[rayiner]

> The unemployed can be trained to run fiber,

I feel like this is a bit arrogant. This stuff is skilled work. A fiber splicer is a $5,000+ piece of equipment. There are electrical, optical, environmental, and safety considerations all in play. It's not something you can just teach people to do whose other employment options are flipping burgers.

A couple of years ago, I got to watch the whole fiber installation process in action when I had Comcast Gigabit Pro installed in my house. Leaving aside the months it took to get county permitting, it took a team of guys a whole day to run it from the nearest splice point 1,700 feet to my neighborhood. Another half day to run it 200 feet to the pole by my house. Another half day to trench it under my driveway and into my basement. And another half day to install and configure the CPE.

For those people who own homes: Think of how much money it costs to get a team of skilled laborers to spend a couple of days doing anything around your house. I just had a new heat pump condenser and air handler installed. I could buy the parts online for well under $3,000, but with install it came to $6,700. Almost $4,000 for two guys to complete work that took a few hours. I bought marble countertops that cost $2,300 for a slab, and another $2,000 for a day's worth of work to do finishing and installation. Tomorrow, I'm going to spend close to $500 in labor for an hour of work to get a sump pump replaced. Renovating a bathroom can involve $5,000 in materials costs and $10,000 in labor costs for something that takes someone a few days. I suspect my fiber install--probably six man days--cost Comcast close to $10,000.

[toomuchtodo]

It it my opinion that to believe in my fellow human is not arrogant. Labor is not fungible ("lump of labor fallacy"), but people are versatile. We should expect that people can be trained into skilled roles, with alternate paths for those who don't have the aptitude. We have trillions of dollars of infrastructure work to be done in this country [1] [2], and we should absolutely expect our citizens to be able to perform that work if provided the means to do so.

Disclaimer: I have run and spliced fiber as a hobbyist for those starting rural ISPs, and also know where you stand on private venture vs community/muni/non-profit broadband. I'm always interested in your constructive criticism (based on your industry experience), as it helps me understand ways to drive down the costs of non-profit broadband initiatives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal

[2] https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

[rayiner]

When I say it's arrogant I mean we too readily accept that skilled labor doesn't require specialized aptitude for the job. We readily accept that we can't easily train unemployed low-skill workers to be programmers or lawyers, but posit that we can do the same when it comes to installing fiber networks or fitting pipes.

I assume we disagree on this point, but I think it's accurate to say that most people lack the patience, attention to detail, and spatial, mathematical, planning, and problem-solving skills to do a lot of jobs that we assume people "can be trained to do." I don't think that Verizon pays service techs $40/hour + benefits out of generosity. My neighbor works at a local brewery. He sees a lot of guys (some with college degrees) that can't master "move vat A and load it into equipment B, but watch out for X, Y and Z."

I've spent my whole life getting roped into helping people with IT. Most of the time, it's a matter of "read the instructions completely, then click 'Next' until the installation is completed." Some surely could be taught to do it themselves. But I would not be surprised to find many for whom simply "read the instructions completely before doing anything" is a barrier, or who just cannot grasp the process of: "try X, observe results, modify approach, try Y."

[toomuchtodo]

I think this is a fair point, but you find this quandary in hiring for most roles: "Does this person give enough of a shit about the job to at least try to get it right?" The economy is still somewhat functioning, so I assume the answer to that is yes, you can find people who can mostly do the job they're in.

This is not to say you don't need education so workers know how to do the job, effective leadership for those folks, as well as quality assurance and other mechanisms to ensure the work being spec'd is done appropriately. I put forth that there is a middle ground between the nihilistic idea that "these people can only flip burgers" and the naive assumption that anyone can be a brain surgeon and policy put in place around such aspirations.

> But I would not be surprised to find many for whom simply "read the instructions completely before doing anything" is a barrier, or who just cannot grasp the process of: "try X, observe results, modify approach, try Y."

I agree an early filter must be used to route these folks into harmless roles or simply benefit programs. Such is the struggle of searching for and retaining talent. People are hard.

