Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
I have a lot of family living in rural areas. They are all using wireless internet (read internet via cell phone.) It is not the best, but it blows dial up out of the water, and at $49.00 a month it beats any other high speed option.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
I agree, but also want to point out some other facts here...
Now he has a T1 so he can get plenty of static IP's without massive surcharges, he has upstream bandwidth that is better than most people can get outside of FIOS, He won't run into the "we will cut you off for exceeding our unpublished and secret cap" problem, and he has an SLA on the circuit. He uses the internet for his business, and the internet IS his business. A T1 is quite reasonable. Unless he is underpricing himself, he is probably making at LEAST $10K / month off that $500 T1.
Just to keep things in perspective...
What I'm surprised by here is that it seems like everybody thinks that broadband = cable or DSL (or, God help you, a Point To Point T1). From reading the comments, nobody is even looking at rural wireless satellite broadband. Disclaimer: I used to work for a satellite ISP so I'm biased. Satellite especially is available anywhere you can see the southern sky (specifically, a satellite hovering 22,300 miles above the equator in geosynchronous orbit) and offers OK speeds for $200 - $600 upfront and anywhere between $50 and $200 per month. The latency sucks (600 ms) but if you aren't using it for gaming, then you certainly don't need a private line circuit with PTP or Frame Relay...
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?
"95% of all Slashdot
You are also missing one more thing. Most of the articles argument, ""Rural US residents don't have the same kind of access to broadband services as those who live in urban or suburban areas." is misleading. Every single Rural residence has access to Directway broadband. (Yes I know it sucks, I was a subscriber for 2 years when I lived rural)
Just because it's $99.99 a month instead of the $24.95 a month my DSL is does not mean they do not have access. they do have access, they just choose to not get it based on cost. It instantly shows that Broadband is not important to people the second it crosses a cost line.
funny part is, I know friends in rural areas that pay over $100.00 a month for their TV service and then scream to high hell about broadband costs. I find broadband far FAR more important than a steady stream of stupidity called TV programming.
Typically there are three reasons that someone moves to a Rural location. 1- Lifestyle, rural life is incredibly slower than city life. 2- the "I hate people" effect. 3- I can afford more out in the country. I can get 7+ acres and a 1800sq foot home with a 3 car garage 1 hour away from work for the same price as the 860sq foot crapshack on a postage stamp that has heavy traffic nearby and street only parking that you hear all the time that is 10 minutes from work.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
My neighbor has satellite broadband. One word it SUCKS and it's expensive.
No, the key is should HAVE.</pedantic>
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
I did my homework when I moved 15 miles out of the city. I called Verizon and they assured me that YES, DSL service is available at the address where I was considering buying. I called back later and ordered it to be installed in the day I would close on the sale and was again told that yes, everything looked fine.
A couple weeks after I moved and still didn't have DSL I called I was told that sorry, the line conditions to my home prevent it. I later learned this was BS. As I was driving past the switching station I saw a Verizon tech coming out of the building so I stopped and asked what the problem was with the lines. He said that the problem with the line was that Verizon doesn't even have DSL equipment at this town's switch. (Verizon has fiber run within 100 yards of the switching station, btw.)
I started looking into wireless (latency with satellite made it a non-option for my needs.) The community was interested in offering wireless broadband service but laws passed in my state forbid it. (Laws lobbied for by the telco industry btw.)
Charter offered cable TV already but seems to have no interest in offering Internet as long as Verizon wasn't doing it either.
A local business was willing to split T1 costs (best price I could find was $550/mo) but I'd have to get service back to my home and there is a large hill between them and me. So I checked on leasing dark copper and using a Pairgain unit to send the data over it. Verizon wanted about $65/mo for the 3 miles of copper. (Over double the cost of using the same copper wire AND phone service for telephone... plus NO service level gaurantees.)
I left fliers with 200 homes in the community and 30 people took the time to call/email and say that they would love to get broadband at any reasonable price. (If you do any work with advertising, you'll now that 15% call back is awesome and likely means that as much as 40-50% of people in town would pay for broadband. Which makes sense since many people in town work in the "city" 15-20 miles away.)
I would have started a wireless Internet business (WISP) but if Verizon or Charter decided that they wanted to offer broadband in town after all within the first couple of years I would have lost my shirt on the equipment costs needed to start up from scratch.
Eventually I shared my "market research" with an existing WISP 25 miles away and they extended their network into town. I finally have broadband (512kb/512kb - which I can live with) at a price I can live with. If I had it to do all over again I would probably go ahead and start up that WISP business. Very high speed links are available wirelessly sometimes as much as 100 miles or more. Once the initial equipment is paid for it becomes a steady income without a ton of work (which I'm sure is why Verizon, etc. love being ISPs.)
It isn't just about up front cost. It's about the ongoing cost, and the sucky service you get for the cost. Satellite internet service isn't bad for just gaming, it also makes VPN basically impossible.
I'm speaking here from personal experience. Satellite internet is no better than dial-up.
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
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.
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
New Hampshire (as well as Vermont and Maine) doesn't have anywhere near the population density of western Europe. NH is roughly three times smaller than the Czech Republic, but has eight times less people. Even if you take New England as a whole, its population density is 2.6 times lower than that of Germany. Sure, we aren't talking about Alaska levels of vacuum, but the overall density is just barely comparable.
230.9 per km2 for Gemany, 87.7 for New England
In economics, utilities like electricity, gas, wireline phone and water are called natural monopolies. You can't have multiple providers because it's inefficient to run duplicate utility lines. You could make the case that fiber optic cables are thin enough that you can have competing providers, and some cities do have two competing cable franchises. The construction work is still disruptive and expensive even if they do have room in the rights of way for a thin fiber cable.
As someone who lives in the great state of NH I can easily say: Welcome to NH, b*tch.
I can say that at least half of my co-workers live in areas where they just can't get cable or DSL because the lines end X thousand feet from their house.
This isn't an Uncommon problem here and the local Cable provider that offers cable internet to most of the state (Metrocast) is very good at telling you exactly where service is and where service isn't. Go on ahead and check their website for youself... plug in Gilsum's zip "03448" right at the top of the metrocast page and see what you get.
Even still, the receptionists have tools to test the lines out to the exact address you specify and tell you if service is available there. In many cases even if you offer to pay to have the line extended to your house the distance from the ISP is such that it will be quite a shoddy and unreliable connection and they tell you to wait until they put in another distribution center closer to your location.
Of course the article leaves out that detail. Would you rather an ISP say "sorry even if you pay to have the lines extended the quality will be too damn low so it's not worth doing" or "sure give us $7000" while you drop the cash only to get screwed by unreliable lines.
Despite the high number of my peers who are without service you really do have to live out in the boonies to not have it around here. I've lived in this state most of my life and moved around quite a bit, I've never found myself in a location without service. A good rule of thumb is if you live within 15miles of a highway you've got a good chance of having internet access... heck I even know a whole lot of people who live on unpaved roads and still have cable internet. (and for you city folk, yes we do have quite a few unpaved roads up here in NH.)
I stand by that this schmuck just didn't do one iota of research before buying his house.
Collector's Edition
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.