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."
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!
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.
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."
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.
Bullshit, this is 2007, not 1997.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
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"
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 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
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
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.
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.
I think the issue is that you are taking the term "luxury" too literally. The only things you NEED to live is food, water, and some sort of shelter.
Modern life / business / education / etc however has added many other things to the list of "basic needs".
Can you get by without transportation, electricity or phone? Sure. Can you participate in modern society without those items? Not effectively.
It's perfectly reasonable to come up with strong arguments that say that broadband Internet access will soon become a "basic need" in order for our society to effectively compete in the global market. In fact, our government (despite total incompetence) has identified this need as real.
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.
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.
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*)
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!