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The US Rural Broadband Crisis
Ian Lamont writes "Rural US residents don't have the same kind of access to broadband services as those who live in urban or suburban areas. According to the federal government, just 17% of rural U.S. households subscribe to broadband service. But the problem is more than a conflict between Wall Street and small-town residents wanting to surf the 'Net or play Warcraft — the lack of broadband access prevents many businesses from growing and diversifying rural economies, as it's expensive or impossible to get broadband. From the article: 'Soon after moving to Gilsum, N.H. (population 811), [Kim] Rossey learned that he couldn't get broadband to support his Web programming business, TooCoolWebs. DSL wasn't available, and the local cable service provider wasn't interested in extending the cabling for its broadband service the three-tenths of a mile required to reach Rossey's house — even if he paid the full $7,000 cost. Rossey ended up signing a two-year, $450-per-month contract for a T1 line that delivers 1.44Mbit/sec. of bandwidth. He pays 10 times more than the cable provider would have charged and receives one quarter of the bandwidth.' The author also notes that larger businesses are being crimped, from a national call center to a national retailer which claims 17% of its store locations can't get broadband."
Sucks, but seriously, do a little research before you move, if your business depends on it. Just reeks of irresponsibility. (Not to say not having broadband at 100% penetration doesn't suck, but I'm not gonna cry a river cause you didn't do your research ahead of time ... )
As population density drops outside of metropolitan areas, it's impossible for telecommunications companies or cable service providers to justify the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile it can cost to bring fiber to every rural community, let alone every home. It's easy to make a superficial comparison with other countries - particularly European - who have higher population densities. I'd like to see a study in which the figures for broadband access were weighted for density.
We do happen to have relatively good Internet via cable (1 mb) but you can't take anything for granted. Yes, the big, evil Telcos don't want to put stuff out here because it costs a lot. And yes, they should be soundly trashed because it was already "paid" for.
A crisis? Oh well. Caveat Emptor.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
New Hampshire is sure known for their rednecks!
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Seems like this is a great argument in favor of municipalities building their own fiber infrastructure like they do with roads, sewers and the like.
Or, like electricity, people could for a Co-Op and get their own broadband.
http://www.google.com/search?q=satellite+broadband
But it's expensive ($80 or more a month), slow (I had it for 2 years, best DL speed I ever got was only 5 times faster than a 28.8 modem), unstable (hard rain = No internet), unsupported (well...okay, they have people on the other end of the line, but they aren't very good, and they can't fix your problem), and high latency (1500 ms ping is quick. VPN doesn't work, and forget about gaming).
We need a Tennessee Valley Authority-like program to get Rural America on the net.
In urban areas we've gotten complacent that broadband is available, and just works. But in reality, the shape of our broadband is sad at best. My experiences are at best unreliable and inconsistant. Not to mention that Wifi access (even for paid subsribers) is limited at best. We really need to get on our horses and make country wide broadband and wifi (to a lesser extend wifi) an imperitive.
This doesn't even bring up the point of pricing structures of broadband in urban environments. Cable is around $50 a month (give or take) for 10mbit. A T1 (granted, a dedicated line) is around $400 for 1.54 mbit. Tell me that makes sense?
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Unless the business has a strict need for high upload speed, why not satellite? My house and my studio are outside the reach of cable and DSL and I've been using Wild Blue's service at both locations for about 2 years. My brother's business uses it as well. Granted, costs aren't competitive with DSL or cable at a given bandwidth, but it is a lot less expensive than a $450/month T1. The package I have at my studio is advertised at 1.5Mbps down and 256kbps up. Overall it is just as reliable as the cable connection I had when I lived in the city. Wild Blue and a couple of other providers cover pretty much everywhere in the US, including Gilsum, New Hampshire. I do agree with the point of the article, that rural areas need better service. I wish BPL was available at my studio's location, just for its up/down parity, but isn't quite the dire straits it is made out to be. That is particuarly true if we are talking about 'households' that don't likely need a lot of upload bandwidth.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
It isn't just Rural economies that are affected by this.
We have a couple of clients in the exurbs who do logistics: mainly deliveries into cities. The warehouses are in the exurbs where land is cheap.
But they can't get broadband at the warehouses. Remote assistance means "bring the laptop to Panera so I can remote in."
You can't run cable everywhere.
If it costs $450 a month for a line, then you have to consider that against the cost of moving to within the coverage area. In some cases, those lines cost a few thousand dollars to lay.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
seriously this guy needs to hand in his geek card
1. should have checked this before moving if it was business critical
2. 0.3 of a mile away? do a deal with ur neighbour and network urself the last 500m
...its a luxury not a basic utility.
rural areas have always suffered from having limited access to luxury items when compared to more densely populated areas. i just don't see the logic in this complaint. i'm not saying its fair...but its nothing new.
if internet is really more important than living someplace that is sparsely populated then you pay a premium to get what you need...or you move. my in-laws live on a dairy farm and they still drive 45 minutes just to buy groceries.
dude.
Most rural areas have not been deregulated. Unless the area was a "Bell Holdings Company" (owned by Ma Bell before the company was split), regulations still exist preventing competition in that region. Whoever owns the area has every [legal] right to say no to expansion.
I wrote an earlier post on the subject about the same thing going on in my neck of the woods.
$50/month for a good pipe might sound cheap to you, but I don't like shelling out that much for it. And, rural pay tends to be quite a bit lower (at least it is here in Kansas) so not many people have that much extra to shell out just for respectable web browsing. Rural folks (see my parents) aren't as tech saavy so the cost benefit for their low level of anticipated use of broadband doesn't justify the costs. I've been trying to get my parents to ditch the Net Zero account and go BB, but that'll never happen since they can't see the value beyond their very limited use of the internet (which I know from experience would increase if they had a connection that wasn't frustrating to use).
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The main reason I set up my Web-based business in a small town in Rural GA (aside from the fact that it was my hometown many years ago) is that it costs next to nothing to rent a decent sized office. I pay $400/month for rent on what would demand 5 times that in a larger urban or metropolitan area. So I trade off cheap Internet for cheap rent.
Most places that have any decent population density have cellular service, and most cellular providers offer near-broadband speeds for less than $100/mo for unlimited access. If that isn't an option, you could always bite the proverbial bullet and get a full or partial T-1.
Brad
Qwest was being dumb and said all their circuits were being used... Even though I'm in the middle of a brand new subdivision and I think if I would have been getting a phone line with my DSL they would have found a circuit for me.
What to do? Have someone I know 1/4 mile away get DSL and put some OpenWRT boxes in Rooftennas. They don't control you. If you have line of site to someone within 10 miles that can get to the internet, then you have internet. If you are good with antennas, you can of course go much further.
Seattlewireless, OpenWRT, and Pasadena Networks are all good resources. Cowboy-UP!
I didn't RTFA, but can't you get wireless broadband access cards from your phone company/cell phone company? That's what friends of our family did when they found out they couldn't get broadband to their house. The monthly access fees are the same as what you pay cable companies.
If that's the case, this guy really doesn't do research at all...
Web programming business? Hmm...
This isn't a fault of rural America or telecoms at all, Mr Rossey failed to adequately research the area before purchasing a property.
If he depended on the web so much for his company, you would have thought he would at least know what he can and cannot get before signing the contracts and accepting the keys.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I moved from 63116 to 62014 (metro st louis to rural IL) Ive gone from "good" DSL service, to no service.
Fronteir offers it, but they are the ONLY carrer in the area, and due to there monopoly can charge whatever they want.
There is limited Point to Point wi-fi but its even more expensive, with worse connect rate, and finding the company that offers it has been near on impossible. (ive had to stop at strangers houses that have the 2.4GHz antennas on there roof to ask them who there service is with)
I used to live in rural Virginia. If you actually lived in town, rather than out in the county, you could get DSL or cable. In fact, the cable Internet access rocked compared to what a lot of people in Northern Virginia have told me about their service! I would frequently get 400-500kb/sec on Adelphia there, with interruptions being rare.
Obviously, if you want to live 20 miles from the nearest cable or telecom office, you'll have to put up with this. It's the price you pay for having so much space.
In many rural areas, wireless broadband is making inroads. Find the nearest neighbor that *can* get cable, and set up a wireless bridge to them. If there's a few people around you, set up a good access point and resell it.
I know, some cable plans don't like that... but on the other hand, it's not like they were planning to sell it to those folks anyway. Also, in my area, you can pay for "enterprise cable" service which is very reasonable, and they won't complain about what you run on it.
If AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and ilk refuse to upgrade their rural networks then pull the subsidies and make them compete on their own merits. At the VERY least they would provide WiFi broadband at reasonable rates.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Just another pointless 'we care for the bandwidth deprived' piece.
Why are some people so interested in 'keeping up' with the rest of the world? Are these the same people that get a 2nd mortgage so they can buy a bigger SUV than their neighbors?
WHO CARES. Internet access is a LUXARY for most people. It's not stopping anyone from doing business. Its not keeping people from living perfectly normal happy lives.
GET OVER YOURSELF. ITS NOT THAT IMPORTANT. FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO WORRY ABOUT!
If monthly cost is a concern, he could pay the $7000 outright and get lower per-month billing and the cost-savings per month could pay for the installation.
The game.
I live in a town of 2000 and enjoy 6Mbit DSL (and could get screwed with 3Mbit Cable for $49.99). Now, I don't really consider my town rural (sure, 2000 is small), I consider my family members out on farms rural. A lot of them are getting point to point wireless internet now though. It is pricey compared to DSL and such, but they can get a 3Mbit plan.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
CANARIE (Canada) has many interesting articles and presentations on cracking the last mile problem. In short: municipalities contract someone to build dark fiber networks to the home, homeowners buy a strand of fiber, and competing service providers plug their electronics into the fiber. There are variations on the theme of course but with a neutral party owning the fiber it makes it very easy for new service providers to set up shop.
I'd insist that ISPs peer all local traffic at full speed, or at least 100Mbps symmetric, but let competition sort everything else out.
I live in a big city with multiple broadband choices for both my home and business.