[vtthrowaway2519]

>A couple of years ago, I got to watch the whole fiber installation process in action when I had Comcast Gigabit Pro installed in my house. Leaving aside the months it took to get county permitting, it took a team of guys a whole day to run it from the nearest splice point 1,700 feet to my neighborhood. Another half day to run it 200 feet to the pole by my house. Another half day to trench it under my driveway and into my basement. And another half day to install and configure the CPE.

That's an absurd amount of time. There must have been other considerations which made it unusual. When WCVT brought fiber to our area in Vermont it took maybe 5-6 hours to run the 1600 feet or so of our side road, and an extra hour for one house on the way with its own few hundred feet, using their larger scale trencher system + an air blaster if they needed to do a horizontal direct bore which could do 25-50' very quickly. Dig Safe had been by a day or two before just like for any normal ground work anyone would do, so all underground cables/pipes were already painted. The fiber ended up right at our place where we put it through a hole I drilled in the foundation. It wasn't any special ISP team either they had one of the local construction companies take care of the bulk part. Then one tech of theirs drove in, maybe 30 minutes tops to get that spliced and run to my rack. Then like, 5 minutes for the GPON CPE, max? They'd obviously done a proper job of calculating optical power attenuation ahead of time so no issues there. Seriously a -half a day- to install and configure CPE? That makes no sense at all, so it must be some Comcast thing, or something went wrong. GPON is binary, it's either within acceptable optical power range or not.

If you're counting anything LAN side beyond the fiber end point you shouldn't because that is completely independent from the WAN drop and represents an arbitrary amount of time that will be different for every customer.

[rayiner]

In Maryland, all work in rights of way must be done by a company specially authorized by the state to perform utility-related construction. Then each county has licensing and permitting processes for work "related" to telecom utilities. Additionally, our utilities are above ground, and our neighborhood is too tight to allow use of a trencher, so all that work was done by hand. This is just how much of the northeast/mid-atlantic is. It's a double-edged sword: these are relatively high-density places where a single fiber cable can serve a lot of houses. But at the same time, they tend to be already built up (my subdivision was laid out in 1920), dense with narrow access ways, and in counties/states with lots of bureaucracy. (I am currently working on a "vegetation management plan" so I can clear the weeds from my backyard.)

For one-off fiber installs, Comcast uses active Ethernet instead of GPON, so maybe that's why the CPE installation took so long. Although, to be fair, I'm counting the time it took to drill a hole in the foundation as part of the half day of CPE install and the time to configure the router/access point--neither of which your average customer is qualified to do themselves.

[washadjeffmad]

A four year degree shows a man can be trained.

After guiding in the low hundreds of employees from a place of no experience to being competent in technical roles, I've learned that the outcomes of training are a test of management and leadership. People you might avoid in passing on the street, whose life circumstances you might disdain, who have succeeded nowhere else can be trained to do immensely complicated and valuable things and make a career out of it.

If you don't want anecdata, then look no further than the success of the US military. You might have fewer teeth than fingers, but they'll find a place for you.

[rayiner]

Four year college graduates are selected from among a pool of people who did well in high school. Likewise, I suspect the employees you work with were not hired from among the ranks of the chronically unemployed. The US military is not a good counter-example. Members of the armed forces, both at the enlisted and officer levels, are better educated than the population as a whole.

This is not a matter of “disdaining” anyone’s “life circumstances.” It’s a matter of acknowledging that infrastructure work requires skills that not everyone has, just like programming does.

[fibermoney]

> A fiber splicer is a $5,000+ piece of equipment.

Nah. A fusion splicer costs $900. You can train a monkey to splice fiber. I give you exhibit A: me, the monkey.

I had no previous formal training in fiber optics nor splicing before I got my first fusion splicer. I read the instructions and I started splicing.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

Like most manual construction jobs, they can be done by anyone, with training. The hard, expensive, time consuming, and difficult part is finding people that give enough of a fuck to do a decent job consistently without constant direct supervision. Once you've got good entry level staff then you need to train them. Most people don't go into construction to be a teacher, so that's a whole other problem to solve.

Likewise, all else being equal, I'd flip burgers over any construction job. I've met far too many broken people that were ate up and spit out by construction companies in their forties to spend the rest of their lives on Medicaid and disability to risk my future working ability for a temporary, seasonal, small pay bump.