Sympathies to the land wire crews

Antenna on roof gets local TV and networks. That adds up to some 34 "free" channels. Our LG TV purchase included a few hundred additional free channels. Have Amazon Prime and I sprung $19 one-time fee for Roku, which gives us countless streaming channels, with lots of free options.

So, other than the one-time Roku charge, the antenna, basically free TV.

On extremely rare occasions -- I think three times in past five years -- have paid a couple bucks for a movie rental from Amazon when relatives/friends were staying over and we were bored.
kris

 

"What was the prompt that produced that AI Overview?"

If I wanted a result that emphasized loblolly pine I would include that in prompt. If I wanted a result that showed more, I'd use a prompt like 'What tree species are used for utility poles'?

It could very well come in fifth on such a list, after those in my link in #9.

Some caution in interpretation is also called for because 'southern yellow pine' is a term used to describe 4 pine species including loblolly (Pinus taeda). There is a risk of conflation here.

 

The 5G reciever on the fire stick was dying, so picked up that Roku. The more tech savy might find better deals than that, but I didn't care to put in the work considering the Roku price through their site.

The paid streaming services will run deals at times. Got the base Hulu for 99 cents a month with a black friday one, and cancelled Netflix.

 

Ah....
Cord Cutting.

Another side-bar but perhaps one less injurious to the ankle - and closer to the OP.

Land wire crews are JUST THAT.
They sling terrestrial WIRES.
That seems kinda 1840's to me personally.....but that's ME being me.
Internet providers and entertainment - um - 'originators' are 'sometimes' a different thing.

OTA entertainment: We were either sold out by dot.gov on this, or dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century with ATSC1.0 when full-power analog broadcasting ceased in '09.
It really depends on who you ask.
HOWEVER (comma!)
WHY do cable and internet providers need to geo-fence you when it comes to WHAT LOCAL TV channels you CHOOSE to watch - 'eh?
IYKYK.
OTA is just that.
OTA - and an antenna (or aerial) is usually just a hunk of metal or some other conductor that converts an alternating electric current into radio waves, or radio waves into an electric current.
There's NO SUCH THING as a 'digital' of a "high def" antenna!!!
Many (if not most) people opt to pay most of $100 a month more or less to eliminate the need to configure their own TV antennae.
SOME people even pay extra for the convenience of getting HDTV - something that broadcasters are still (as of 2024) required to provide more or less over the air (OTA) for.......free.
AS I SAID in post #2.....

All of the others?
In most cases, they provide a service or a convenience - but these days it's usually delivered either OTA or through buried glass - or?
It WILL be very soon.

BOTH....
"Probably" another topic for another thread.

 

Not in rural areas. In fact, the power and cable feeds are still overhead copper to the ole and then underground to the house. Fiber to the home is only in a few areas locally here.

 

Even ten miles outside Boston, Verizon’s fiber is overhead.
Here in Florida, everything is underground

 

Still a bit miffed having the fiber optic forced on me.

It was some sort of "rural" rescue program to bring us into the 21st century. Of course our little woodland hideout proved to be a bit of a challenge. Their plan to use the same path as my water line was met with a big NO! And they grudgingly agreed, forcing them to add an extra 500 + tough yards to their project.

I guess it is for the best, but their excavating has caused some small slipouts and other issues.

Powerlines are still overhead to our property line. From there about 350 yards underground.
kris

 

Verizon is my company's economic competitor, and so I 'must' stand mute.

HOWEVER (comma!!!)
I will offer some completely UNRELATED observations....

Ariel fiber is cheaper in the short term if you don't mind renting space on somebody else's poles.
Bastan gets cyclonic storms ______ often.
Bastan gets wild fires as often as _______.

It's a very VERY complex picture.