I used travel to farmland in a small town south of here when I want to escape. Lately, EVDO coverage has expanded all the way to the farm, and there is no place for me to hide. The local telephone cooperative, made up of some really smart tech-savvy farmers, took advantage of the Universal Service Fund to set up a cheap Asterix PBX in their CO (more like a shack) to set up one of those "Call China for the Cost of Calling Podunk" call-termination revenue-collection centers. This funded DSL for everybody for nothing more than the cost of removing all the old bridge taps. They even started packaging it with Dish Network. I actually wanted to get away from it all; now I can't escape.
Last week I left the farm and went to the mountains to escape. Even the summit of Pike's Peak is now covered in high-bandwidth cellphone antennas from every carrier. Sheesh.
In north central VT there is a company called Waitsfield-Champlain telecom - they've been around I think 100 years.
They offer up to 4Mb/s dsl in most of their service area so some operators seem able to satisfy their customers demands.
I live less than 20 miles from Gilsum, and about a mile from a (relatively) major regional ISP with good SDSL. I did my research before moving here. But the crisis isn't someone moving to Gilsum blindly. The crisis is that there are lots of ways that solid broadband access can give advantage to a business. Good broadband is a strong advantage for economic development. So rural areas need to find ways to develop it. It can be profitable, evidently, even for the providers. The highest DSL penetration in the country is claimed by VTel in Vermont. Meanwhile the State of Vermont is looking at ways to subsidize extending wireless access to the remotest valleys - with the Republican governor's strong support.
The crisis is that what's good for business and economic development on the whole is often not taken care of by the incumbent carriers, who have discovered ways to make more profits elsewhere without delivering particularly good or advanced services, just by squeezing customers they already have. It's not that they couldn't make real profits in rural areas, but that they'd have to do some actual work to earn them, rather than just live off the legacy of the networks they've already built.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
This problem would appear to be hampering the economic development of rural areas, specifically in regard to things like call centers or other "warm body" like enterprises that korporate America could take advantage of. The cost of doing business in rural areas would be significantly lower than in metro areas, especially where wages are concerned. Commute times and quality of life would factor in also. Why aren't our rural areas leveraged for their labor?
You would think that rural economic development entities would be trying to encourage broadband...
Perhaps states and counties could encourage broadband expansion into rural areas via incentives.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Admittedly, SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and TOS (Terms of Service) are closely related, but that $400 T1 line does give you:
1) A certain guarantee of performance from that 1.544 Mbps line. Your 10M cable modem, on the other hand, is shared with your neighborhood. (Sort of. DOCSIS is around 30, your cap is 10, still that means you're still fundamentally shared if there are more than 3 users in your neighborhood.)
2) Probably a block of static IPs instead of DHCP
3) No "no servers" ban in your TOS
4) Higher reliability
5) Upgraded support guarantees
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Why not find a few a neighbors within WiFi range (Pringles can, anyone?) and subsidize the cost of the T1?
AT&T was founded on Theodore Vail's vision of "universal service." There were good and bad things about Ma Bell, but one good thing about it was that it united the nation with a uniform, uniformly priced, highly reliable service.
Exactly the same thing is true of the post office. It costs the postal service more to mail a letter to Alaska than to mail it across town, but the price of the stamp is 41 cents.
Universal service is only possible if the service provider is allowed to cross-subsidize the areas that are expensive to service with revenues from the areas that are cheap to service. Competition and the free market will always produce wildly varying prices and cream-skimming (in which the most profitable markets get service from multiple suppliers and the least profitable get no service at all).
If the Internet is now as fundamentally important as the telephone or the postal service, then--just as with the interstate highway system, or the system of air traffic control which enables airline service to be nationwide--there will need to be national policy to that effect. Otherwise it won't happen.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You're not even guaranteed 56kbps on your residential "broadband" line. Hell, you're not even guaranteed it will work AT ALL on any given day. When you pay for a T1, what you're paying for is getting every single goddamned one of the 1.544M bits every second of every day in both directions--and the right to do whatever the hell you want with them.
Where I grew up (Mojave Desert) there was a Beach Access Crisis. It was far harder for us to enjoy water activities than those people in urban areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco. But the smog and traffic in LA was hideous. In California, we have better access to fresh fruit and vegetables than people in many parts of the country.
Broadband is not "unavailable", it is merely more expensive. Wherever you live, some things will be more available and others will be less available. Get over it. The fees that were (stupidly, I believe) tacked on to all phone bills to fund rural access are still there - just a big pot of cash that the telco's squabble over even though routing phone service to rural areas is no longer a real issue.
Whenever I hear talk of rural access fees, I wonder why the same people aren't championing an urban affordibility fee. Tacking a huge additional fee onto transfer and property taxes in rural areas to help fund the ability to live in San Francisco or Silicon Valley makes about as much (non)sense.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
"Soon after moving to Gilsum, Rossey learned that he couldn't get broadband"
Hmmm... wrong order. Check first, then move.
Also: Why didn't he simply use satellite (Hughes)?
It works OK....
Soon after moving to Gilsum, N.H. (population 811), [Kim] Rossey learned that he was an idiot.
Please. This guys makes his living on the web, and yet decides to move to small town USA. And only after buying the house and moving, does he think to check if broadband is available. And then makes it sound like his high T1 bill is the telco's fault, not his own.
If broadband was that important to him, he should have made it part of his purchase requirements and done some research. I've recently moved to small town USA myself, and it was the first question I asked whenever a property was presented for my review. He's a moron for taking it for granted.
Also, more small communities than you'd think do have broadband. One town over, they're getting fiber to the curb laid down--in a town of 500. It can happen. In my small town of 12K we have several options for broadband.
Moral of the story: if your livelihood depends on the availability of a resource, you should make sure it's available before you commit to a lifestyle.
--
$tar -xvf
I'm willing to bet there's a difference in semantics, here.
"can't get" is not equal to "won't pay what they're asking".
VOTE!
Echo from seventy years ago:
Everyone knows electrical availability in rural areas sucks. It's just not cost effective to deliver it and that's not going to change with current technology. Get over it.
Look up the Rural Electrification Act of 1936.
Rural US residents don't have the same kind of access to broadband services as those who live in urban or suburban areas.
Uh...in Boston, we can't get Verizon FiOS. They've been cherry-picking the suburbs and towns while refusing to do anything in Boston or the poorer towns; they want to run fiber and get people who have HDTVs and will go for all the expensive cable packages, and not load down the network. They're not interested in high density areas that will suck up bandwidth and have customers that will be stingier. Urban users are also more likely to share; an entire block could work very happily off a single FiOS connection and a 802.11G access point, and that scares the hell out of them.
If you google around, you can find a color-coded map showing where it is actively offered, where they are deploying, and where they're sitting on their hands. Supposedly, Boston is "in progress", but something tells me the Verizon trucks are only on Beacon, Newbury, etc.
My folks can't get DSL in their home town; one town over has their choice of DSL providers and bitrates. Verizon never bothered to provide anything more than their shitty 1.5mbit/128kbit (yes, 128kbit!) service and sDSL at insanely expensive prices. The ONLY choice is Comcast, and thanks to the "cable access committee", they decided that because Comcast has thrown a few dollars at a local community television station (which mostly broadcasts a perpetual powerpoint presentation), they should get exclusive access to the town (in MA, each town licenses cable TV providers.)
Please help metamoderate.
Surely, if the town is big enough to support it, this is something that could have been seen as a business opportunity?
I'm embarrassed for New Hampshire. Stop whining. If you live in the middle of nowhere, don't expect to have all the amenities of a large town or city. You wouldn't expect to find an Asian market or a tapas bar there, why would you expect to find broadband? All are "public" amenities, but they aren't omnipresent, and one can't expect them to be. Either wait until broadband gets out to the boonies, or move. In the meantime, stop complaining about where you have chosen to live.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
They can't just lay the line and be done with it - they have to lay AND MAINTAIN that line, and they have to lay AND MAINTAIN that line on ONE SUBSCRIBER'S worth of revenue.
The problem is that the phone company has the ability to charge $450/month for laying the T1 line, but once the cable company lays the line, it's obligated to charge him the same price it charges all the other customers, which doesn't make financial sense for the cable company.
It's not that the cable company doesn't want to provide him service - I'm sure the cable company would have been happy to lay the line for free if they could charge him $450/month - it's that the laws governing the rates cable companies charge prevent the cable company from providing service in a manner that makes financial sense for them to do so.
paintball
This is not anything new. You don't start a major banking corporation in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere. You have to go to a major city (preferably one that specializes in the banking industry, like Charlotte). And for a long time, if you wanted to start ANY sort of serious technology company, you had to do it in or near Silicon Valley. This has, thankfully, changed somewhat as the internet has spread, but the basics remain the same.
If you want to live in the country or in some dipshit town that can't afford to build up its broadband infrastructure, this is part of the price you pay for that choice. Your power is going to go out more often. Your cable service is going to be backwards. Your shopping selection is going to suck. You're going to have to drive further to see an independent film. And you may not get broadband. Welcome to the country--behind the times since the INVENTION OF THE CITY.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Anyone else think that maybe, JUST MAYBE, our attitude towards the lax customer service portion of corporations have allowed them to grow lazy and fat as hell? I mean, it's sad when in Asia and the netherlands, most of their people have broadband (and most of the intro packages are cheaper and much faster than the crap we offer in the US). Yet, they're cool with keeping us underdeveloped because it would cost them an extra buck or two (even though it would eventually earn itself back). But nooo, they want to make the money now. And you allow them to continue with the short sighted business model, which in turn hampers our development.
Keep it up, man. Keep making America great. I mean, who needs to be on the leading edge of service anyway?
It's not all that different in urban areas. I've recently moved to the 3rd largest city in the U.S., but still made damn sure that readily available broadband was a major part of the decision when choosing a lease to sign. Even in the city, you still have to check on these things (there were 3 otherwise great locations I had to turn down for lack of sufficient net access). If your livelihood depends on broadband then you are a total dipshit for not making sure it's available (at a reasonable price) *before* you move.
Company builds out network to most profitable areas first. News at 11.
Duh!
paintball
It's not just a rural problem. My office is located in a major Minneapolis suburb (Minnetonka). We are at the extreme distance allowable from the central office of the phone company so we barely can get DSL. The cable company says they won't spend $40,000 they claim it will cost to run cable across the street to our office building. We're having to double up sub 1megabit DSL lines like ISDN lines of yore to get any reasonable amount of speed. It's absolutely ridiculous.
