Couple shocked to learn ISP wants an exorbitant amount of money to connect their home to the internet

boing
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Out here, there are specifically-engineered soil mixes required by law, usually trucked in, then spread atop septic fields/areas with low to no percolation (out here, limestone rock).

These manmade sewage drainfields / irrigation fields are planted with grasses and other mowable plants (again, specified by regulation) that are meant to be able to absorb sewage water that is aerated / sprayed onto the surface using sprinkler heads above grade. These engineered septic fields are supposed to be flat; be situated away from wells, caves, big cracks in the ground/rock, creeks, rivers; be situated well-apart from where people might live; and operate perfectly in all kinds of extreme Texas weather (drought, flood, hard freezes, etc.), all day every day.

The solids collect in septic tanks (typically below grade, good luck carving out that hole for it!). Full septic tanks are emptied by big tanker trucks (sludge transporters) that suck out the solids, driving the load “away” to be competently processed, one would hope, by some big ol’ sewage treatment plant in a civilized part of the county that has infrastructure and engineers and chemicals and stuff.

There are state and county, and in some cases inside a city limit, city regulations that factor into design and implementation and operation. The Texas Council on Environmental Quality relies on individual counties and cities to make sure state regs are obeyed. Ish.

In the case of massive amounts of sewage disposal, it is common for treated effluent (filtered sewage water that has been minimally processed and then dosed with chlorine to sanitize) to be applied to golf courses, which are thus septic irrigation fields. A lot of 'burbs have golf courses here for the purpose.

Poop water’s gotta end up someplace and to do that cheaply, the closer that place is, the “better.” /s

(I have plenty to say on the matter but that’s even longer and more off-topic than I already am.)

Rock saw excavators are a common sight here, and are necessary to lay in utilities, sometimes, if those utilties can’t be strung up on poles. They make terrific noise and dust, and consume enormous amounts of fuel.

The steel teeth on those blades have to have carbide tips to work out here. The teeth are built to snap off cleanly when they break, so the whole cutting wheel or chain is not ruined.

Plumbing in our part of Texas depends on use of these machines for installation, then soils, gravity, topography and electric power if some of these are not in one’s favor. Yes, the pvc pipes delivering potable water are laid in the ground, bedded in sand ideally, though the deeper the pipes are laid, the more expensive to install, so often they are laid in at minimum depth. Very very minimum. As required by law. Usually.

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Oh….I was tempted :slight_smile:

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Was curious to see how the federal infrastructure bill would help with this:
https://www.internetforall.gov/program/broadband-equity-access-and-deployment-bead-program

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My partner and I have done it.
Including the ditch digging.
And wiring inside houses and outside with our own demarcs.
We supplied our neighbors (customers) with hubs, routers and cabling.

We were our neighborhood’s ISP back when dialup, then ISDN, were the only ways to connect. Distance from where the connection drop is, lightning strikes, signal repeaters, fire ants, wasp nests, heat, power surges provided by our electric co-op, and careless digging were the least of our problems compared with managing our customers’ issues.

We happily fired ourselves at the first chance of real broadband (Time-Warner), which came out here 10 years ago.

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It sorta is, though. They’ve received government funding to build out internet infrastructure and used it for executive bonuses, instead. Much like Charter did in New York.

They have also lobbied Washington state regulators to block munincipal broadband to retain their virtual monopoly in some areas.

So, yeah, this is another fuck Comcast story.

Comcast has been blocking munincipal broadband funding from the infrastructure bill by claiming the municipalities can’t do the development safely.

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I hate Comcast with the burning intensity of a thousands suns - just like everybody else - but they can’t be expected to provision high speed service to every home in the country without a way to recoup the cost; especially when the previous property owners neglected to request service (or possibly outright refused) back when the infrastructure was first placed 30-40 years ago.

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Um, they were paid to do so and they paid themselves, instead.

Someone else said, “Hey, we will do it!” And Comcast blocked them from doing so.

It’s not an ambiguous position.

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Sure there is. It’s called Title II.

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Sorry but that’s incorrect. Cable companies are not required to wire 100% of homes for internet access. It varies depending on their charters with each city. Sucks but that’s the way it is.

