ARPA is funding cheap community-owned gigabit fiber to neglected neighborhoods

125 comments

·February 24, 2025

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jpm_sd

This is American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) not Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, DARPA, ARPA-[E|H|I], etc.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPA#Acronym

DidYaWipe

They seriously hijacked a well-known longstanding government acronym?

Technically-ignorant legislators strike again.

throwup238

At this point I doubt any of our legislators are actually writing*, or even reading the title of, any of these bills. They spend the vast majority of their time fundraising, either for themselves or their party.

* I assume the Office of Legislative Counsel actually does that, when it’s not brought to the legislator by a lobbyist

DidYaWipe

Yep. Can you imagine showing up at your job totally ignorant of what you're implementing... and that's A-OK?

Just realized that I likened Congress to Severance.

HumblyTossed

> Technically-ignorant legislators strike again.

While fair point, look at how many non-technically-ignorant developers hijack common names for projects. It's a disease anyone can catch.

DidYaWipe

You are, of course, right. I mean... Amazon named their digital assistant after the best-known cinema camera in the industry.

And VW named one of its cars after the last 30+ years of Canon cameras.

Huh, my entire litany of two other examples involves cameras...

dboreham

Perhaps it's a cloaking device designed to make it Musk-resistant? I'm guessing he's familiar with the real ARPA.

neilv

This is a bad name collision, given the domain (Internet).

I saw the headline, and immediately thought "Huh, what's their angle? Surveillance?"

ThinkBeat

Thanks

ape4

Not the ARPAnet

Arubis

If they want to keep going down this route, they'll keep it quiet. Now is a rough time to be doing work with the US Feds that benefits the proletariat..._especially_ if it could compete with something Elon is involved in.

asow92

I live near where the article talks about and the ISP it mentions, Empire Access, is fantastic! I have $60/mo 1Gbps fiber with 1 to 3 ms latency.

DidYaWipe

We the taxpayers gave the telcos hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars to bring this to everyone, and they... just blew it off and kept the money: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...

hn_acker

Not sure what you meant by replying with the (otherwise relevant) article about violating subsidy conditions (usually done by serial abusers like AT&T) to a comment about Empire Access. I don't know what Empire Access usually does, but in the case mentioned in TFA, Empire Access will operate on municipal open-access fiber infrastructure, which the Oswego County (not Empire Access) will use subsidies to build.

DidYaWipe

I'm pointing out that by now we should all be enjoying fiber to the home; it should not be remarkable.

AngryData

They did lay some fiber, the problem is it was the fiber to supply their cellphone networks and not to directly serve customers, which allows them to gouge customers through mobile data without running afoul of any of the restrictions put on the fiber network the government paid them for.

troyvit

Oh but don't worry about it! Remember how they all said 5G would replace wired internet completely?

'augmented reality, “the internet of things,” and seamless streaming to the mainstream':

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/5g-explained

'By packing or “densifying” the network, signals will be carried faster and more reliably, with bandwidth measured not in megabits but rather in gigabits per second.':

https://hbr.org/2019/03/5gs-potential-and-why-businesses-sho...

'Consumers expect 5G to offer a step change in network performance, relief from urban network congestion and more home broadband choices as near-term benefits.':

https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/consumerlab/r...

(All these are articles published between January 2018 and October 2020)

yostrovs

You should be upset at the government that gave the money and that didn't do the due diligence to make sure it's used for proper cause. Secondly, it should be reconsidered that giving billions to profit making corporations so that they can make more money is a good idea.

DidYaWipe

I am, as all taxpayers should be.

asow92

I'm not disagreeing with you, however, Empire Access is neither Verizon, AT&T, nor CenturyLink.

DidYaWipe

Clearly, because they're actually delivering.

DeepSpaceRadio

I am in a county that has been laying lots of fiber with ARPA support. Prior to this, I could either use Starlink or a PTP antenna on my roof for internet. Now I get gigabit FTTH for $100 a month. It's cheaper AND faster than my other two options.

black_puppydog

EUR40/month for a 8Gbit/s FTTH here in france. Private company by the way. Just saying, while I do have preferences about who builds infrastructure and how to regulate markets on that infrastructure, I recognize that the presence of a market as such isn't the problem.

troyvit

Wait everybody on HN says Europe is a technological backwater. How can this be?

null

[deleted]

Meanwhile, in my neck of the woods in NY, we have Archtop Fiber who raised $350m from a private equity firm to build a fiber network and get everyone in our area to switch away from Comcast (only alternative). They're signing up entire neighborhoods for about $60/mo (and installing the necessary fiber infrastructure at the same time).

I was excited to see the local investment in fiber, especially in such a rural area, but I'm a bit less excited now that I see it's funded by private equity.

sammyteee

Do you mean in a sense that you'd like to see such service provided as a necessity service and owned publically? I'm not sure I understand the private equity part.

Private Equity is well known for exploiting markets for profits without regard for much else.

They will do things like enter a niche market, buy up all mom & pop shops (or in the case of ISP, even replace an existing monopoly), then once they own the entire niche, commercialize the niche and extract as much money out of the niche as humanly possible (usually at the expense of customer experience, quality of product, etc)

foobarchu

Private equity is almost by definition profit driven. There's a high likelihood that they're using the low introductory cost to build out a network before jacking prices up and up in a bid to become the new monopoly.

toofy

Private equity typically starts with rhetoric along the lines of, “Look at how much good we’re doing!” and then will ultimately end up a race to the bottom.

They don’t expect financial sustainability with reasonable returns, they expect significant profits over that and the product is typically gutted in this race to the bottom.

soperj

Private equity isn't in it to help people.

richwater

Everyone believes this weird narrative that the only thing PE does is buy successful businesses, load them with debt and then cause them to shutdown.

The reality is that PE does not buy successful businesses; they are already struggling. No one else will touch it. Thus, when it comes time to recoup the investment, there is normally a sense of enshittification, which is reality was either already destined to happen, or the business would just close anyway.

rsynnott

I mean, I'm sure there are some very nice, friendly, competent private equity firms, but certainly the classic view of how private equity works is taking a thing, raising prices and cutting costs until (ideally, from their pov) they reach some sort of maximum profitability point or (often) it just collapses.

You can understand why this might not be behaviour you'd want of your ISP.

daveguy

Not to be glib, but private equity loves to enshittify for profit. It's really bad in combination with necessary services.