I'm in the same situation. I was originally going to move the 56Kb line out to the new house in the country and host my webserver there. Sure, it would cost a lot per month (same as his T) but that's the price of doing business. Then I got a sweetheart deal from my local ISP: help in exchange for hosting, plus a 384Kb frame relay line to my house. That was great for a few years, but it wasn't costing them any less, and when they quit using frame relay, they had to drop my home connection.
No cable on our road; too far out for DSL. I had used dialup, but I'd rather choke myself to death with a hampster. Tried satellite, but interactive use over a satellite is like shooting yourself in the foot, day after day. Finally found a local business which had cable with line of sight. I pay him $20/month rent to host a cablemodem, router, and antenna on the roof. I pay the cableco for a 5MB/512KB business connection, and I'm all set.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Well, yes, one always should do one's research beforehand. But that's like only seeing the tree in front of you, and missing the entire forest.
The basic problem here, and throughout the U.S., is that the so-called "last mile" lines are tightly controlled by the local monopoly, and closed off almost completely to any competition. When you don't have competition, you have no incentive to offer better service.
The only way we'll ever see either wider deployment, or 100 Mbs to the house in the next 10 years, is if the Telephone companies are divested of the Central Offices. That is, these are spun off into businesses which sell the lines to competing companies. Only then will you have motivation to upgrade the last mile with better services and speeds.
What I find amusing is that there's always someone who will say "but there won't be any interest in upgrading the rural areas". They always fail to realize that there is no interest right now, and isn't any on the horizon.
If you make this market truly competitive, then there will be interest. Now, granted the price will necessarily be higher, and that's where the main objection from people living out in the rural area comes from. But at least there will be service for a price. And that's what is needed to get the infrastructure ball rolling to deploy better solutions than just a T1 (which really looks rather pathetic these days).
It's also amusing that America is facing internation pressure on this front (while doing nothing about it). Other countries are deploying high-speed internet (100+ Mbs), while the best we've got being rolled out is a pathetic 6 Mbps.
Silicon Valley in particular is extremely lacking here.
Unless this is changed, and soon, there will be a lot of other countries which are in a better position to compete than the U.S.. The next 10 years will be interesting.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
The issue is broadband is becoming required infrastructure for business and rural areas don't have it. Areas of the country with less population density now have reliable power, roads and telephone service because the infrastructure was universally built out. Because of programs like the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) that electrified rural areas and the Interstate Highway system and regulation in industries like railroads and telephones, factories can reasonably be located in rural areas. Recent census data indicates urban and suburban areas are growing faster that rural areas which could be an indication that urban job growth is drawing people in. The question we have to ask ourselves as a nation, is do we want to return to a situation where production is centered on large urban areas or make the investment in infrastructure to make rural areas viable.
Those low-broadband areas are the same ones that vote reliably Republican.
It's yet another demonstration that the less informed, the less connected to other people outside your clannish town, the less modern you are, the more likely you are to vote for Republicans, or to not vote while your neighbors choose Republicans to "represent" you.
--
make install -not war
I'm largely libertarian (I know, I know, I've surrendered my credentials with this post alone) but some things, like mail service, phone service, water service, and yes, internet, aren't profitable enough on the small scale for the greed factor to make it worth providing service to houses scattered across the prairie, or even in small towns. So we have to choose between no internet at all or cries of encroaching socialism. The question is whether the economic benefits of internet access are enough to warrant the problems caused by government involvement.
Were the benefits of phone or mail access enough to warrant government involvement? Anyone want to speculate on the economic life of a town with no phone or internet or public roads? The phone system may not have been government-supplied, but they did guarantee the monopoly that made it sufficiently profitable. The distinction isn't that important, in this context.
But...But...I thought Silicon Valley was over - and you could do an internet business ANYWHERE!
The media told me this in 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2004, 2006....
It has also been determined that rural residents don't have the same kind of access to prostitution services as those who live in urban areas. The obvious solution is a federal government mandate that all rural women must contribute 10 hours per week of "community service."
Alternatively, rural hard-up losers could just drive to town to go a-whoring, those not living in range of any regular ISPs can just get satellite Internet access. The real tragedy, if some a-hole tries to fix this with legislation, is that if left to the market, it will result in someone figuring out a cost-effective and profitable way of getting broadband to sparsely populated areas.
if you move out of the city to get away from it you may get away from some things you cannot live without.
Frankly, the net doesn't matter to me at home. I did the get away from it move but I still have all the access I ever need because I checked what was available before making the final decision.
I do not believe the majority of rural people want high speed internet, let alone want the net to begin with.
I do not believe hard wiring rural areas is the way to go, wireless is the more efficient method
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
For a business, wouldn't a T1 be better, though?.
You're not at the mercy of some ISP that may cut you off because you've suddenly used more bandwidth than you were supposed.
You have some public IPs, and can use them to provide whatever services you want. You're not beholden to the ISP with respect to what services you can and can't provide. For instance, a few years ago, a fella I worked with wanted to get a business cable internet connection run to his small business so he could host his own website, etc. The cable company told him that while they would happily provide him the line, he would not be allowed to run his own webpage (i.e. they would restrict connections to port 80/443 just like with the regular consumer grade cable internet).
And there's always the reliability factor. I would suspect a T1 is going to be significantly more reliable than either a cable or DSL connection.
So while there are obviously some bottom line cost savings, at what point do the other benefits of a T1 line start to counter balance that, especially with respect to a business?
RFC2119
Regardless. Federal taxes have been collected and redistributed to the ISP's to fund rural "information superhighway" infrastructure. Where did the money go? Did the ISP's just steal it and refuse to build the infrastructure? Do we need to recover the funds through taxes on the ISPs themselves? It has been paid for, now it needs to be built.
Second, internet access in rural areas is a huge boon to job growth in those areas where land is cheap. It is a win for everyone involved. I'd rather "outsource" to rural America than to India.
Third, huge urban sprawl is an ecological nightmare. The government needs to provide incentives to redistribute populations on a wider geographic basis. Not having access to basic business infrastructure makes this very very hard.
They are, actually.
Remember, redneck!=Southerner.
Although there are a bunch of rednecks down South, that's only as a corollary to the fact that there are a bunch of rednecks everywhere.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Look, you can sit there and claim 'luxury' until the cows come home. The fact of the matter is, a large portion of the internet IS NOT ACCESSIBLE via 19k dial up (or even 43k, etc). It just isn't. Not even email works well due to things like linked images, embedded attachments, and spam. You tie up your link downloading the message, including the attachment, BEFORE you get to decide to not read it. It's a trap. And unless you've actually spent time behind a modem lately, you have no idea how much this has changed over the last several years.
For those of you crying 'luxury', let me ask, what percentage of the internet should be inaccessible before this IS a crisis? 50%? 80%? 100%?? Or is the internet in general just a toy? Perhaps you envy the Amish??
This isn't the deepest African bush we're talking about here. This is the USA, where supposedly most of these ideas originated.
Niggers can't even afford the computer and broadband to jack off their muh dikks to pictures of white wimmins
Life must be good in the boonies if this is a "crisis".
I'm sick of subsidizing other people's lifestyles. Where I live (dense suburban) you couldn't buy a damn doghouse for what a rural mansion would cost. We have smog, traffic, noise, crime, etc. But I'm here. Why? Because of sushi bars and broadband.
I already subsidize rural electricity, postal service, and highway infrastructure. People who live in the country can get satellite internet or live with dialup. Don't expect me to pay for your choice of scenery.
I found this study last winter when I weighing broadband options for a rural location. It's quite a thorough survey of the options available: wired options discussed include Fibre, DSL, Cable and BPL (Broadband over Power Lines); wireless options discussed include WiFi (long-distance share with a neighbour), Broadband Cellular, MMDS and LMDS (Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Systems and Local Multipoint Distribution Systems), Motorola Canopy and WiMAX.
Of all the wireless technologies mentioned in the report, Motorola Canopy appears to be the most intriguing. Think of it as a network of towers, like a cell-phone network, but spaced much farther apart. Distances of up to 200 km are said to be feasible. The subscribers get a dish to point at the nearest tower. Speeds are impressive -- comparable to cable service. But [satellite is] expensive ($80 or more a month), slow (I had it for 2 years, best DL speed I ever got was only 5 times faster than a 28.8 modem), unstable (hard rain = No internet), unsupported (well...okay, they have people on the other end of the line, but they aren't very good, and they can't fix your problem), and high latency (1500 ms ping is quick. VPN doesn't work, and forget about gaming). Latency and cost are certainly a problem with satellite. But speed? Not that I can tell. I have used satellite hook-ups and the speed is comparable to a moderate DSL (over 400 kb/s.)
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
3/10 of a mile!? Give me a break, it's called RONJA (http://ronja.twibright.com). That's the problem with society these days - no inspiration, no creativity - reach out and THINK. Remember when you were in elementary school, all the talk about critical thinking? Maybe if you had been paying attention rather than stare at Susie Rottencrotch, you would've strayed away from the herd-like thinking. Seriously though, in this case, there were alternatives to paying $450/month for a slow fractional T-1.
For an individual, the ability to play WOW online and chat with your friends may be a luxury. However, depending on one's age, being without the technical resources provided by internet access is going to leave one seriously disadvantaged. Moreover, for a business, lack of internet is a very serious hit. Email, and in many cases a webpage etc are extremely important. The GP is right. Maybe in 1997 the internet was more a luxury, but in 2007 when most of your customers have an internet connection, and expect to be able to look your company, your email, and various other such things online, it's very near necessity.
No, it's not something that's 100% necessary. Heck, a human could get by with a sharp stick, a cave, and a campfire, but the fact is that life in this day and age, and much of the communications associated with such, depend on being online to at least some extent. A bigger issue is specifically broadband access, but in this day-and-age I'd say that "broadband" (and I use the term sparingly, become some is near-dialup in terms of speed anyways) is pretty much near the level of requirement as a phone or other similar communications services. It depends on your lifestyle/career too, for somebody in a technical field it shifts from convenience towards necessity rather quickly
Try searching for a job sometime without a decent-speed connection and a cellphone. And for the record, my grandmother has neither and quite often complains about the lack of communication from other family members, whereas my grandparents on the other end of the family are online, and happily receive email from the family up north, replete with pictures of my cousin's young child, and other such messages from their friends back in Europe etc. Not a bare necessity, but definitely a functional part of life.