This is not even the first Ars Trchnica article on the subject.

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Yeah but it’s going under a 3 lane road. You gonna rent a horizontal boring machine, or you gonna dig up the road and repave it?

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Always read the fine print.

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Not surprising to me.

Companies do NOT spend money for no gain. I am in the middle of San Francisco, one of the densest populated areas in San Francisco, in fact, and only a block or two from the heavily fiber’ed Financial District. My ONLY choice for Broadband is DSL, and AT&T won’t even offer a double-channel. I had to go to Sonic to get a double-DSL. I checked with Comcast, they said they’ll wire my area in 3 months. (that was last year), and there’s no plan for fibre on my block by anyone that I know. What’s even more surprising is I can’t even get Home 5G. Verizon can only offer me Home LTE/4G. Same with T-Mob.

So not surprised Comcast would quote them that much for the job. It probably really cost that much to install the wires AND the infrastructure to support it.

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You’ve made me realize how fortunate I am that my well and septic tank & field were dug in normal soil, no rock saw needed!

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Duct tape the cable to the road surface.

But seriously. I’d find out where the neighbors’ cables run and see if I could run a cable back to where they hook up. With their permission, of course.

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I never said they are. What I did say, that is quite relevant to the topic at hand, is that they were paid to expand internet infrastructure and pocketed a chunk of the money instead of using it for infrastructure. While that may or may not apply to this individual house, it’s certainly relevant that they didn’t fulfill their commitment to use that money for infrastructure development in Washington, in the Seattle area.

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If there’s a culvert that goes under the street, that can be makeshift conduit to string a cable along the ground “temporarily” (esp. if the cable is made for direct burial use).

A call to the entity that tracks buried lines and services in your home state would be prudent:

https://call811.com/before-you-dig

http://www.callbeforeyoudig.org/

… because there’s a lot of stuff underground that is impossible to know about. Better safe than sorry. Especially if your power lines are buried in a joint trench.

Out in less rigorously monitored areas like really long ranch driveways, I have seen a deep groove or slit cut into the road surface and cable just shoved down in there, with some cold lay macadam shoved on top of the slit to close it.

YMMV and of course all information I list here is for educational purposes only and not to be construed as advice.

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The neighborhood I last lived in had DSL available for every house except six of them. One of those was mine. I worked admin and service desk roles the entire time in that house. We had to get a line of site dish pointed to a tower to get internet. This was pre-DISH era. You bet I SSH’d into work and did everything I could through a shell.

Finally, our neighbor was able to use their personal relationship with a VP at AT&T to get lines put in to those final six houses at no cost. We went from 15Mbps to “up to” 45Mbps speeds. We lived large for those final two years. We moved to a new subdivision and had a house built. I watched them run the fiber into the house as it was built and have consistently hit 1000Mbps up and down for the past five years with the vendor’s equipment. What a world of difference. IDK if I should count the cost of the new home in this, but it was worth it.
Randy Savage Yes GIF by WWE

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wow those are wild. it almost seems like it’d be easier to ship in dirt, and mandate 6 ft for everyone’s house ( it doesn’t rain there right? definitely won’t wash away :sweat_smile: )

can see how cables in the air would be a wee bit easier (!)

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Especially with commocast. They will take that and more and it will cost them maybe 2 or 3 grand but will chatrge $30k or more. And what they will do is make one person pay for for them to bring to close to them them all others can hook up to it without having to pay the extortionate fees to being the cable. I have fixed wireles here and and it works great.

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I lived on the outskirts of London, zone 5, and in a central location, and my options for internet were limited, ADSL or Coax, neither particularly reliable, and 60/15 down/up advertised, but rarely delivered. For many reasons we moved to the seaside a few years ago, and got slightly worse internet, life is about tradeoffs. However, last year, I saw an ad, and found they werre installing FTTP, and got 550/90 for what I was paying for ADSL.

The reason they’re installing fiber even in little seaside towns?

They’re shutting off PSTN and ISDN in a year or two in Europe, in fact, they won’t even install any new phone lines now. Fiber brings some interesting problems, like your VOIP phone not working when the power goes, but in general it’s a big positive.

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