| reply to IowaCowboy
Re: Please bring FiOS to Western Mass Skip the rural areas? Why do that? While those rural areas might not bring in a lot of money, they are one of the more costly areas to maintain copper service. We have a number of cooperatives and rural providers deploying fiber on gravel roads where there are only a couple people per mile.  |
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 IowaCowboyWant to go back to IowaPremium
join:2010-10-16
Springfield, MA
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| said by silbaco:Skip the rural areas? Why do that? While those rural areas might not bring in a lot of money, they are one of the more costly areas to maintain copper service. We have a number of cooperatives and rural providers deploying fiber on gravel roads where there are only a couple people per mile.
My bad, I did not realize that rural copper was expensive to maintain. I was thinking from a service provider's perspective where they want a quick return on investment. We don't have the cooperatives here in Mass like we did in Iowa. Mass is pretty urban and the rural areas are served by investor owned utilities. What I can say is the urban areas get their power restored pretty quickly after a storm (I was out three days in the October snowstorm) but the rural areas waited up to two weeks for the lights to come back on. And they want to sell their rural assets as Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont are rural states and Verizon dumped their inventory there onto FairPoint (which is basically insolvent due to the high costs of serving those areas). And with FairPoint, service has gone downhill (Grandma quickly switched to Time Warner for home phone when FairPoint came to town). It would be nice if FairPoint did upgrade their areas to fiber but they don't have the cash.
It would be nice to have cooperatives here, particularly in the rural areas (particularly the rural parts of Western Mass, and northern New England). I don't think the laws of the states here allow for cooperatives but we do have a number of municipal utilities (Chicopee, Westfield, Holyoke, and South Hadley just to name a few). Municipal utilities tend to have better rates than investor owned utilities. |
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| Cooperatives benefit greatly from the lower maintenance costs of fiber. There are several here deploying it to their entire service area no matter how rural that may be. Unfortunately major companies would rather pay higher maintenance costs than deploy fiber. |
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| reply to silbaco
I would terminate all copper service to the rural area and force them to use either cable or LTE.
These equipment are too expensive to be deployed to rural area |
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| Most rural areas don't have cable. That leaves nearly a monopoly for the telco. Although deployment costs are high, if you deploy fiber to a rural area it will pay itself off eventually. If you can get them on your TV service, it will pay itself off even faster. Plus a lot of rural people still have landlines. |
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