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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."
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.
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.
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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
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.
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
According to Wikipedia
Seoul http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul has a population density of 17,108 people/sq km
New York City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_city has a population density of 27,083 people/sq km
I would say you are wrong.
Self awareness - try it!