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The Cost Of Broadband In Every Rural Home
dave562 writes "In an analysis of the effectiveness of the the 2009 stimulus program (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 or ARRA), one of the programs that was investigated was the project to bring broadband access to rural America. Some real interesting numbers popped out. Quoting the article: 'Eisenach and Caves looked at three areas that received stimulus funds, in the form of loans and direct grants, to expand broadband access in Southwestern Montana, Northwestern Kansas, and Northeastern Minnesota. The median household income in these areas is between $40,100 and $50,900. The median home prices are between $94,400 and $189,000.' So how much did it cost per unserved household to get them broadband access? A whopping $349,234, or many multiples of household income, and significantly more than the cost of a home itself.'"
So how much did it cost per unserved household to get them broadband access? A whopping $349,234, or many multiples of household income, and significantly more than the cost of a home itself.
Why don't they just run a single line into the center of the trailer park and install a switch for distribution?
Trolling is a art,
Keep in mind that this study was conducted by Jeffrey Eisenach (former head of Newt Gingrich's political action committee and longtime conservative activist) and Kevin Caves of Navigant Economics (a bunch of professional "experts" who spend most of their time testifying in favor of various pro-big oil, pro-energy concerns). The article that cites it is by Nick Schulz, of the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute.
And it also includes some data that I'm highly skeptical of, to say the least--like asserting that all but 1.5% of users in Montana had wired broadband access and all but 7 households in the whole state had access to 3G broadband prior to this funding. Those numbers are better than my own state, and we're not nearly as rural or mountainous as Montana.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If you live in a rural place like that, you don't WANT to be contacted by anyone. You don't WANT to have that Internet gettin' in your life.
Your idea will get broadband to trailer parks, but what about farmland where there are a few homes per square mile? I would think that satellite or other wireless access would be more cost effective than wired Internet access in sparsely populated areas.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Shared responsibility / Shared Suffering that we need to do per the administration's latest whims?
Well better on this than some sort of healthcare-for-all-scheme that our debt ceiling can't afford.
Is it really that necessary? Really?
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This is what happens when you send a government to do a man's (or woman's, or group of private citizens') job. We could stand to learn something from the successful, small WISPs and other small-time broadband providers (one of which I am a happy subscriber to).
Check this out for more information about how it's getting done Europe.
sig: sauer
I live in Canada, but we also have this same sort of pledge to bring high speed internet (not broadband specifically) to rural areas. I've been looking at rural homes, and to be honest, it's a real pain.
As someone who torrents heavily, games a lot, and generally uses about 300gb/month at least in traffic, I need a fast connection. There is literally nothing in most parts of rural Ontario that exceed 3mbps down / 1mbps up, and with unlimited (or at least, overage charges that won't make you go broke) caps. If you go the 3G/4G route (which I would love to), many areas don't actually have coverage even if they claim they do, and the caps are 5gb if you're lucky. If you go satellite.. well, it sucks. Latency is awful. And if you go Xplornet or something (wireless antenna), they all block torrents, are known to be highly unreliable, have low caps, and the speed is 3/1 at best.
It's kind of sad, because I don't want to live in the city, yet there's no real options out there either.
And it would be worth every penny.
I am sure that the resident of montana really appreciated it.... both of them
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Satellite latency is inherently terrible but low-end-DSL-equivalent bandwidth is doable over satellite.
If we plan for it now, future satellite systems can offer more bandwidth for those customers willing to pay for it.
Another option for some is fixed-wireless - basically putting a transmitter/receiver on the nearest tall radio or cellular tower for each customer and using a very-tight-beam transmission path. That's not exactly cheap but it's a lot less than the cost of a house in most cases.
What, you are so far out there is no tall tower nearby that gives you line-of-sight? Well, you might have to settle for satellite then.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The cost per unserved household has a big weasel word - "unserved." Considering the source, I'm surprised that they didn't declare that there were no "unserved" households in the state at all, which would drive that cost to infinity. They may have thought that an infinite cost wouldn't be as believable.
