thank you for sharing. just to be clear, you're saying there is no nationwide company/brand for trenching? ISPs like comcast and verizon just use local contractors/companies?
We just moved on to a home that was very recently built on agricultural land. Comcast had fiber at the end of our 300-foot driveway, but they wanted $10-$15 per foot to trench in order to start a cable internet (DOCSIS 3.1) service. They were simply subcontracting the work out to a local company. I told them I would trench instead. They then had the company drop off 400-feet of conduit. I rented a trencher ($200) for the day and hand-dug what the machine could not deal with (mud, trees, etc). After I was done, the subcontractor came back to finish the end points. They had a machine and process that was virtually identical to my own.
I'm surprised there are not mini boring bots. Maybe in a few years.
To my knowledge, yes. Whenever I’ve had Comcast, Verizon, or another provider pull a last mile of fiber, it’s been done by a local contractor (my experience is limited to Illinois, Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin) with the upstream provider coordinating the turnup.
thanks, final question if you don't mind. :) do you know how much the average trenching job costs or how long it takes (order of magnitude)? $10K and days, $100K and weeks, or ...?
Comcast recently pulled fiber down a main road (about half a mile?), then about 150 feet along poles down a residential road, then trenched about 15 feet beside my driveway. It took a couple of months to get permitting to run it along the main road, but maybe half a day to actually run it. It took half a day to run it on poles along the residential road, and 6-7 hours (four guys) to trench 15 feet beside my driveway. Plus another half a day (one guy) to terminate the fiber in my basement, and another half day (one guy) to install the CPE.
I'm surprised there are not mini boring bots. Maybe in a few years.