So joining the navy will be compulsory then?
You can use a giant Kleenex tissue for your flag!
Agreed. PRIVATE industry knows that there's only one acceptable way to squander resources - executive bonuses.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Paul Reubens can be on your currency!
So many problems could be avoided by this, but it would add its own set of problems.
Empty conduits don't last as long as you would think, moisture, water, bugs and critters will break up any seal you use, if they bother sealing the end of pipes not used. Been in many man holes, most empty conduits are open and flooded.
if a contractor hits and breaks an empty conduit, don't expect them to fix it, and if fixed, doesn't guarantee that you would be able to fish a new line through it easily any more.
Who will locate these empty lines to show contractors not to hit them? (dig safe is paid for by the utility company s who wouldn't own these pipes.) also you would need tracer line in them or they simply can't be located. and honestly most people "forget" to place tracer line with fiber lines never mind empty conduits.
Who would be responsible? New roads are very rare. What constitutes upgrade? will cities stop fixing sidewalks due to 10x the cost putting in conduit
Dig down 2-3 feet avoid any other utilities that may be in the sidewalk ( if they screw up and hit a marked utilities thats an extra 10,000 up to millions -- seriously)
Have to deal with all the extra dirt ( extra dump trucks +or - what it costs to get rid of dirt
conduit piping
labor to pup pipes together
dirt to cover pipes ( reuse is not advisable especially if you already have trucks go to and from some aggregate site
Acess point instalation ( manhole/Handhole)
stamp and pour sidewalk surface
VS
scrape dirt
stamp down surface
pour surface
I fully support this idea and I can tell you that their are a handful of multi-billion dollar companies that would rather see the nation go back to using slow-ass DSL before it sees a competitive landscape. They honestly don't care about providing a service, the only thing they care about is that they be the ones to profit from it no matter what the cost to the consumer. As such, you can be assured, the people they bought will kill this bill quite quickly or put in enough legal landmines that only they can makes use of such pipes.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I'm an executive, you insensitive clod.
Why should city-dwellers subsidize your chosen lifestyle. You don't want concrete and police sirens? Well, you don't get fast Internet, either.
Suspect this is just another attempt to pass on a cost to taxpayers that private industry no longer feels like paying while reaping most of the benefits themselves.
but who owns the ducts and what if the comms companies don't want to pay the price to use them and would rather lay their own. Are they forced to pay the monopoly rates?
Norway
Mean: 47 Mbit
Median: 27.7 Mbit
People <4 Mbit: 3.9%
People <1 Mbit: 0.5%
People who can't get fiber: 54%
People who can't get 100/10 Mbit: 22%
People who can't get 4 Mbit on a fixed connection: 5%
People who can't get 10 Mbit LTE outdoor w/antenna: 0.06%
I thought maybe the fiber rollout would slow down, but the last stats indicate a speed up going from 41% to 46% in last year. Next year it seems likely a majority of the population can get fiber.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I like the concept but regulations likes these are historically the domain of the State. Does the Federal government even have the authority to regulate how roads are constructed?
It'd be no different from Switzerland, Israel, or any other country that makes every man part of the military reserve.
Somehow, our primitive forebears wired up the whole vast continent for the telephone and we now know what effect that had on the US economy. If we want to stay on top, we need to do the same for gigabit data. Doesn't really matter what technology is used, as long as it's robust and universal.
There are large areas of the country served by overhead power and telephone lines. Bringing fiber to these areas would be cheap compared to those with underground utilities. The poles are there. It's just a matter of hanging the fiber from them and paying a (regulated) per pole rental fee. And yet we don't see fiber going up in these areas any faster than in neighborhoods served by underground utilities.
Overhead fiber can be so cheap that a few power companies have gone ahead and put it up whenever they have a maintenance and/or upgrade project in the neighborhood. But often, due to non-compete agreements with telcos/cable companies, or restrictions on municipal broadband systems, this fiber is relegated to the power companies internal use for SCADA and metering systems.
When the government can get to the root of the economics that broadband providers use not to compete with each other, perhaps the installation of fiber will start to take off in this country. But that will also see some execs off to prison for antitrust violations, so don't hold your breath.
Have gnu, will travel.
FYI... they already do this without a law telling them to and have been doing it for years. lt's called Dark Fiber, and I've had a first-hand tech power company tech tell me that.
Now granted, it may not be all/most companies. But the power companies are eager to make money off of selling wires they can lay for almost free, while they're already laying power lines. So it stands to reason that we shouldn't need much of a legislative push to get them to do what's already clearly in their best financial interest.
Laying fiber to the 99% of the USA that's ALREADY paved, however, that's going to be an interesting, less short-term profitable venture.
Gesundheit.
I'll be here all week, folks.
Your form of government will be a DICKtatorship!
Yea, so for 300 miles of desert freeway we will have to foot a bill for something that will never be used?
Or in every city, every street will have to have the 'pipes' even when it is redundant and worthless. This will cost the U.S. probably far more money than it is worth.
As with anything the Government implements it will cost far more than any human can imagine.
threatening to veto the bill.
since the government leverages digging into road resurfacing. They want to create a lot of digging in order to get the free road repairs. That's great in theory, but also the reason so many places here don't have fast Internet access since it's just so ridiculously expensive to do upgrades.
Politicians telling telcos/cable companies how to build-out their infrastructure.
