Rural Infrastructure thread

[Oaktree]

People I know in telecoms seem to think a wire (fiber, coax, copper) to the home will die out over next 10 years. Doesnt mean fiber dies, just that a service drop to the home isnt or wont be, the most efficient way to get service to every home. Dont know if thats a Starlink analog, 5g micro towers, or some of the stuff of sending signal down power line conductor, or what.

Its funny to be to hear people complain about speed, we average about 20-40 mbs, with Tmobile, and im fine. I hear people complain about 500 mbs; what they heck are you doing with it?

When we first moved here a little over 20 years ago the only internet was either dial-up or a satellite service like Wildblue or Hughesnet. No cell coverage either. Hard to believe now, but we have a choice between 2 fiber services (one, from Spectrum has copper distribution, but the trunk is fiber, the other is fiber to the home).

As far as speed goes, when we first got the Spectrum (Time-Warner at the time) I think we got 25 down and 5 up, now we've switched to the phone company and getting 300M bidirectional (getting upgraded to 1G tomorrow). Don't really need the extra speed, but with "landline" phone bundle it's cheaper than the 300!

Satellite internet sucked. We'd lose it everytime there was a storm, and there were trees very close to the path (of course, those trees were on someone else's land ). Not sure Starlink would be much better...only a 45° or so arc of clear sky above the house.

Cell coverage is better, but still not great.

The other thing I've seen done in a few towns is municipal wifi.. they basically ran the infrastructure themselves and everyone in town could access it. The spectrum density with 2.5 and 5ghz wasn't .. great.. for that.. but with some of the new wifi 6/7 and other newer stuff... you can get a lot more people per cell and better signal steering, etc.. so it might scale..

Maybe 15 years ago a company put in something similar, trouble is, a lot of terrain issues (it's hilly/mountainous here) and I don't think they're still around. One neighbor had it, it worked OK for the limited amount he used it, but he was quick to ditch it when a better option came along.

 

[Highlandr]

The telco maps claim I should have full 5g here.. we don't.. we have 1 bar of 4g IF you stand on the high spot of the property on one leg and wave the phone in the air... So practically speaking it's non-existent at my house

Likewise.

We ran cable to the house (Spectrum) for internet when we built here in 2013, so Wi-Fi calling it is. If Spectrum is down we can manage to text but calling is very sketchy.

When we bought the property the former owner had already had the power company drop a transformer close to the building site (700' from the road).

Natural gas is unavailable - and probably won't be in my lifetime - so propane for the "emergency heat". But we burn wood to keep the EH from kicking in.

I live 5 miles from the interstate. A few years ago a commercial developer bought over 400 acres of farm land between me and the interstate (one mile from the interstate). The plan was to put about 300,000 sf under roof and lease it out. Last year that developer sold the property and the new outfit wants to put a data center in there. The community is now in an uproar.

 

[RayIN]

We dont currently have internet available, other than a T-mobile cellular box, but Comcast is starting a rural fiber stimulus job soon that will get it out here. Not 100% sure if we will sign up, frankly we have been fine with the $60/month cellular internet.

Now, if natural gas came through... id sign up for that

We got fiber phone/internet service 2 years ago, the main difference is phone bill went from $60/mo, to $115/mo., and the fiber build-out was paid for by a federal government grant.

 

[rumwrks]

Maybe 15 years ago a company put in something similar, trouble is, a lot of terrain issues (it's hilly/mountainous here) and I don't think they're still around.

We had access via a wireless ISP circa 2003-2006. At the time we were in effectively desert country with a couple of tall mountains in the middle so it worked really well because there really were no trees.. Wireless in free space is mostly limited by the oxygen absorption curve - and water has oxygen.. and vegetation has water.. I see this with my outdoor wifi as well.. 5 bars (equivalent) of signal.. walk behind a big old tree and boom.. it's gone.

We also had the option of DSL there but the telco had in their tariff agreement that they had a hookup timeline requirement but no service availability requirement and they had a significant equipment shortage so they were stealing the DSL head end ports from existing customers to hookup new customers.. we had it for about 4 months then it went dark and when we called they had no timeline for availability. So we moved to the wireless ISP.

After having had the wireless service for a few months their tower got hit by lightning and the hut with all the equipment in it burned completely to the ground. We figured we were hosed again because they were kind of a little podunk company.. but no! They actually had a fully equipped mobile van and had everything back up in under 24hrs - basically as soon as the fire dept cleared them to go in. To say we were impressed is an understatement!

I remember Hughesnet .. the best you could say about it was that it was technically better than nothing.

The place I grew up on we had to have a 500' long antenna (aka old piece of copper wire) strung up the hill just to get AM radio signal. No phone service with 6 or 7 miles and no electricity (grandpa later put in a windmill and eventually we got a small generator but none at all for some years). You had to ride a horse (or later drive once we got a road in .. in good weather) 3-5 miles up the mountain just to use a CB. You can imagine my surprise when i found out the folks who bought the place were on facebook and had full cell service!

