ARPA is funding cheap community-owned gigabit fiber to neglected neighborhoods
89 comments
·February 24, 2025jpm_sd
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
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.
neilv
This is a bad name collision, given the domain (Internet).
I saw the headline, and immediately thought "Huh, what's their angle? Surveillance?"
ape4
Not the ARPAnet
ThinkBeat
Thanks
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.
cj
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.
cj
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.
soperj
Private equity isn't in it to help people.
daveguy
Not to be glib, but private equity loves to enshittify for profit. It's really bad in combination with necessary services.
See also: dental, medical, veterinary
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.
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.
2jhrf09834
when you have the gigabit, it is easier to notice that unwanted data is being sent
threemux
Cool! So where is the funding going to come from for the hard stuff like long term upgrades and maintenance? Are the citizens of Oswego County going to accept a tax increase down the line, or will maintenance be deferred indefinitely until they need to be bailed out by the state?
oneplane
If you read the article, and then read the referenced report, you can see that long term planning is included, which also covers maintenance and upgrades. None of those are new issues or unsolved problems. It's not core to the issue of broadband access at all.
doctorpangloss
> It's not core to the issue of broadband access at all.
What is?
Arubis
Upfront capital investment. Right of way.
threemux
I read every word of the article, please follow site guidelines regarding comments like that and quote where it says anything about future maintenance. The link to the Oswego County project links to a New York press release which is all about initial connectivity.
A single lump sum is never sustainable, so if you have evidence of commitment in an ongoing way, please provide it.
eightysixfour
> Oswego County will own the broadband network and make it available for lease to internet service providers, including Empire Access, on a non-discriminatory and non-exclusive basis. The revenue generated from these leases will support the network's ongoing maintenance and future expansion. This innovative public infrastructure model ensures sustainable, affordable access while promoting competition among service providers.
From the first link in the article.
noelwelsh
"Oswego County will own the broadband network and make it available for lease to internet service providers, including Empire Access, on a non-discriminatory and non-exclusive basis. The revenue generated from these leases will support the network's ongoing maintenance and future expansion."
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-2...
cavisne
FTTH infrastructure is very low maintenance once built, its mostly passive fiber optic cables that don't degrade. The electronics on either end last a long time too.
The issue with FTTH is the build can be very expensive, you need to either work with an existing utility or dig trenches through an entire neighborhood, and each end user install is a mini construction project.
Thats why community FTTH makes a lot of sense, a small team does that negotiation with the utility, and uses that to be build a business case.
Vivtek
I think they might be rolling out here in rural Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, which to be absolutely honest I would not have expected in a million years.
Certainly a guy came by this week measuring for, he said, laying fiber optic cable. Just to put this into perspective, our barrio is the least populous in Adjuntas, which is the least populous municipio on the island. For my own perception, as a displaced rural Hoosier, it's still really densely populated, which means it's probably a reasonable cable investment, all else equal, but still. Astonishing to see it.
AnAnonymousDude
Claro has had the goal of rolling out fiber island-wide for quite some time. We (In the rural foothills of Mayagüez) were the some of the first customers to receive this expansion several years ago. Are you sure it wasn't Claro?
tptacek
In the muni where I serve on our telecoms commission, we built (before I got there) a fiber network with the anticipation of potentially offering it to tenant ISPs. We wanted the network anyways for internal municipal needs. But the economics of building an ISP on top of that fiber in a place already served by AT&T and Comcast are not great: you target a certain amount of uptake to break even, and you're not going to get it.
bombcar
The trick, which is hard to do, is to get AT&T and Comcast to realize that they can serve the customers better and faster over your network.
But that involves negotiation and there can be lots of finger-pointing, so companies don't like it.
hn_acker
The full title is:
> ARPA Is Quietly Funding Cheap ($50-$65 A Month) Community-Owned Gigabit Fiber Access To Long Neglected Neighborhoods
madeofpalk
Title made it sound like ARPA is comitting up to a whopping $65 to fibre, which doesn't sound like enough.
null
xyst
I’ll never understand why municipal run internet is illegal in some (most?) states. Maybe national ISP lobbyist groups are just that powerful or have the right amount of propaganda to influence the people in their direction.
One of the many benefits I see:
- local, high paying jobs across the board (linemen, network engineers)
- money kept locally within the economy rather than used to fund a C-level executives jet fuel costs
- strong motivation to improve the network and make it resilient
kjkjadksj
It is due to isp lobbying for the most part.
nobody9999
cf. The American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC)[0] tactics[1]
[1] https://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/02/12385/how-alec-helps-bi...
bombcar
When nobody cares strongly about something, the lobbyist groups have a much easier time.
gruez
>- local, high paying jobs across the board (linemen, network engineers)
As opposed to linemen telecommuting from the other side of the country?
>- money kept locally within the economy rather than used to fund a C-level executives jet fuel costs
True, although this could turn out to a wash. There's operational efficiencies that can be obtained by a national company (billing system, support, etc.) that city-scale ISPs can't achieve.
>- strong motivation to improve the network and make it resilient
The city has "strong motivation" to do a lot of things, but based on how universal complaints about city services are across the country (from potholes to clearing homeless encampments), I don't think it's a slam dunk argument you think it is.
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