Are we really so sure that it is the actual digging that holding back wide-spread high-speed internet rollouts? Perhaps the issues have more to do with regulations and policies previously adopted by politicians to help telcos/cable companies roll-out their infrastructure (local monopolies, etc)?
And after the road is complete, it will be DUG it. Dig-Dug
Why wouldn't she and her pimps love it? Yet again, monopolistic corporations will be given valuable infrastructure to hoard for their own (and rent seek), all ENTIRELY on the taxpayers' dime.
Israel requires women to serve also, too lazy to Google Switzerland military obligation...
penis potatoes positively pervasive passim population
North Sea oil money can buy a lot of nice things.
US politicians don't care that roads made with government money are being damaged by private businesses, for profit. It says a lot about the priorities of Congress.
Why aren't municipalities doing this already, at least at intersections? One day, they will want to install traffic lights or pedestrian crossings and a little bit of work during construction, saves time.
They might look the same. (They're both round and can be carbon steel, stainless steel, galvanized, or plastic.)
However pipe is designed to be pressure retaining (fluids) and conduit is designed to hold electrical cable.
Kind of like the difference between... null/void and zero. (One state is indeterminate while the other is a known quantity. Or an if statement vs. a while statement.)
"It offers $20 billion a year in hard Federal dollars every year for the next four years, to build an economy for the 21st century, to invest in new roads and bridges, and streets and rail systems, to develop high-speed rail and a national fiber optic network, to develop new environmental technologies to clean our waters and our air, and to recycle more of our solid wastes. In short, to do those things which we are not doing today."
Bill Clinton June 22, 1992 Campaign Speech
I remember hearing about possibly laying fiber as part of an interstate highway bill. But the plan was way too ambitious since it morphed into maintaining the equipment and doing the last mile connections, etc.. It would have put the Fed as a telecom competitor (and who would want the govt running telecom?).
Pres. Clinton created the National Information Infrastructure Initiative by Executive Order 12864. It was spurred on by then Sen. Gore in his High Performance Computing Act of 1991.
Kent Law Review
The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s
RRK
The government needs to take ownership of this immediately and make broadband access a utility. We know we cannot trust the existing providers to provide fiber at a quick pace and competitive price. It's time to cut them out and immediately start digging to install fiber. Not just the conduits or the right-of-way. Install it now.
Imagine the jobs.
Verizon Fios(fiber optic) was strung on telephone poles in my area.
So this adds to the cost of infrastructure immensely and doesn't imply a useful map or topology. It is darts at a wall. And it may delay projects that are needed. Additionally when a road needs to be moved, the possibly empty fiber needs to me moved as well. And taking on a life of its on, the additional steps needed when some local jurisdiction decides to slam dark fiber in all these conduits then say a large construction project buys up a few dozen square blocks of property, now they have to relocate all the fiber and conduits of the ill planned installations. Just widening roads which is a very normal event gets horribly complicated. And what size conduit gets installed? I watched in my local area a fairly main road under construction for over a year as they installed 12 conduits over a very long piece of the road. So If I have a road with one empty conduit; who decides what can go in the conduit. Sure the municipality could install something like the 768 fiber cable, if that is legal in their jurisdiction, which isn't guaranteed, and still leaves maintenance issues. Also multiple services in the same conduit is a single point of failure. One cut dozens of fibers bite it. And where do cable vaults get placed? And how is power delivered to them. It isn't enough to have a conduit, you need all the support that is needed to fill it, and a well thought out local plan for each mile of conduit so you can responsibly place cable vaults that have power delivery space for multiple meters breaking off the power and room for multiple pieces of hardware for fiber repeaters. And even nitrogen pressurization equipment. Maybe instead of jumping the gun and creating more problems that it solves at a huge national cost ... (and perhaps becoming yet another unfunded federal mandate the courts will strike down) they might better engage in planning and standardization, then establish a pilot program in some small city, have the federal government pay for the repaving of the town and installation, track costs and problems. Sometimes speed is essential, but this seems to be setting the country up for huge expenses and potentially poor results plagued by problems. And often high power lines can't be installed, or shouldn't be installed, in the same conduit. Maybe install empty concrete 2 meter diameter concrete pipes with a cable vault every kilometer. or a six foot diameter pipe with vaults every 5/8 of a mile. Leave slack for geography, define bridge standards, consider opening bridges and tunnels, define responsibility roles and provide a support and emergency plan. Consider all that can go wrong in a system so large it will go wrong, often. plan for it. Unfunded, ill conceived. I don't like it. No sir I don't like it.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Putting in conduit is nice, but once you get outside the center of a major city there is no ground work being performed other than road maintenance.
Since rural maintenance consists of adding pavement and handling drainage, there will never be any conduit installed outside big cities, and the people that don't have any useful internet providers will still have the same few choices.
If someone with a high school education would just sit down and Think about these things, we would not have to waste time on them.
Its known that a copper wire was run to every household in the u.s. about 50 years ago. We have been stuck for almost 10 years with 60% of the u.s. geography having no access to high speed internet.
Until 3rd world food-producing countries become hostile to the US, such as if they join the 2nd world by becoming more closely allied with Russia and China than with North America and Western Europe. Domestic production must be prepared to cover for sudden interruptions in the flow of imports.
All that conduit will be plastic and the plastic comes from Big Oil. So of course Trump and the Republicans will want it passed to help out their friends. Just think that with every meter, sorry foot, of new road laid down then a food of conduit will have to be put down too.
I presume this will be part of Our President's promised initiative to renew our infrastructure?