 

[LHF2019]

I live in PA, less than a mile south of the New York border. Just a few observations on rural infrastructure...and maybe an observation on being poor...

Interstates in the area are 65 MPH on the NY side and 70 in PA...same road, same design, but more government restrictions on the NY side.

Also seems like many more NY State Police are employed making sure folks do not violate the 65 MPH limit! I can travel 60 miles to the closest city south of us and not see a single PA State Police. I can't go north 6 miles without seeing a NY State Police radar patrol on the interstate targeting PA and other out of state travelers!

Secondary 2 lane roads are very similar on both sides of the border. You can't really tell when in NY or PA from the road conditions or speed limits.

It's the local and rural roads that are a big difference! NY has paved rural roads...PA tends toward many more gravel rural roads in my part of central PA (center of the state East and West)...and with limited road maintenance. You can be on a blacktopped rural road in NY and immediately know when you hit the dirt road, you're safely back in PA.

And just an observation on being poor. There's a big difference in not having money and being poor. Not having money is a cash or funds deficiency. Being poor is a mindset and way of life, generally created from continually making poor life choices.

I find it interesting to look at the differences in homes, land and "treasured possessions" traveling between NY and PA. Both sides are rural, limited funds, and cash poor.

But the PA homesteads seem to be "trash rich" with old cars, boats, refrigerators, old farm implements, dilapidated RVs, and plastic kids toys everywhere.

You can be blindfolded and taken to a road you've never traveled before and pretty easily tell whether you're in NY or PA just by the treasures scattered in the yards. PA residents (in this very rural area at least) are good, friendly people, but they seem to generally have a poor mindset - with all their wealth invested in worldly possessions (junk actually) scattered around their homes.

No moral judgment, but it breaks my heart at times to see it...although this is the area we now call home, and though we plan to die here...we'll always be outsiders - since we don't have any refrigerators in the yard!

You are exactly due east of me by many 100's of miles. You are spot on with your observations though here there are some rare dirt NY roads. I never knew they existed until the first year I did custom work in Clymer, NY and looked for the straightest route to my destination. It was on those travels I found out NY dirt roads existed. And for the most part they are in better conditions then my local PA dirt roads.

Our rural dirt roads are getting bad. no maintenance for decades have turned them into one lane or narrower in places and farm equipment keeps getting bigger. There are and will continue to be close calls and any year there will be a fatality. Either I will be involved or it will be my cousin. We are the heaviest AG users

 

[rumwrks]

Our rural dirt roads are getting bad. no maintenance for decades have turned them into one lane or narrower in places and farm equipment keeps getting bigger. There are and will continue to be close calls and any year there will be a fatality. Either I will be involved or it will be my cousin. We are the heaviest AG users

County north of us a bit actually de-paved a lot of their rural roads because the maintenance cost was eating them alive. They had enough miles of them that even the 15-20 year cycle on re-paving added up to a lot (especially since they had to re-do a lot of road base to not have the frost heaves wreck things). They figured out it was cheaper to slap more gravel on top and grade once or twice a year long term.

In either case roads require maintenance and it's certainly not free. We're lucky that we have a county commissioner who likes to drive down ours so we get a grader over it 3-4 times/year which keeps it in pretty good shape and they have one of the large side mower tractors hit the vegetation on the edge of the road. Before that fellow was in office a couple of the local farmers would hit the worst spots near them with a box blade a few times a year and occasionally buy in a truckload of gravel.

I need to bring in about 5 or 6 dump truck loads of gravel for some of the farm roads here.. The biggest problem area has some older concrete culverts I don't trust a full sized dump truck to go over.. so it'll have to be tractor spread unfortunately.. A small dump trailer would sure be handy but yee gods are they expensive.

 

[paulsharvey]

We had a road, called Main Street, lol, that had gotten so bad they brought in a reclaimer, and ground the asphalt, and clay base and just rolled it, to make it better. I know the county engineer through work, and I mentioned how that road wasnt on the dirt to pave list. He explained, they have to split the budget evenly between each of the 5 County commissioners districts, and in order to do the whole of Main St, he needed more than that districts whole annual dirt to pave budget.

Main street is a left over from a more or less failed large subdivision. It never got really build out, but there are a few hundred people that use it every day, but back in the 60s/70s, the county excepted ownership/maintenance of the road.

Even if they budgeted $5m/year for dirt to pave; thats just not that many lane miles of road. Plus, they still have more major county roads that need resurfacing, widening to modern standards, drainage work, ect.

 

[paulsharvey]

Nothing confidential here, publicly available, published state wide averages for a few specific pay items of road work.