This seems perfect for the application of that broadband over power lines idea.
They're getting power aren't they?.... if not..... then why would they need interwebs?
1) Comcast/ATT/Cablevision/COX/etc all get their lobbyists push for this in the bill.
2) The Gub-ment pays these mega corps billions to build out in the mountains.
3) The people in these areas now have "access" to broadband... for only $79/month.
4) They don't sign up... Comcast/ATT/cablevision/etc don't care. They already made $300K per house passed in the build out already.
5) PROFIT!
I have to return some videotapes...
Broadband is a way of sending data. Broadband does not describe the amount of data. not the bandwidth or latency. We need'ed to establish at least a minimum delivery rate.
I have DSL, its the best I can get, just 3 miles from a brick and mortar Verzion switch. My data rate is mostly below 500 Kilo bits/sec. This is to slow to watch a video at 240p with out a lot of time wait time to fill the input buffer. Sometimes my line degrades down to 300kbs. I am sure there are things that are Broadband at much slower speeds.
Having broadband does not necessarily imply a adequate access. We need better standards. Before we even staart talking about this. Like perhaps. at least 1 megs bit/sec. let alone 10mbs or even 100 mbs.
They are using pure gold internet cabling with pure platinum connectors. That way your internet pictures, audio and video will have the highest quality without degrading over those long rural lines. Not to mention the sparkling clarity of your email messages! They're wiring rural America using genuine Monster(tm) brand cabling.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Damn inefficient government. This should have been contracted out to the free market and it would have cost much less because companies are so much more efficient than the government. It was done by the government, right? right???
SJW n. One who posts facts.
WiMax from water towers, silos, etc.
The median household income in these areas is between $40,100 and $50,900. The median home prices are between $94,400 and $189,000.'
First of all they're dirt poor and not going to pay for broadband or own a computer. The critical part is the ratio of income to house price. Somewhere around 1:2 is OK but not ideal, 1:4 means extreme poverty, like 99% of your legally declared income must be going toward the house and you never eat anything but ramen, at least until the inevitable foreclosure and bankruptcy. Even commissioned cheerleaders for the home sales/building industry don't have the guts to ask for more than a ratio of 1:3. Personally I live around 1:1.5 and live a pleasant luxurious mostly carefree lifestyle, including broadband, although I am not rich enough that I can totally ignore budgeting and planning. So paying any amount of money at all to provide service is useless if economic conditions are such that they can't afford to own a PC or pay for the now-available service.
The next problem is, from being in the telco industry, most of the $349,234 is going to executive bonuses, scams, overhead, etc. They need a tower to put the wireless ISP gateway on, and the CEO's brother happens to own a company providing that at merely 5 times going market rate. To get a monopoly license from the city, the city would like a $1M tax/donation/fee, but don't worry the customers will pay for it... etc.
Finally the cost of providing telecom services is at least 100:1 from multi-zillion pair buried single mode 10 gig ethernet fiber, down to wireless using 802.11 gear and fancy antennas. Since they're pimping the high cost, assume they're talking about an absolutely gold plated fiber to the house 10 gig using all Cisco brand gear and as many subcontractors as politically possible. But realize a small hungry WISP could probably provide service for a capital cost of maybe $3492.34/customer not $349234/customer. That wouldn't fit with whatever political conclusion they're trying to draw, so...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I currently live in Montana and not much has changed in the past 5 years. I have cable internet at home and they are horribly oversold. I get a fraction of the advertised speed. Qwest DSL is even slower. The options for connectivity have not changed at all at any of my branch locations throughout Montana. I have a feeling they just pocketed the cash and perhaps updated some equipment in 1-2 COs somewhere in Montana.
I'm moderately liberal, but ultimately, why shouldn't people who want to live in rural areas have to pay more for services? It costs more to provide services to them.
