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."

Comments

It isn't just rural economies affected

[ednopantz]

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."

Re:Good argument for municipal-owned networks

[MrMunkey]

I grew up in rural North Dakota. Our small town (population about 500) has the Northwest Communication Cooperative http://www.nccray.com/ They provide phone/dialup/DSL/cableTV access. The co-op seems to have worked fairly well back home. I don't know if that's not normal or not... I just grew up with it there.

So What?

[linuxwrangler]

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.

Re:They don't have hookers on every corner

[AeroIllini]

Those are all natural monopolies because physical items need to travel along the lines from provider to customer, and cannot be mixed with other customer's items (with the possible exception of phone, which I'll get to later). When you order water from the water company, it has to physically travel from the reservoir controlled by the utility to your house, and the water company owns all the lines in between. The water you order can't be mixed with water your neighbor orders, if your neighbor orders from a different water company. Water, electricity, and natural gas don't have routing addresses.

The difference with internet is that only the last mile is a natural monopoly. Many different companies could plug their backbones into the last mile going to your house, and in fact many different companies could share the same backbone lines, and your traffic would not be "mixed" or confused with your neighbor's traffic like it would if many water companies were plugged into an analogous hub. The internet is a very unique utility in this way. In fact, the phone system works the same way, but only recently (since digital telephone transmission), and of course telephone providers still maintain their "natural monopoly" status along the whole length of the line, left over from the analog days.

So the solution in this case is, I think, to separate the last mile providers from the connection providers. Allow the last mile providers to be a natural monopoly, either run by a city/town/village or heavily regulated, just like the rest of the utilities (but separate from the data providers). However, allow free market competition from companies providing Internet service to that last mile hub. This would be even further aided if the last mile providers created a universal standard for providers to plug into, which only requires a software change in order to change providers, instead of a truck changing a physical plug. All data (internet, phone, cable) would come into your home with the same type of cable, whether it comes from a telephone company, a cable company, or some other newcomer. When customers can switch Internet providers easily (as they could when the last mile is owned by the city and software switchable) there will be a real market at work, and all the wonderful pro-consumer effects of supply and demand would suddenly kick in.