Biden Admin Spends Tens Of Millions To Deliver Fiber Internet To Only About 90 Rural Alaska Households

excalibur

Diamond Member
Mar 19, 2015
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Just more wasting of money by an idiotic federal government run by a bigger idiotic administration.

Just mind-boggling how they waste money.



President Joe Biden’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) is spending tens of millions in tax dollars to bring fiber optic internet to rural southeast Alaska.

As part of USDA’s “Reconnect Program,” it awarded a roughly $33 million grant to the Alaska Telephone Company (ATC), the agency announced last Thursday. Fiber will be delivered to 92 households and a total of 211 people and five businesses in two Alaska native villages called Skagway and Chilkat, according to a federal grant award listing.

ATC’s fiber plan will cost around $204,000 per passing of each residence and business, according to an analysis by Fierce Telecom, a tech publication. ATC also said in a Sept. 22 statement it will invest roughly $11 million into the fiber project.

“The Klukwan-Skagway Fiber project will spur economic growth and significantly enhance quality of life in very remote, hard-to-serve locations, empowering rural Alaskans with options for remote work, distance learning, telemedicine, and more,” Mike Garrett, CEO of Alaska Power & Telephone Company, which oversees ATC, said in the statement.

...

USDA’s reconnect program allocates up to $1.1 billion in grants and loans to areas in rural America that lack “sufficient access” to broadband internet, a type of internet through service providers. The program was authorized under Biden’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed in November 2021.

Entities that can apply for the funds include corporations, Indian tribes, territories, state or local governments, and other groups.

But other internet network types can be used for about 10% of what Fiber costs, according to a 2021 report by Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, a trade group for wireless companies.

Fiber is “very expensive” and “every option is actually cheaper,” meaning the Biden administration could have spent less in taxpayer dollars giving internet to the areas in Alaska, said Joel Thayer, a tech lawyer who is president of the Digital Progress Institute, a bipartisan tech think tank advocating for “policies so federal and state efforts to close the digital divide proceed as swiftly and efficiently as possible.”

...

There are “several other options” that USDA could have chosen for a cheaper price, according to Thayer. Satellite-based solutions and wireless inter service providers (ISP) are two such options, he said.

“There’s also just AT&T and Verizon, who offer wireless services,” said Thayer. “There are plenty of options. They’re cheaper to deploy [and] just easier to use.”


 
Keep grasping! Keep flailing and failing!
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President Joe Biden’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) is spending tens of millions in tax dollars to bring fiber optic internet to rural southeast Alaska.

Does fiber Internet help crops grow better?
 
Wireless works great, until it snows and covers the dish and the receivers. Getting the signal out that far so residents could pick it up with regular gear would cost almost as much, and be far less reliable. And what a fiber optic system takes to maintain is minimal. So the initial cost gets defrayed over a few years.

This is not the worst boondoggle I have seen our gov't make.
 
ATC’s fiber plan will cost around $204,000 per passing of each residence and business

Anyone who wants internet up there already gets it via satellite. Worse, can you imagine the abuse of the fiber in a climate like that? If it cost them $204,000 just to string it to every home up there, what will it cost to fix and replace it all when it goes bad in a few years?
 
Anyone who wants internet up there already gets it via satellite. Worse, can you imagine the abuse of the fiber in a climate like that? If it cost them $204,000 just to string it to every home up there, what will it cost to fix and replace it all when it goes bad in a few years?

Goes bad? You think fiber optics spoil like old food?
 
Goes bad? You think fiber optics spoil like old food?

You think they last forever? Most communication fiber is made from a polycarbonate plastic core these days not the good AT&T glass fiber, surrounded by a protective jacket, and it is still subject to the same UV degeneration from the Sun +wind, cold, snow, stress, accidents, etc., whatever it is subjected to up there in Alaska, perhaps accelerated by the fact that with so few customers up there, fiber bundles on any given trunk will be smaller, thinner, leaving even less protection. That stuff will still need maintained, repaired and replaced as needed, so one must consider THAT as part of the total picture of internet cost.
 
Wireless works great, until it snows and covers the dish and the receivers. Getting the signal out that far so residents could pick it up with regular gear would cost almost as much, and be far less reliable. And what a fiber optic system takes to maintain is minimal. So the initial cost gets defrayed over a few years.

This is not the worst boondoggle I have seen our gov't make.

Not too long ago left loons were whining people shouldn't whine about having to clear snow off solar panels.
 

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