You're right, lack of broadband sucks (my friend Mike in the sticks outside Columbia, IL is on dialup), but it's hardly a "crisis".
A crisis is when you're broke and you run out of toilet paper. A crisis is when you're addicted to cigarettes and can't find a light.
A crisis is when the Soviets ship ICBMs to Cuba and the President threatens to destroy the world. THAT's a crisis. Broadband? There are businesses here in Springfield, where you can choose cable or DSL, on dialup.
-mcgrew
maybe a few hundred billion tossed at the carriers will solve this, wait, we already did that didn't we.
200 Billion Dollar Rip off
It's about 2700 a month to string a T1 to here in Southern Ontario.
Bell/Rogers are rolling out WiMAX off cell towers though... in urban areas that are already well served by DSL/Cable.
My parents live 5 miles outside of a town of 2000 people, one hour away from a town of 100,000 people and 2 hours away from a city of 500,000, yet they are still able to get High Speed interent via Satellite, and at a reasonable cost.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
In my experience, Europe, in particularly the Scandinavian countries, and the US sell connections differently. In the US you usually don't get as high a signaling rate. 10-12mbps is generally the max you get. However, the rate you pay for is one that is properly supported by upstream. Your 6mb DSL will get 6mb to any site that can support it. The Scandinavian countries offer much faster pipes to your house, but don't back that up further up the chain. It's a big WAN in effect. You'll get great transfers to anyone on that ISP (at least on that ISP in your country) but you get much slower transfers to the rest of the world.
Now maybe that's changed, but if it has I certainly don't see it in my experience.
Also, for what it's worth as a given datapoint. Speedtest.net shows North America as having the fastest aggregate connections, above Europe. Of course there's problems with the way a test like that works, but it does indicate that perhaps the rest of the world isn't as blazing fast as people on Slashdot like ot make it out.
Most of these people whining are well-off - rich retirees moving out to their hobby farm in the middle of nowhere who expect service just like they had in town, or agribusiness - the first already sucking a tax off my phone bills to subsidize rural phone service, and the latter billions in government farm and ethanol subsidies.
Al rural wireless internet IS available. An old college acquaintance in Hamilton County Texas has been providing it for years, has been pretty successful, and hosts dozens of web sites of local businesses.
Walk it off, crybabies.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Wow, this article goes on complain about the lack of rural broadband access... Oh criminy, I guess I'll just do some fishing/hiking/gardening/whatever as a trade off. I would like to see an article about how there is lower population, and, coincidently fewer residences, in rural areas and what incentive certain private corporations have stringing a couple miles of coax up to Cleetus's moonshine shack. Better yet, how about an article about what rural is and means.
~ In Trust, We Trust ~
We just spent two weeks in rural Wyoming. We had broadband in some pretty surprising places, like Dubois (population 900). Those who had it were WiFi-ing it, in fact if you hang out near the piano on the sidewalk, you have multiple coverage from the local hotel, coffee shop and restaurant.
The larger problem we found with info access was cellular. Cingular is basically nonexistent in WY, Verizon's a little better, Sprint is best. Cingular has "partner networks" which I still haven't had explained adequately, for which you are apparently charged a premium. And there's a tiny piece of the info that says if you use the partners too much you will be in violation of your contract. Nice.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Seriously, one of the towns/villages along my normal work route - population under 1500 - is halfway up a mountain, far enough from the city to be pain to install high-speed, and yet still has internet.
See here for more info. Commercial broadband internet has been available for years, and residential popped in more recently. Here's another town with a population of a little under 3000. We've got areas that are little more than a smudge on the map that have decent broadband, since both Telus and Shaw cable have a good trunk. On top of that, smaller or more-local providers such as OCIS provide internet via shared/leased connections (with their own infrastructure added to make the last mile) and other technologies such as wireless etc... without being strangled off by the big guys
Sorry, but if we Canucks can manage it, the US can too. I'm fairly sure it's a case of piss-poor implementation, support, and just basic greed that keeps it from happening.
And before people start pointing out that the US has more population to reach, I'd like to point out that Canada has plenty of area, and plenty of open space between locations but still manages to for the most-part get internet out to nowheresville across plenty of long-empty distance and nasty unpleasant environmental conditions (no, we don't have 365 snow here, we go range from as much as +40c/104F in summer to -40C/-40F in winter, so we get it *all*)
Wasn't the "Universal Service Fee" required by the FCC and state carrier tariff regulatory bodies created precisely for this purpose? To compel carriers to provide services to rural customers by collecting an additional charge from the high-density (and profitable) city areas?
Time to file complaints with your local tariff board and the FCC, folks. You are getting the government you pay for, or more accurately, the carriers are getting the government that they've paid for.
There is a BFH (big freakin' hill) in between my house and the only wireless Inet provider, no cable, and the phone line is horrible quality. I barely get any cellphone reception as well. About the only real choice for the Intrarwebs is satellite when you live in the sticks like I do. Wildblue has decent connection speed for the $$, but you won't be playing WoW on it due to the lag - typically between 700ms and 1200ms.
I tried getting a T1, but Verizon wouldn't sell it because it was a residential address. How soon for stratellites?
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
A friend of mine invented a solution, it's called "Vertical Inlaid Fibre"
Here is a blurb from his website:
TeraSpan Networks Joins Initiative to Bring Broadband to Rural America
Vancouver, BC - June 15, 2007. TeraSpan Networks' Vertical Inlaid FiberTM (VIFTM) System has been added to a the accepted materials list of the United States Department of Agriculture's Rural Development Telecommunications Program (RDTP) supporting expanded broadband access to rural American communities that currently receive limited service.
"We are very pleased that the RDTP has granted us technical acceptance," said Lisa Payne, TeraSpan's President. "Small towns should have access to the same resources as urban and suburban areas, and our technology can help these communities by significantly increasing the ease of broadband deployments while simultaneously decreasing the costs."
The technical acceptance of TeraSpan's VIFTM System will qualify the company to participate in RDTP financed projects, including many Fiber to the Home projects. TeraSpan's innovative technology is ideal for such projects as it is faster and more economical to deploy than traditional methods, and its flexible design allows for the future expansion of the network. TeraSpan's VIFTM System consists of a rugged 2-piece conduit that "zippers" closed over the fiber optic cables and is then placed in a slim cut in the ground.
http://www.teraspan.com/
I live in the sticks - I knew when i moved here that commodity internet access was not going to be available, but my line of work allowed me to pay the high prices and install a T1. I did so, but what I found was that even though I was willing to pay for it the 'locals' simply were not smart enough to support it. So anyhow, I have a $14,000 bill for service that is not even turned on. I take them to court. To my suprise, the court is unwilling to force them to meet their contractual obligations. Bottom line is I win, but Bell South (AT&T) walks away from their contract, I have no service and now I have to move (again).
The problems goes beyond 'not available at reasonable costs', the problem is not available if the phone company doesn't feel like providing it. So what does the universal access charge that every single phone customer pays every month go to? Certainly not universal access.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Every time I hear something like this, I think there should be a tax on rural residents to subsidize parking for urban residents. After all, lack of parking has negative effects urban development.
As someone this affects, I can say that this definitely is a serious problem. I live about 7 miles out of a small town in Arkansas. I've lived here all my life, I own the home, and don't have the money to move anywhere else. In town they have DSL. On our rural phone exchange, there is nothing. Zero, zip, nada. There was a wireless offering advertised a while back, but that too was restricted to city limits. About the only real game in town is satellite internet. There are three choices: Starband, HughesNet, and Wild Blue. All apparently have two major issues. The first is latency, so you can't play any online games on these services. The second is bandwidth limits. Starband is the worst, with a measly 750 megs a week. Hughesnet is slightly better. Wild Blue, which I use, gives about 17GB in a sliding, 30-day period. And they advertise these as "high speed". There really needs to be something more out here, and if the federal government has to step in and mandate it, then so be it. Every American citizen should have access to broadband internet, just as every American citizen has access to electricity.
It should be noted that large portions of rural America have no connection to a sewage system and are forced to use septic tanks. Rural America is suffering a shitting crisis.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
This is also a problem in rural Canada. Add Northern Telephone (subsidiary of Bell) to the list of useless, uninterested telcos. They keep advertising high speed to me in my mailbox but when you call them they tell you it isn't available. Don't even get me started with the cable companies and that steaming turd called Persona Communications (they call themselves "The Amazing Persona"). Got the pamphlet advertising high speed cable so I called them up (knowing full well they didn't reach my place) and said "Great!!! Sign me up!" The sales rep was all wonderful until I gave her my address. "No High Speed For You!!" That's not very amazing.
:-(
Hey at least we have $60-$200 month Satellite and their rocking 1200ms latency, not to mention the costs of the equipment. Blah!
That leaves dialup and an earth shattering 26.4K connection speed because of the crap phone lines. I mean I am only 10 minutes outside of the city.
Next steps? I don't know, looking at organizing the neighbours to see what our options are. I fear that they will be forever somewhere between slim and none.
Was it sold to taxpayers as a crisis back then too?
Umm its an internet connection, i don't think this qualifies as "crisis".
Whats next, a black and white TV "crisis" when we move to all digital TV broadcasts?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What is slowing them down is that it is snakeoil technology. The vast majority of places around the world that have tried it have given up because of its extreme suckitude. And not only your local neighbor HAMs get hosed once it is turned on, but it screws up your emergency services radios as well, and you'll be lucky to make it past the first T storm without frying your equipment.
I'd suggest your local coop investigate wireless instead, the tech is much more robust now.
I grew up in a suburb 20 minutes from Boston, and we had no water service to my house. We had some really great well water. Pain in the butt to maintain though.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
This is a valid reason. But can anyone think why I can't get FiOS, even though I only paid $20,000 less for my house than my mother-in-law did for hers, and even though I live in an upscale neighborhood of a city of 75,000 people? And I'm less than 3/10 of a mile from the CO and the neighborhood is home to a lot of college kids.
Because I sure can't understand this.
And as for the guy who's 3/10 of a mile from the nearest cable internet connection, he should pay the person who lives there for the connection and then install a solar-powered, battery-backed up repeater halfway in between and just run Ethernet. It's a rural area, and I've seen stranger things.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Even in many rural areas that don't have cable or dsl you can get a decent EVDO.