If people choose to live out in the sticks, they should be forced the understand and pay for their services. The reality is that it's a hell of a lot more efficient and less expensive to provide services (water, power, Internet, phone, cable, etc) to people in high density urban areas. That's what we need to be moving towards - not making it easier for people to live out in the middle of nowhere and subsidizing their services to prevent them from knowing the true costs of living out there. Country people talk about how expensive cities are - well living out in the sticks would be more expensive as well if they had to pay the true costs of obtaining phone and other services.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
If you heard Anne Coulter or one of her ken say this, you wouldn't give it moments thought. Schultz is hitching on the crazy train, perhaps hoping for a job at Fox.
4 out of 5 dentists would recommend Crest - even if it were true, it isn't really in your dentists best interests to lessen your dental bills. But it also isn't true because it lacks any sort of rigour whatsoever. By avoid hard statements of fact, which Schultz does with the flair of a security software salesperson, he neatly gets to create any outrageous scenario he can imagine.
Chuckle, move on, and wait for him to appear as Rush's economic expert soon.
While the source of this data is obviously biased, I wonder where the stimulus money was actually spent. Think what a trillion dollars actually is. A new aircraft carrier costs ~10 billion dollars, planes double that cost, meaning that the country could have purchased 50 with the stimulus (we currently have 11). In todays dollars the Apollo program cost 150 billion meaning that we could duplicate it six times with a trillion dollars. A highway bridge near where I live is being replaced for a cost of 300 million, thus a trillion dollars could have replaced that bridge 3000 times. It could have paid the 14 million unemployed, $35000 a year for two years. Where did it go, and what did it do?
Broadband should be considered as an infrastructure and not as a luxury. Good infrastructure leads to economic development. The cost of providing infrastructure might be high initially but in the long run it has tremendous benefits for the economy of the area where that infrastructure was provided. Providing broadband in rural areas will attact outside businesses, help local businesses grow, make easier to provide education. The benefit will far outweigh the cost in the long run. Oh and what about steaming HD pr0n? Don't people in rural areas have needs?
So, how did the roads get built? How is the mail delivered? How is power transmitted? How about Plain Old Telephone Service? There used to be some bonafide investment in infrastructure in the US, so where did all that go?
Granted, I understand that water and sewer isn't too common in rural areas, but it's not like it's a backpacking adventure through the rainforest we're talking about.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Farmers know how to move dirt. Let them do it. Broadband is a matter of digging a ditch, dropping a single mode fiber cable into it and putting the dirt back into the ditch. It is not rocket science.
From the same folks that brought you Obama's trip to India costing $200 million/day comes, $340k/house Internet!
It's just absurd.
The debate over whether stimulus worked or didn’t is too abstract to be of much help. It’s a better use of time to look at some specific stimulus programs and projects and see how they did.
Yes. Always cherry pick first before trying to get a broader perspective. This is the best way to get off on politics rage. This is why we are talking about this right? Right?
Also, the article's source seems to be down so I don't even figure out how in world they are claiming "$7 million for each additional household served".
The most expensive line item is salaries and benefits. The stimulus went to prop up the HR costs of state governments. You may have noticed that most public sector jobs were not lost during 2008 and 2009. That's where the money went.
It's a different picture now. The private sector shed 8 million jobs. There's no more support for another bailout/"stimulus", so expect to see a wave of contraction in public sector jobs.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
We all appreciate your offer to raise your share of food for your neighborhood, but right now we have a more pressing need for minerals. Please let us know when your quota of copper ore is ready for shipment to the smelter.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Plenty of spots in Upstate New York, Vermont, Maine, etc that have sufficient geography to kill WiMax on the top of anything manmade. And putting a WiMax tower on top of Mount Washington serves a bunch of deer, and little else.
It's the geography, stupid. Hills kill wireless. WiMax in Montana, maybe for some of it. For Kansas, maybe better, for Minnesota, maybe not so good either.