Optional base group 9, equivalent to 10" of limerock roadbase, the norm for most state road, $29/sy. Superpower asphalt, $163/ton. 18" round pipe culvert, $220/LF. Those are installed prices.

So; without anything else, subgrade stabilization, $7.53/sy; base $29/sy; and even at just 165#/sy (1.5") asphalt; the math adds up Fast.

Then to top it off, about 30% of the cost of road work is temporary requirements (MOT, erosion controls, detours, temp lanes, ect).

 

[paulsharvey]

So, a pretty basic roadway, no drainage work, no embankment, no sod on grass shoulders, no MOT, ect, you are at $50/sy. So, even with that, 1 mile of road is $704,000 (assuming only 2 12 ft lanes).

 

[paulsharvey]

Then, I will admit im not 100% sure if they are "infrastructure" or not, but schools, hospitals, and other items, all scrounging for money too. Maybe "services" not infrastructure?

 

[Larry Caldwell]

We dont currently have internet available, other than a T-mobile cellular box, but Comcast is starting a rural fiber stimulus job soon that will get it out here. Not 100% sure if we will sign up, frankly we have been fine with the $60/month cellular internet.

Now, if natural gas came through... id sign up for that

That's about what fiber will cost you. You could switch to a low data limit cell plan as a backup. We don't have cell service, so fiber and Starlink are our only options. We had DSL for a while, hardly better than dialup.

 

[oosik]

I have Hughesnet. There may be others available - I don't know. But they will also be satellite service. With the same weather related down sides.

I find that Hughes is perfectly fine. Fast enough for all my needs and you simply learn to work around any weather concerns.

I've been out here in the country for 45 years now. No way in hell would I ever move back to urban life. Urban life is simply to confining. Besides - my way of life would not be allowed in an urban environment.

 

[Oaktree]

I find that Hughes is perfectly fine. Fast enough for all my needs and you simply learn to work around any weather concerns.

It's been 15 or so years since I had satellite internet, I'm sure it's improved since then. We had Wildblue, I think they later rebranded as Exede. Weather issues aside, it was OK for email, web surfing, etc. but the latency was so high it was useless for any remote access applications, no way could you do VOIP over it either. I actually kept a dial-up account for those times I needed to remote-administer work related stuff.
I don't think I ever got more than 250-300k speeds out of it.

I guess it was good technology in its day, but I don't miss it.

 

[paulsharvey]

One mindset we are always dealing with infrastructure... People think "good enough" that will work, and dont realize the Small things that are needed to keep it functional for 50-75 years. Things contractor view as way over the top, ridiculous. Like wrapping storm drains joints, priming road base, even rebar separation from concrete surface. Sure, its fine for 5 or 10 years; but if that water main fails in 25 years, thats early,

Corrugated metal pipes for instance, cheaper than reinforced concrete, easier to install, lighter, ect. Last maybe 25 years, in good conditions, add salt or tannic acid in the water, your looking at closer to 7-12 years. And guess what, its not cheaper the 2nd time, when you are doing the repair under traffic, and doing the restoration to the road (or driveway).

 

[LHF2019]

County north of us a bit actually de-paved a lot of their rural roads because the maintenance cost was eating them alive. They had enough miles of them that even the 15-20 year cycle on re-paving added up to a lot (especially since they had to re-do a lot of road base to not have the frost heaves wreck things). They figured out it was cheaper to slap more gravel on top and grade once or twice a year long term.

In either case roads require maintenance and it's certainly not free. We're lucky that we have a county commissioner who likes to drive down ours so we get a grader over it 3-4 times/year which keeps it in pretty good shape and they have one of the large side mower tractors hit the vegetation on the edge of the road. Before that fellow was in office a couple of the local farmers would hit the worst spots near them with a box blade a few times a year and occasionally buy in a truckload of gravel.

I need to bring in about 5 or 6 dump truck loads of gravel for some of the farm roads here.. The biggest problem area has some older concrete culverts I don't trust a full sized dump truck to go over.. so it'll have to be tractor spread unfortunately.. A small dump trailer would sure be handy but yee gods are they expensive.

Growing up we had a awesome road crew. Twice a year a year roads graded ditch to ditch and crowned. He retired and a new road crew came in with foreman being my uncle who lives on one of the roads. I don't know what happened but pot holes were filed in manually. Very little was done for years. Of course the section in front of his house wasn't to bad from years of oil applications. He retired and a new crew came in. By this time roads were fairly flat. Ditches have long ago filled in and new ditches were in the making as the water went with the least resistance. Road crew kind of tries to grade but there's nothing left to put the crown in. Even with the new grader they are afraid to work ditch to ditch so what happens is there is a little ridge of gravel/dirt/grass and then it rains. Water follows the ridge cutting a new ditch. This has been going on for at least a decade now. There has been ditch cleaning happening more often but you now have people that can't read the landscape or never knew where the ditches used to be. So they make ditches where they think they should be then when they get to a sluice pipe they have to dig back to it to make it join the ditch. Doesn't do anything for the lack of crown in the road which at this point can only be remedied by bringing in material. There are place they have dug big rocks out of the road because we are down to base layer or lower.