A 60 bucks a month for unlimited access and DSL like speeds it may be worth looking into vs the 400 dollar a month bill. You will likely want to get an antenna and check EVDO availability, but SPRINT has target just these types of rural areas.
There is also satellite internet which should be just fine for 'web programming'. EVDO tends to be faster once you get decent reception, which mostly means getting a good signal to noise ratio.
Sat of course is available almost anywhere where as in very remote places EVDO is impossible. These days basically if you can get digital phone service then you can get broadband cellular internet. If your phone runs in analog all the time you may be in a bad spot, further researching your distance to the nearest EVDO capable tower is a good idea, but Sprint offers a 30 day return so you can try it out, though you may want to buy an antenna and/or booster if you get bad cell phone reception.
Either way Satellite and EVDO should be your main alternatives for DSL and cable, not T1 or fractional T1. They are not cost effective for their rather low bandwidth unless you are doing highly upload intensive stuff.
On the other hand, why do you need all this bandwidth to run a web programming businesses? The most your uploading is code and internet optimized graphics right? It's not like your hosting web services from a rural location, because that would just be silly. There is a reason businesses grow around infrastructure you know. Perhaps you should have thought of that when starting a businesses.
I'd be very surprised to find that EVDO nor any satellites can offer you service for under 100 dollar a month. Sounds like this guy just isn't aware of his other options. EVDO Rev A is still pretty new, but satellite internet has been out and providing rural customers with broadband like speeds for quite awhile. They are rolling out the 4g WiMax now so EVDO Rev A is more or less last generation stuff but still can hit over 1200 mbps with an ok signal.
I've been using ISDN up until this became available in the area, so I know exactly what it's like, but of course this is a residence not a business and if I needed broadband for businesses uses I'd simply have gotten Dish or DirectWay. It's too much latency for games though, so ISDN was the better choice in my case. Sat should be pretty good for most anything beside online gaming. At least compared to paying 400+ for internet.
I mean, that could be a major part of a store's lease, with a storefront and ohh cable modem. Planning your businesses is part of being successful and many a professionals take their living on the road. Lots of people are using RV's with EVDO or Sat internet for instance, so I find it unlikely they are not the more reasonable solutions to such a high internet bill.
If not, MOVE to a better locations, that's what a lot of businesses do. If your working at home that doesn't really make it any different. It's just obviously harder to run any business from a rural location. The only benefit is you may find cheaper rent, but more intelligently you chose lands surrounding major cities if you can't afford to run the business in the city. This way you are close and rent/lease is still reduced. It's usually just not worth it living in a completely rural area, at some point you may need to meet customers and such, you may want access to an airport without driving an hour and half, cheap internet, natural gas. These are all luxuries of choosing a good location for your business. Plus chances are you get more business with more exposure to more people, even if it's just plain old walk-ins.
So, maybe the article should explain the advantages of running broadband out to rural areas where most businesses have yet to find a need for the bandwidth or why perhaps reducing your bandwidth consumption was not a smarter move. Out here things like monster.com doesn't even find jobs because even if there were a lot
>Urban users are also more likely to share; an entire block could work
>very happily off a single FiOS connection and a 802.11G access point,
>and that scares the hell out of them.
Very good point. I can see an apartment advertising "We have Fiber-optic internet services," and the customer wondering why his internet address is 192.168.1.143
Yeah, I lament the state of the Boston Comcastopoly too. Thank goodness for MIT's inet2 backbone, can hitch off it at work.
From what I understand WiMax uses a cellular style approach to broadband and each tower has roughly a 30 mile range. Should help significantly to get broadband spread throughout the "heart land".
My worry will be security. Unless Intel had placed some form of strong encryption at the core of WiMax it's going to be far too easy to eavesdrop on.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
Have you tried to get a VSAT provider ?
I had heard about prices under a 100$ a month, decent bandwidth, reasonable installation costs (under a 1000$).
Of course the latency sucks since they are using satellites, but still, this could be a good option for rural America.
Western Europe's population density varies a great deal. Obviously, there is some average value, but there are rural areas, where you can't get a fast Internet connection. I only know the situation here in Germany. It's the same thing - it would cost telcos too much to get DSL there, so they don't do it.
Selling is legal. Fu*king is legal. Why isn't selling fu*king legal?
To equal the density of Paris, you would have to cram the entire 3.8M population of Los Angeles (city) into the 68 square miles of Washington, DC--on top of the existing 600,000 people--and you'd still be short by a quarter million. To equal Seoul, you'd have to take the entire populations of New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles and shove them onto Manhattan.
The 5 or so techies in the town of 500 should form an LLC, buy a T1 or two and put together the best way to get the access to the people. Whether it be WiFI/WiMax/Point to Point wireless, I dont know. (Also dont know what kind of problems there would be with the FCC.) But in turn if done right, theyre little company could stand to make them some nice $$$ as well as help out the people of the area.
I haven't found anything worth modding up yet so I'll just post. Here's my personal anecdotal evidence which of course isn't worth much.
I live in rural Ontario, Canada on a farm. I'm 4 miles from the nearest town of ~600 people and about a 15 minute drive from a 45,000 person town (Woodstock, ON if you care). I have fixed wireless available to me which operates on a 900MHz band. The whole general area is blanketed by the service, in some cases even by more than one provider. Sure it cost a few hundred dollars to set up, and it's maybe $70/month when you factor everything in, but for that price I have a nominal 3Mbps/512kbps connection with a static IP, and no bandwidth caps or restrictions. In reality most of the time it's more like 1.5Mbps/400kpbs but it's good enough for me to work from as I'm self employed and work at home.
This service has been available here for years, and was put in place back when I was living in suburban southern California and having trouble finding broadband service.
Fixed wireless seems like a great way to serve low density areas. I personally use XPlornet and am very happy with them. They have real people answering the phones.
www.clarke.ca
Was this guy born yesterday?
1. Who expects to necessarily get decent broadband in a rural town,
2. What person with a tech-related business doesn't check the connectivity options before moving?
We're looking to purchase some acres, and broadband access is necessary. If the plot of land doesn't at least have cable Internet or DSL (both would be nice, to give us options), we're not interested. I guess if you're willing to pay the "scenic view tax", all the power to you. You can find decent plots of land (>=2 acres) around here with cable access. I guess it's a tradeoff - cheap rural land or reasonably-priced broadband. We've looked at many plots that offer both decent acreage and cable Internet access. Perhaps it's a regional thing.
This is just one of the disadvantages of living in the sticks. You don't get broadband choice. You don't live near as many stores. You don't get exposed to the culture and the excitement of a big city. You also don't get as much crime, traffic, or pollution, so cheer-up. Deal with it. But don't think us city-dwellers are going to line-up to subsidize your broadband the way we subsidize your telephone service (public utility commissions insist on single-rate service across a state) and your highways and roads (again, state-funding).
People in big cities may have to pay hundreds of dollars a month for parking. They have better roads, access to airports, etc. On the other hand, they don' t have as much access to open country, the air quality is lower, the crime rate is generally higher. It always seems like the subsidies go in favor of the country folk (think airfare and phone subsidies). Am I to feel bad that some guy who probably has a much bigger home than me (and LESS expensive) is having trouble getting cheap broadband? Is he going to subsidize parking garages in New York city? Most adults can choose where to live, we all know what we're getting.
That was Vermont, but don't you remember Larry, Daryl and Daryl from the Newhart show?
That empty feeling in your stomach, the one you get when you know something is horribly wrong, will soon be visited on your wallet as the government and telecom industry prepare to suck another couple hundred billion out of our economy and deliver nothing but a new definition of the word "broadband".
I must be feeling cynical today...
"According to the federal government, just 17% of rural U.S. households subscribe to broadband service." This does not equal low availability. I am not saying their is lower availability but you cant prove it by quoting how many avail themselves of a service "from the article: 'Soon after moving to Gilsum, N.H. (population 811), [Kim] Rossey learned that he couldn't get broadband to support his Web programming business, TooCoolWebs. DSL wasn't available, and the local cable service provider wasn't interested in extending the cabling for its broadband service the three-tenths of a mile required to reach Rossey's house -- even if he paid the full $7,000 cost. Rossey ended up signing a two-year, $450-per-month contract for a T1 line that delivers 1.44Mbit/sec." So someone who needed something for their business did not bother to see if the area he was moving to provided. Also, why not use satellite service? 50$ a month and the service is not at all bad. "He pays 10 times more than the cable provider would have charged and receives one quarter of the bandwidth" His own stupidity..
Consider the economic benefits if the USPO stepped into areas abandoned by broadband ISPs and provided cheap, reliable connectivity that urban citizens enjoy.
No, I am not a Socialist.
Information wants to be Free. Useful Information will cost you.
In other news, farmers are complaining about the high farm land prices in mid-town New York.
What about Wireless ISPs? I run one in Texas and give my customers ~40ms pings to nearly peering point in Dallas. The bandwidth may be slow and expensive compared to cable/dsl providers in large cities, but the only other alternatives are dial-up or satellite. My customers also enjoy the fact that I'm a local small business that lives down the road. They can call me up and ask me a question personally and not have to worry about getting shunted to a large call center in a foreign country.
There are thousands of Wireless ISPs around the country helping to provide service to everyone who the big telcos don't think they can profit enough from. Look hard enough and I bet there's already a WISP servicing your area.
The biggest issue is how federal funding is handed out to rural ISPs. The FCC determines broadband coverage based on zip codes the big providers give them. That means even though Verizon has DSL in the nearest town to me, they only cover about 200 houses within 1/4 mile -- everyone else outside that is considered covered by the FCC even though they can't get service. I can't get a RUS Grant because my coverage area is already "covered" by another provider.
Given the increasing cost of transportation, suburban sprawl, and the ecological costs of rural migration, maybe a "move to the city" policy might be a good thing.
Why do you think they coughed up $150M to shore up the HD-DVD format? Because they want to undermine disk formats entirely in favor of downloadable HD content. But the far bigger barrier to downloadable HD content is the lack of fast enough pipes to the home-- so I rest assured that our Microsoft overlords will be coming to the rescue here very soon...
Gore was right. The "internet superhighway" is just as if not even more important than the national superhighway system. It should be a national priority to insure high bandwidth broadband everywhere in the country and both wired and wireless. The boon to business, innovation, entertainment, communication, access to information and computational resources makes it more than worth it.