You may not should be.
(Correct US Southern grammar, I'm told)

Glass is not a very good conductor and it tends to be fairly non-corrosive.
It's fairly durable and believe it or not it's remarkably flexible.
Also....
In telecommunications, it very scalable.
That means we can (and DO!) serve clients with needs ranging from kilobits to terabits - with, literally, the same glass strands.
Other than space-based delivery - it's REALLY the best that we mere mortals have come up with for now.
I could go on and on but that's NOT fiber's BEST quality!!!

It's also (for now) NOT REGULATED!

IYKYK.

 

Fiber here is generally underground. I do remember one private overhead installation that went over a railroad right-of-way instead of under the tracks..

 

The one vulnerability with ariel fiber is that sometimes you have to splice the strands when weather, drunks, wildfires, or "acts of GOD or nature' assert themselves.
No big deal really - it's a lot like welding.....I'm told.

HOWEVER (comma!!!!)

'Sometimes' meaning almost ALL of the time, glass is a solid item.
Now...I'm still wearing bandages from the last time that a drive-by scientists nipped at my ankles but GLASS that has been diced and spliced is a little bit like a former spouse.....
IT doesn't forget.
If a drink driver causes you to splice a 60-mile section of fiber and some of those splices are exposed to temperature variations (like.......hanging in the air.......) then....well sometimes BAD things happen.

IYKYK.....

 

Um......(uncomfortable pause)
Multimode is (USING WIKI!!!!) "multimode" refers to a cable with a larger core diameter that allows multiple light modes to travel simultaneously, (according to the WIKIS) best suited for short distances....

It's common knowledge that interoffice fibres use DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing.
Basically it's LITERALLY the same thing that Alex Bell was tinkering with when he was trying to invent the harmonic telegraph in 1876!!!!!
More than one signal traveling on ONE strand - in this case fibre and 'light colors' instead of copper and electrical frequencies.

Nothing new under the 'son' 'eh?

 

I’ve read about contractors who hit fiber in people’s yards that was supposed to be a lot deeper than it was.
A very expensive repair

 

It depends.
If you hit a 256 strand cable with a back-hoe or a drill - yep....it can be expensive for the telecom because of certain service terms and rebates....not to mention a little OT and some supplies.
More often than not fiber strands are cut by competitors' contractors (directional boring) after a bad locating job.
When cables get cut I can help the outside techs by measuring the strand with an OTDR which will spot a break, broken splice, or no fault at all - which means the problem (if any) is at the customer's prem.
Ariel fiber has actually been stolen - which has GOT to be a BIG let down for the would-be copper thief!!!

One of my jobs is diagnosing and isolating faults in fiber circuits which is happening FAR LESS often than it used to - and automated testing and dispatch is also helping me to cover a much larger turf than I would otherwise be able to.
Big Bell's strategery for now is to retire people like me without back filling the position - and Robbie the Robot still cannot drive or replace failed equipment or fibres - so unless I screw the pooch I'm probably good to go for a few more years.

 

" ... measuring the strand with an OTDR ..." Please take a moment with me to think about time-domain reflectometry. It was developed for exactly this purpose. But it has made a second concurrent career in measuring moisture in soils.

Moisture in soils is far from trivial as it exerts major control on plant growth, that in turn exerts major control on our fundamentals. If that needs buttressing, I'd provide in 'Environmental'. It is simple enough to measure moisture in soils, but previously, one would take soil cores, weigh, dry, and weigh again. It is often a poor choice to make many holes and do all that other stuff.

TDR technology with remarkably few modifications measures soil moisture immediately and (nearly) non-invasively. While cable guys might disagree, I'd claim that TDR technology has advanced the human enterprise more in this way. I put it to readers that soil science would never have developed this independently. A great debt is owed to cable guys in need of locating line breaks.

==
There are other ways neutron scattering in soils can also measure soil moisture, but requires radioisotopic sources that are very frisky and not ideal for wide use. The future of this will probably belong to capacitive soil-moisture sensors, now mass produced for about $1. But those give different results in different soils, and need to be calibrated with TDR.