 

[paulsharvey]

Growing up we had a awesome road crew. Twice a year a year roads graded ditch to ditch and crowned. He retired and a new road crew came in with foreman being my uncle who lives on one of the roads. I don't know what happened but pot holes were filed in manually. Very little was done for years. Of course the section in front of his house wasn't to bad from years of oil applications. He retired and a new crew came in. By this time roads were fairly flat. Ditches have long ago filled in and new ditches were in the making as the water went with the least resistance. Road crew kind of tries to grade but there's nothing left to put the crown in. Even with the new grader they are afraid to work ditch to ditch so what happens is there is a little ridge of gravel/dirt/grass and then it rains. Water follows the ridge cutting a new ditch. This has been going on for at least a decade now. There has been ditch cleaning happening more often but you now have people that can't read the landscape or never knew where the ditches used to be. So they make ditches where they think they should be then when they get to a sluice pipe they have to dig back to it to make it join the ditch. Doesn't do anything for the lack of crown in the road which at this point can only be remedied by bringing in material. There are place they have dug big rocks out of the road because we are down to base layer or lower.

What happened, I imagine is the same as almost any rural county; Money. So, very little funding for road base, labor, machines, contractors; constant demands from residents to get XYX done, that keeps them hopping around, and never 3 days to actually get 1 thing all the way done. Florida rural county motor grader operator, might pull down $20/hr, plus benefits. If hes good, he can get $40-50/hr as a finish grader man at a road contractor. So; that means either; A, they arent at all ambitious, or B, they arent all that good.

Thats a bit negative; as its a different skill set to get 2 miles of dirt road knocked down and passable, then it is to get 1000 ft of roadbase to +/- 1/8" and ready to pave

 

[paulsharvey]

So, maybe 10 years ago, maybe 9, I did some design type work (utility coordination), on a road in Greenville FLa. I met with the town public works manager, to get maps of their water and sewer, it was a mix of paper plans from a rural water works grant in 1990s and some very very old, crumbly, faded blue prints, as in Blue prints. The manager, he ran the town utility, drove the trash truck with two inmates grabbing cans, read meters, mowed, ect.

I actually applied for a job many years ago, Public Works Manager, in the town of Micanopy FLa, didnt get it, but they were upfront with the fact that the manager mowed the ball field and library, read meters, cut storm debris, was 24/7 oncall, and it was like 1.5x minimium wage

 

[paulsharvey]

I also personally know the gas utility boss for a small city gas utility. He's a bit of a different breed, hes aggressive about expanding, picking up new customers, finding cheaper ways to do installs, bring in new revenue. Thats not normally what you see, normally its about getting through till Jan 1, and let next year deal with it.

He actually bought a direction drill, vac, mud trailer; whole set up, and trained 2 guys into an in-house directional drill crew, cause its cheaper then contracting service bores.

 

[LHF2019]

What happened, I imagine is the same as almost any rural county; Money. So, very little funding for road base, labor, machines, contractors; constant demands from residents to get XYX done, that keeps them hopping around, and never 3 days to actually get 1 thing all the way done. Florida rural county motor grader operator, might pull down $20/hr, plus benefits. If hes good, he can get $40-50/hr as a finish grader man at a road contractor. So; that means either; A, they arent at all ambitious, or B, they arent all that good.

I don't know. I wish I could remember what equipment was there when everything was maintained. There was a point in the last 15-20 years there was a bunch of new or very good used equipment purchased. Regular upgrades are good but for a small township they seemed extensive. Couple that really stands out is the grader and excavator. Growing up I could not tell you how ditches were cleaned. Townships here do work together on some things so maybe there was more of that in the past than now. Of course I do not go to the Township meetings like I should. Could be money issues but also how is what available utilized. Crew is 2 people and I think it is still that way. Back in the day oil for dust control. Then we went through a brine period. Now it is only oil if residents purchase it for in front of there homes. Regular oiling kept roads in good condition. The brine or doing nothing has turned sections into mucky almost impassable roads in the spring.

 

[paulsharvey]

Well, another aspect that its hard to overstate, industry wide; experience... In my little part of the industry, I think they said the average age is like 58, and very very few people are entering. We do get some young guys in, and some are good and eager to learn; but atleast 75% that do, are using it as a stepping stone.

As a whole, basically, we are missing the entire middle or if you prefer, Journeymen. There are still a fair, small, but fair, nimber of old guys, that have been doing it for 40 years, but they are rapidly dieing off. there are new young guys that come and go pretty often. What we dont have a lot of 5/10 year experience.