Rural Washington state. 3 counties in various stages of fiber deployment through the county power district. Fiber to the premises, ethernet to the building. 100mbps starting at $40/mo. Sweet.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Thanks for enlightening us.
And those people who live in the suburbs or exburbs will have to make those decisions for themselves. However, a LOT of the sprawl will be slowed (or halted) if you demand that the developers provide the services and have the infrastructure in place BEFORE they can bulldoze everything in sight. Ever run into a traffic jam caused by 5,000 new homes suddenly being fed by the same two lane road? Or, after 10 years of rezoning 1 house/3 acre parcels into 40 condos per acre suddenly the city says "oh yeah, now we need to build several schools and, by the way, the low taxes that brought you out here are now going to be tripled.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
The Conflict is not between big city/small town/rural areas but between us and the telco's. We've agreed to surcharges to provide us with fiber broadband and they have not come through. Universal access to broadband today is as important as universal telephone service was in the 30's, 40's and 50's.
Write your Congressman - demand accountability from the telcos.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
The lack of open land in urban areas is preventing urban areas from diversifying into agriculture! News at 11!
If your business depends on internet access, then locate it where there is inexpensive internet access, just like if your business depends on open land, you locate it where there is inexpensive open land.
If a farmer can't run a farm in downtown Chicago because there isn't any affordable land, the problem is not the lack of affordable land, the problem is the farmer is stupid. And if a web developer can't be a web developer in BFE NH, the problem is not that there isn't inexpensive broadband in BFE NH, the problem is that the web developer is, also, dumb.
The inability of rural areas to host high-tech business is NOT A PROBLEM! They're RURAL AREAS, the whole POINT of a RURAL AREA is that it supports RURAL BUSINESSES, like agriculture. If you want to run an URBAN business, MOVE TO AN URBAN AREA!
Trying to run broadband internet all over the country doesn't make any more sense than building multi-million dollar 4-lane highway bridges to remote islands in Alaska.
paintball
infrastructure, and you'll get some penetration out further. this is one of those "one more thing..." charges on your phone bill designed to subsidize the cost of service those who live out at the corner of Wheat and Weeds. and it's currently limited to lifeline POTS service.
deep rural is a place where wi-fi really makes sense, if you get good distance from the transmitters. DSL drops off radically beyond 10 thousand feet in speed, and ADSL-1 beyond 18 "kfeet" is about dialup speed again.
but there aren't enough subscribers to make either pay out there. so you have to subsidize or governmentalize to get it done as things stand now.
and we all know how fast our present governments are to jump into new things, raise taxes, and create large costly staffed organizations. uh, unless they're security and spies/lies, that is.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
As a former ISP that provided broadband in rural areas there just aren't enough users to support pricing the users see marketed at large markets, so the initial setup costs and monthly recurring charges are going to be higher in rural areas unless they are subsidized some how. Getting good bandwidth(DS3 and higher) to rural areas is also very expensive. I can buy 100mbps for ~$20/mb in a large metro, but in Qwest land a DS3 is $36 per mile and that is just for the loop. If you have to go any real distance like 100+ miles that gets expensive quickly and adds to your per megabit cost. So a full DS3 at 100 miles is $3600(+taxes etc) + IP servies. The local loop is more than 100mb in a major metro. With less population density the economics don't add up. The only way to cost effectively provide broadband in Rural markets is via wireless. Customers in rural areas do not want to pay for Wireless installations because they see the pricing marketed in larger areas for $0 installation costs. Users expect wireless to work like their telephone. Wireless has more associated problems and is very expensive to maintain. They also can't reach every customer due to line of sight issues. I have a friend that works for a rural telco that still charges like $30/mo for 128k DSL. Its because their IP connectivity costs are are over $200/mb/mo. Until good connectivity DS3 or higher can be pushed to rural areas for less than $50/mb the price of broadband in rural areas cannot come down.
Makes me wonder if the writer is even aware that wireless exists.
A number of companies have been trying to sell wireless networks for rural ISPs but haven't made much headway in the market. I don't get it. The systems are non-line-of-sight and the price and bandwidth are competetive. If I were putting together a rural network, wireless would be my first choice.
If you dig around in the archives of a century ago, you'll find that this is essentially the same situation as with telephone and electrical service in rural areas.
The telephone story is the most comparable, obviously. 100 years ago, there were two sorts of problems. One was that you couldn't get phone service out in the sticks, because the phone companies didn't think it was profitable. Meanwhile, in the bigger cities there were often several competing phone companies, but you could usually only call someone who subscribed to the same phone company as yours. The ISPs haven't implemented this last problem, because the Internet software came with compatibility builtin. But they're working on it, and if the "Net Neutrality" goes the way they want, you'll find that you won't be able to see web sites of a lot of companies that your ISP doesn't like, especially their competitors, but more generally any sites on other ISPs' lines.
With electricity, the story was simpler. The electric companies didn't build out into the countryside, because it wasn't profitable enough.
Both of these effectively ended when the government stepped in and imposed regulations. The phone companies were told that they'd provide rural service and interoperability, or they wouldn't sell any service at all. This was done somewhat less with electricity, mostly because the Rural Electrification project discovered that they could create locally-owned electrical co-ops that could do the job. They did need regulation forcing the electrical companies to sell electricity to these "competitors" at a reasonable price, but the urban electrical companies weren't always forced to build out into rural areas.
So in effect, universal telephone and electrical service would never have happened without the government regulators stepping in and decreeing that the services be provided to everyone. There's no historical reason to expect universal Internet access to happen in any other way. The comm companies naturally want to sell to only the most lucrative market, and can't be bothered to deal with those rural yokels. If the rural folks want Internet service, they're just going to have to push for the same sort of solutions that gave them phones and electricity a century ago.
The best idea might be the rural co-op, as this would give them a semblance of control over their own service. Of course, the big comm companies are already fighting this, by bribing legislatures to ban anything that smells like government-provided Internet. But unless people start agitating for such things, nothing is going to happen any time soon.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
...in a past life, helping to build a rural, broadband ISP in 1999. We made 802.11b available in about a 10 mile radius from a little Alaskan town, pop. more responsibility). I've spent half of my (admittedly, short) life doing internet and comms in out-of-the-way places. That bit of geekiness aside, 'net rates low on personal and philosophical list of needs. Calling off-grid a 'crisis' demeans the word. Disparity, sure. Crisis, no. If it rates that high to you, then you are waaaayyy too far off the grid for your own good, and there things which will soon come to worry you more [ie, firewood, bears, honeybuckets. NO STARBUCKS : ) ]
I'm in Montana. This is a huge problem for us. So I've got 3 words for you: Rural Telephone Cooperative. Our local coop is 3 Rivers, ( www.3rivers.net ), and they really suck. To their credit, they face some challenging problems, however their stunningly craptacular customer service has no excuse. Here's some of the challenges we face to give you an idea:
----- obSig
I remember reading about a small town in Texas that invested in BPEL (over power lines)
Whatever happened to that?
Per Bob, the contractor, from Buffalo; the reason the South lost the war is that Maine's rednecks are a hell of a lot tougher than the South's.
I drank what? -- Socrates
My father lives in the boonies, can't get online service, complains about it. He can just lump it as far as I am concerned.
We spend large amounts of money subsidizing people who choose to live in rural areas. You know all those taxes on your POTS phone bill? They subsidize my father's telephone line, which is about 3 km longer than mine, and who pays the same for phone service.
It costs me $0.41 to send a letter to someone in an apartment building where the postman can deliver letters to 10 domiciles by walking next door. It costs me $0.41 to send a letter to my father where the postman must drive an automobile 6 km to deliver to 10 residences. Most of that $0.41 is subsidizing whom?
At this point I have to believe somebody is paying you guys to present these density and last mile arguments.
In sleepy little towns less than pop. 5000 across rural washington you can get fiber to the premises and 100mbps service for less than $40/mo.
The problem is that the incumbent monopolies are milking the market for far more than they should be able to get away with. That is the only reason. All of these logistic and practical reasons are nothing but industry propaganda. I post this in every broadband thread and will continue to do so.
Muni broadband. The incumbents won't build us a bridge to the modern market so the People must.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I don't see that. The cost of laying the T1 is amortized over the 2 year contract, right? So for cable, you have:
7000 + $45*24 = $8080
For the T1 you have
450*24= 10800
So his total cost is about 25% higher, not 1000%. It's still a lousy price-performance differential given the much lower bandwidth. I suspect the problem for the cable company is that he's in a different jurisdiction, so they don't have the rights to provide Internet outside the city limits.
If he's going down to 1.4 MB/s, he should look at satellite. HughesNet advertises a residential asymmetric service at 1.5 MB/s down 200KB/s up for $80/month with a $300 equipment charge. That's a total cost of $2,220 for 2 years. Business plans start at about $20 more/month and the equipment charge is twice as much, but they also have a 2 MB/s down, 500kB/s up plan for $179/month.
We are the 198 proof..
Well, that's what you get when you have lows in the -60's and some of the rockiest unfriendly soil in the nation.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
I have spent a lot of time in upstate NY as well as the "pee dee" region of SC (AKA, the buckle of the bible belt). I can certainly attest to this: Southern rednecks are typically louder, and consume far more cheap beer and BBQ pork than any other rednecks. I can also say that no southern redneck can begin to compare to the levels backward society that is shared by most new england hicks. The NY breed in particular in many cases is not much more evolved than the inbred farmers of the early 1800s. Most New England hicks also work fields or other hard labor for a living, and endure harsher climate shifts, and thus are usually much tougher than they typical southern trailer hick variety.
In the south, for the most part, redneck is a lifestyle choice. In new england, it's much more of a lifestyle they're stuck with. Given access to cultured society, technology, and education, most NE hicks will willingly shed their status and quickly evolve. Most SC rednecks have such access, but continue to slide backwards due to apathy and low work ethic.
I would hesitate to cross either breed. In a knock down drag out fight between each other, I'd put my money on the NE breed any day. They may be somewhat single minded and simple, but they have much more drive!
(I state this jokingly of course, just in case a member of either breed reads this and fails to understand the sarcasm).
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
...is the new affordable living in the U.S. Everywhere that has it also has high cost of everything. Great.
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
Well, the first paragraph of my message was a quote of what I was replying to. I just forgot to add the italics tag. Oops.
And, while I agree with you in principle, your sleepy little towns in Washington with that connectivity are utilizing municipal connection. Well, State connection to the fiber ring that runs thru WA and northern OR that is owned by the PUDs. The last mile may be private, but the backbone access is pure gov't-owned.
From the Grays Harbor PUD site:
State Law prohibits and it is not in the business plan for the Utility to retail this access to the end or home user. Therefore, access to this communications system will only be offered on a wholesale basis to companies such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Incumbent and Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (ILEC's & CLEC's), and cable TV companies for example. It is those types of companies who will, in turn, retail this access to their Customers and end-users within the community for use such as internet connectivity, high speed communications and data transmission. These companies are co-joining their resources with the Utility at the co-location facility, constructed on the PUD property in Aberdeen, which allows them connectivity to the community infrastructure and Bonneville fiber ring.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
...so sad about the rural folks and how they should just do without.
Probably the same people who are bragging about current bandwidth levels in larger centers and how one day mp3's and divx's will make CD's and DVD's obsolete.
Hedghog
I spent the last 10 years without brodband because I live in the country. Time Warner was always "Just a few miles away" and would be here any day now.
Then a bunch of wireless ISPs popped up out here in the hills. I paid one of them $200 to come set up an antenna and now I get better than T1 speeds. Not super amazing, but good enough for everything except web hosting. I can even watch online Netflix movies.
Cost? $60/month
Range? My signal comes from a town about 8 miles away.
If you live in the boonies, look into it. Most of the companies are small and don't advertise that much. There are at least 3 that cover my area.
How much is Verizon's 1.5/128 ADSL? $20/month? I don't see how that's the same as "can't get DSL".
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
take in account that European ISP's have always used large cache servers, so your WAN likely contains one big motherf*** Squid machine. They will also link to the other locals (ISP's in the same region) throug regional exchanges and really only throttle trafic to the US and asia.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
They both crap all over you.
Granted, he pays roughly 10 times, if you already have cable and phone through your cable company, and if you don't count the taxes and fees that specifically get added for cable internet. 8mbps cable is $46 / month where I live. What people don't realize is that at 1.544mbps, you actually get the full bandwidth and a stable connection. You have 24 64kbit direct links to your ISP. With cable, everyone's data is transmitted over the cable lines, so you share your bandwidth with everyone on your node. If you happen to be on a node with few subscribers on it, you will get the full 8mbps. More than likely, you will get a MUCH slower connection at least during busy times. Also, a T1 is very reliable, and cable internet is NOT. I tried cable internet twice in two different areas and got rid of it both times due to slow speeds and dropped connections. Eventually it was going out almost every day. I would call tech support and be on the line for 45 minutes while he had me unplug MY COMPUTER. Come on, my computer should have NO EFFECT on whether the little green link light on the cable box is on. You know how many times our T1 has gone down at work over the last three years? ZERO.
I think the most misleading portion though is claiming 1/4 the bandwidth. The upload speed on cable is actually a MAXIMUM of 512kbps, that used to be 128kbps and might vary from area to are and depending on how active your node is. If you have people using P2P on your node, forget about it. A T1's upload speed is actually three times as much at 1.44mbps. Also with a T1 you have lower latency than with a cable box. Both of these items are important for a web programming business, this guy should be happy with the increased value of a T1 over cable internet. Combine that with the improved reliability (also very important if you're running a business), and I would get the T1 over the Cable even if it was available.
I ran up against this problem last year, when one of our long-time business partners needed to get his home-based shop updated to something faster than dial-up access, so he could exchange drawings with our firm.
I discovered he lived too far outside the city to get either high-speed cable Internet or DSL service, so I immediately suggested satellite.
He found out AT&T offered "Wild Blue" satellite Internet service, with a local business working as a contractor to do the installations. (He wanted to work with someone local for the install, so he had people nearby he could go back to if anything went wrong.)
It turned out AT&T took nearly 6 months to get him online though. He was told that their satellite capacity was almost filled up, and he had to wait until a new satellite was launched and put online -- and apparently, that was never done on schedule either. And yes, this POOR service was coupled with a big up-front equipment expense, and the fact that it still has bad latency issues you never deal with using DSL or cable broadband. (You click to start a new transfer, and literally wait 1-2 seconds before anything starts. Acceptable for a large file upload/download or clicking to check one's email, but unusable for most Internet gaming and annoying for lots of random web surfing.)
I know i'm probably too far away, but what the hell. Today i heard a different one from the usual "call back in 3 months". I heard "oh the equipment is in place, but it's your electricity company that has to upgrade their equipment because we share the same poles with them and they need filters to stop the interference".
So i call the electricity company, and they don't know what these filters are. So now i'm stucking waiting for the electric company to upgrade some "equipment" that may or may not exist!
Try moving to Alaska. My wife and I moved here under contract with our employer and because we both wanted to experience the state while we are young (something I recommend to EVERYONE). Broadband here consists of DSL lines capped at 7658K/500K, costing $140 per month. Satellite is also hard to receive due to being surrounded by mountains and line of sight issues from lower latitude orbits. Worse still, the remoteness of this location mean very few, if any, qualified personnel live locally to support the infrastructure. What you end up with is a crew of guys who got to where they are because they happen to know the most about computers and networking, which is to say, not much.
The lack of broadband has been one of the single limiting factors in deciding whether to build a house here or not (that and whether we can get running water).
I work for one of the three big shipping companies in the US, and this hits me HARD. The company has an initiative to get all of our customers who use our shipping software on LAN connections. I work out of Maine where a lot of areas just don't get broadband. It's dial-up or nothing.
I'm having to write up near weekly reports explaining why I'm so bad at getting customers to swap to "better, more efficient" technology. For some reason they don't appreciate it when my reply is "ask Verizon, not me".
I am tired of reading about people who move to the sticks and are surprised they don't have { broadband | fire department | police | medical | cable TV | trader joes | etc }
I moved to Shasta County, California from Santa Cruz. I know all about this and at least I took the time to research it before moving.
People should take some responsibility for their decisions.
Your food and water and power are subsidized by rural people most likely. Your electric transmission lines cross a lot of rural property with not a penny to the owners, a direct government grab and subsidy to you. ditto your water most likely and for sure your food is subsidized because we have a "socialist" road structure, else it would be ten times as expensive for the city dwellers if all the roads were private toll roads. And the coal for the electric plants comes from anyplace but the back room at starbucks, another subsidy.
And so on. Give all that up, pay a fair market price for all your stuff, and the rural people actually could afford broadband if they wanted it. My best guess is a national fiber infrastructure, like we built the roads and the post office, etc will be the way to go eventually. then companies can bid on the lines and offer competition to the consumers. that or if wimax ever gets here and works.
But really, being rural myself and a victim of your leet urban generosity, and having lived urban before, so I can see how it is a bit of colonialism and exploitation here, I would rather go to private markets and have the buckets of cash for your taken for granted necessities and make you assholes pay full free market price for all the rural stuff you take advantage of. That would be *sweet*. Make cities and urbanites really pay for what it costs to keep them going, and you'd find out your "modern" lifestyle is a lot higher in cost than what you pay now under the exploitation system.
All I can say is thank deity for the idea of having a senate, or we'd be even more screwed, a few populated states and some urban areas would completely dominate the government, at least we have a chance to maintain some sort of parity. It's fading, but eventually you'll learn, once your cities get cut off from natural disaster or other circumstances. You'll go from comfy living to hell on earth in a few days. Hope you enjoy cannibalism and living in the dark and scrounging rain water from beer cans, because your cities produce nothing of any real value anymore, especially since your business class jerks have screwed over manufacturing. All you produce is busywork paper shuffling, and the rest of the planet is getting annoyed with it now that we don't have anything of value to swap back for dollars. those fgoreigners are rather tired of swapping for just more IOUs with no rational way to ever pay them back, and your urban property values are *grossly* over priced, and once real energy costs kick in-soon-you'll see. You greeded yourself out of a future, I hope you realize that, it's crumbling around you as we speak, check the economic headlines for some clues there. The rest of the planet is real close to not taking printed up green pieces of paper for tangible goods and energy supplies...real damn close.
So ya, I got dialup and deal with it, but I wouldn't trade where I live for a 100k figure job in any city right now...the term is "suckers", like you think your economic cons will go on forever. Guess what? They WON'T. You guys think US rural people and all foreigners are somehow stupid. We aren't, we can look forward pretty well and see what is coming, clearly. And those of us out in flyover and dialup country will be sitting pretty with the stuff you NEED when your wall street hedge funds derivatives scam economy collapses, and it's soon now, real soon. Hope you can download some nutritious food from your cable connection then!
A company called Wildblue offers broadband access over satellite. They have nation-wide coverage in the US. The service is very similar to cable modem service. The only difference is that you get a dish on your roof (similar size to dish tv, etc) instead of a cable connection from the street. It costs a little more than cable modem or DSL service but lots less than some of the solutions I've seen in the comments.
I live in rural Ontario, approximately 3.5 miles from the nearest town (Dundalk: pop. 2,000) and approximately 1 mile beyond the DSL limit. No cable available. So I use a Ku-band satellite. I get a reliable 1Mbps downlink and 256kbps uplink.
As it so happens I DID install kubuntu on one of my machines here just 2 weeks ago. Via satellite Internet. It took about 75 minutes.
The speed-of-light (SL) latency (about 550ms) is a bit of a drag when dealing with large numbers of small files, but overall the speed is quite good. IP spoofing is used at the downlink point to avoid SL latency on every packet. I have 56kbps dial up for backup (which usually doesn't connect at more than 33.6 kbps) and there's no comparison. I'll take the satellite any day.
Perhaps all the people here that have been crapping all over satellite Internet are thinking of the previous state of the art. These days things are quite impressive. Check out Xplornet for the low end home/small business stuff, or Tachyon for high end enterprise type stuff.
bork bork bork!
I live in a rather poor very rural area and I have to go ahead and say this, but the infrastructure in these areas is horrible! DirectTV is THE ONLY provider for high speed internet in our area, and their (when I checked) $500 setup fee was rediculous even to me! The nearest place that gets cable is 15 miles northeast and is actually a "town." The phone line quality is utterly horrendous. Even when talking on the phones there is a horrible buzzing sound 45% of the time. I have internet access through People PC now (local ISP went out of business), and I connect at a constant 21.6k with them and I did about the same with my old local ISP. So, before the information superhighway can be extended properly to rural customers like myself, it first needs to be prepared for it, a washed out dirt road is NOT acceptable. Summary; our information network needs overhauling FIRST before we can get high speed to rural areas. Dont even get me started on the state of the ACTUAL roads...
It's their choice to live in the middle of nowhere and enjoy easy commutes, lower costs of living, etc. But we shouldn't have to subsidize it. And we do. Rural phone access charges on our phone bills, being one. Rural electrification was another. And if we pass legislation subsidizing rural broadband it will be just another case of the tail wagging the dog . . . typically through the US Senate, which is topheavy in members from sparsely populated states. madmac
Yes. And it was.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Have you ever tried bringing up a VPN connection over a satellite link? That's where the latency really starts to become a serious PITA. I have a client that owns some power plants in the middle of central California. They are seriously out in the middle of farmland with no infrastructure to speak of around there. Satellite is their only option and it sucks.
This bill was proposed this year to allow the PUD's to retail internet service. It didn't pass on the first try but it will pass, by initiative if necessary. AFAIK, the PUD owns the last mile too-- they just can't sell the service retail so the reseller owns the relationship. At least they do until they neglect their customer and the customer has to find a more amenable reseller to launder the relationship.
Resellers can and do exist to bring the service the rest of the way to the customer at the rates and speeds I quoted. In fact, I believe there's a link to a list of 16 or so resellers on the page you quoted. So what's your point? Mine was that govt owned infrastructure is a slam dunk in this case.
In all the areas where this is offered, it will take something amazing to drive the customers back to the incumbent communications providers who neglected them so long.
Does your state power grid not have a buried fiber network yet? Tsk. It's not too late to start.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The -1 is really unfair. raehl makes a valid point, on topic, and a little sarcasm does not a troll or flame make.
I hate to put this out there but with a T1 line in that small of a community he could probably start up his own broadband service or atleast convince the town to pay him to set up a wireless router
Coming to you live from another dimension.
But without broadband, won't everyone in rural areas end up like Miss South Carolina?
And then watch the cable and/or telcos throw a fit in Washington DC over public entities competing with their private businesses and get legislation prohibiting it.
Have gnu, will travel.
the rural broadband crisis as its called is fixed very easily. Build more infrastructure.
This is still why broadband costs so much in the U.S.
This is why 100Mbit lines are so cheap in europe. Go to Sweden and get a 100Mbit line there for less than my 20Mbit cable.
They're using their grammar skills there.
what the fuck. I live in south sacramento (north of elk grove, near the florin district) and I can't even GET broadband. the fastest internet connection out here is 1.5 MBps DSL at $79.99 a month.
fuck the rural areas, what the hell does a farmer need that requires a broadband connection.
WHAT IS THE GOVERNMENT GONNA DO ABOUT ME?!
god. this reminds me of a quote from a newsletter I received last week
"Some folks argue that Internet service should be run by the government because it's a necessity, like other utilities. Yet in many areas, other utilities such as electricity are provided by private companies, not the city. Cable service is almost always provided by a private company. Services such as garage pickup for which cities are responsible are being contracted out by more and more of them. Water and sewer services are, in many cases, the only remaining utilities that cities provide directly."
and in the followup newsletter, "David K. offered, 'Poor people need internet connectivity to dig out from under their poverty... I feel it should be available for free like the broadcast airwaves are. Note that the broadcast companies are private and profitable; but the airwaves they use are free and public.'"
there are 10 types of people in this world; those who get this joke, and those who don't
I was always amazed that so few people knew about or considered satellite broadband despite the millions of bucks a year that HughesNet throws at advertising, especially on DirecTV. WildBlue now also has big co-marketing programs with DirecTV, DISH Network and AT&T. So I'm curious - do people not know about satellite or do they know and just don't want it?
When I moved I could have gotten satellite access but being able to get cable access I chose it instead. Latency isn't an issue with cable and I get faster speeds. I'd rather have DSL so I wouldn't have to share a connection, however I don't know if the wiring here is any good. Nor do I have landline phone service, which I'd probably have to have or I'd have to pay more. If however there was no landline broadband available yet I really wanted to live there I'd probably go ahead and get satellite. With the new FCC rules, er proposed rules, for the 700 MHz airwaves though companies like Google, or small local businesses, may be able to offer broadband wireless in a lot of places.
FalconShould there be a Law?
1. a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, esp. for better or for worse, is determined; turning point.
2. a condition of instability or danger, as in social, economic, political, or international affairs, leading to a decisive change.
They don't GIVE it to you, they "give" it to you. You're missing parent's point--from the customer's perspective, you'll usually pay the same monthly rate with the cable company's equipment. There's no discount for buying your own equipment. So it's "free" only in the sense that your other alternative is paying for the equipment twice.
I don't know if you have cable access or if you do it's on your bill but my cable bill has an entry for the rental of the cable modem I have, I'd have to pay rental for the cable box if I had one for tv as well. It's only a few dollars/mo whereas the cheapest cable modem I've seen was about $80, something like 20 months rent. If it failed I'd have to buy another whereas when the original modem I had failed it was replaced, and with a faster modem, without be charged more. Generally I prefer to buy not rent but in this case I think renting is cheaper.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Maine has two seasons. "winter", and "damn poor sledding".
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
As someone who lives in the great state of NH I can easily say: Welcome to NH, b*tch.
Ah, the state for the Free State Project.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Did he offer to pay for maintenance to the line in butt-fuck nowhere? Did he offer to replace it when one of the Neanderthals that live out there digs it up with farming equipment?
When you leave the city, you're leaving civilization. There are consequences to that.
The US's overall population density is quite low. Rather than live in cities like civilized folk, they're spread out in thousands of festering, incestuous hamlets. The cities can't get proper communication infrastructure because the voting block of over entitled yokels wail and cry until the government forces providers to lay useless cable out into the hinterlands.
GET OUTSIDE THE CITIES LABELED WITH LETTERS: DC, NYC, LA.
It's very true the vast majority of America has dialup-at-best...it' a lot of square miles to cover! The cities are a tiny, tiny fraction of the mileage to cover, but they're dense enough to fund the effort.
(Thanks for noticing since the internet startup was around 1993...)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
The biggest problem is web-page bloat. A well-designed page can work well with phone modems. True, modems exclude practical music and video downloads, but that is only a small portion of the web. There is more and more bloat these days as companies get sloppy with design.
Table-ized A.I.
Who is the someone you think should fix the problem? If you're advocating federal government subsidies or mandates, I disagree.
The telcos and cablecos already got billions of dollars to built out infrastructure but they did a halfass job and didn't finish it. Such as the "The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal." . They should be held accountable for the taxpayer dollars they already received. But whether they can or not they should not have a government granted monopoly Government created the problem by giving both monopolies and subsidies to businesses, now it's government's responsibility to clean up the mess. Allowing open access to the 700 MHz band is a start to that, small start but a start.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yup... Telstra. That most un-benevolent of companies that has Australians by the balls when it comes to internet access. They basically have total control of the telecommunicaions infrastructure here in Australia and does their best to stop everyone having access unless they can make huge profit from it. And their aggressive profiteering is not even the worst thing... Telstra have that added bureaucracy which makes them an ineffective telecommunications provider as well. Paying more money for less service? We understand your pain mate.
It is absurd to make any claims about the power and goodness of privatisation and and profitability in the businesses you listed, because the vast majority of them are either given governmental grants of market exclusivity in their service area, or are protected from the vicissitudes of free-market competition by government acts which place almost insurmountable market-entry barriers to obstruct potential competitors through limiting the total number of business licenses and access to public utility right of ways.
Private? not exactly, as they are shielded by government actions from exposure to an open market-place, and far to often engage quid quo pro chicanery with politicians and public bureaucrats in dimly lit back-alleys.
Profitable? Without any doubt, but crony capitalism usually is for both the public and corporate actors who engage in it. It has nothing to do with a free-market though.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
People in rural areas are likely to be too poor to afford a 50" plasma TV and 7.1 digital surround sound system. /. leftists call for equality in ownership of 50" plasma TVs and 7.1 digital surround sound systems...
Seriously, if broadband Internet isn't reaching the countryside, then that is a market signal that they are too expensive; that they are, by living in the boonies, behaving inefficiently relative to the conditions of the point in time. It is an incentive to move closer to an urban area, where job opportunities, salaries, social activities, etc. are greater, and the ability to behave in an environmentally-sounder manner -- by biking or taking mass-transit rather than driving -- is improved.
Similarly, it is also an incentive to try to solve the problem independently. WiMax, or directional 802.11a/b/g to create a mesh network between small towns, anybody?
Mr. Farm-Country web developer should've done his homework *before* moving. Duh. And he could still get dialup service and have his site hosted somewhere else with much fatter pipes (e.g. Rackspace), rather than hosting it himself... you know, like people did back during the "web 1.0" era...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Most people who live in rural areas do not need (or want) broadband access. Many of us live where we do because we choose to live at a slower pace and not be "connected" 24/7/365.
Only for geosync. LEO satellite networks would work fine ... there's just no money to launch them.
I think you and I have truly different definitions of the word "crisis"......
The problem isn't really in new subdivisions(the spillover caused by pushing infrastructure out to new subdivisions would indeed be nice though). New subdivisions usually have a large number of attractive customers, and they get service.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
If every new subdivision was required to have fiber then every neighborhood between the city the the exburbs would be within a mile or two of said fiber runs. Everybody wins.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
I don't know about "prevention", but I think an ounce or so of brains might have helped.
"Gee... I think I will move my package delivery business to a tiny town where there are no gasoline pumps..."
"Gee... I think I will move my Web programming business to an area where there is practically no Internet..."
That's what I meant by spillover. The problem is that subdivisions tend to go in between the cities and the areas that don't have broadband, rather than in areas where they pull infrastructure(as much as anything, this is because developers are rather pragmatic and don't like to spend money).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
A Lucent portmaster 25 ($200.00) and a radius server (free) will help recupe some of the cost for the T1 by selling dialup at $20.00/$25.00 per subscriber monthly. Out.