Just so we know this, if it were affordable, the telcos or cable cos or satellite guys would have already done it.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Does anyone honestly believe that running WIRE to a home, even if you had to dig a trench (which millions of homes who have sewer and water do everyday) costs more than the freaking home?
Who the hell are they kidding? Strange how you can build a home with a huge amount of labor and material for $150k in 4 months, but they wanted more than double that for internet connectivity.
1 year of the average income is enough to pay for both the wire, the labor, and the poles for some 5 miles of direct line. The reason the costs seem high is because the studied is skewed, and they are likely paying full "industry" prices by the wage, probably on the order of several hundred dollars an hour to drive in telephone poles. And those industry prices are jacked because of the excessive monopoly these companies have. It doesn't cost that much. They're full of it.
And they just shot themselves in the foot--any study by this group is going to be criticized because of this piss poor "study."
This reminds me when I wanted to connect 2 nearby properties that I had--could have easily simply run wire up the pole on one with a long trench (since that property was newer, everything was underground) to the other. Any geek wanting to run a then 100mbit ethernet line shielded could have done it for $400 in wire across the property and to the poles. Add in labor, 100 yard trench, pole connections, insurance, the job easily could be done for under $1,500 in 4 hours. Of course, I was told that I had to get the telephone company or some private line company, and I was quoted $15,000, lead time of 3 months.
I wonder where the stimulus money was actually spent.
Not exactly hard to find out (per Wikipedia):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009#Provisions_of_the_Act
Almost half ($288B) went to tax cuts, about half of that went to direct aid to the States ($144B), the rest in dribs and drabs to other things.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The market will bear this out. I'm currently in Alabama, not even in a particularly rural area (western Mobile), but there's not cable or DSL on my road. Very frustrating to use 3G internet for internet, but I don't think it's the goverment's job to drop me a line, or for them to force comcast or ATT to do it. I'll wait. 4G is available, but I'm grandfathered in a 3G unlimited plan which I will loose if I get a 4G card. I'm currently using 7GB/month on 3G, as soon as we get 4G we'll start streaming like crazy and probably do 10GB every 5 days.
Do I want better internet? Yes.
Do I want someone else to have to pay for it? No.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Um. This is southwestern Montana they're talking about - think Rocky Mountains and not Great Plains. Line of sight is tough and getting physical access and power to repeater sites (on mountains - mostly) in the winter is difficult during large parts of the year.
I relied on a local in-town wireless provider for a while. They lost one of their tower sites when somebody moved and I got switched up to the mountain repeater as it was the only tower my radio could hit. It routinely went down during the winter and took hours to get back up. I eventually moved and was able to hit a different tower, thankfully, but even in towns there are generally enough hills in the Rocky Mountains to make things difficult for wireless.
I agree that satellite may be the only option for lots of rural people. Tall towers aren't that common and there are large portions of most of the less populated states that nobody wants to string anything to from a right of way or ongoing maintenance or certainly profit point of view. The population densities just aren't there - and since the water supply generally isn't either, we'd like to keep it that way.
I don' think the issue should be one of "building down" to the local user. Rather, it should be creating incentives and policies for "building up" from the local (potential) broadband user. Rural folks are often handy at building what they need ... so 40-50 foot towers aren't a real problem as long as there's 1) an affordable kit they can use for a receiver and 2) policies that allow people to build said towers and link them into a net.
The most expensive line item is salaries and benefits. The stimulus went to prop up the HR costs of state governments. You may have noticed that most public sector jobs were not lost during 2008 and 2009. That's where the money went.
It's a different picture now.
Public sector employment is down 500K jobs from January 2009 to today.
Now that the ARRA support for state and local jobs is expiring, there will be a lot more pink slips (the June jobs report is a start.)
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I was a technical evaluator. We often joked it would be more cost effective to move the people to somewhere with internet access. The point of the project though was to deliver internet to people who didn't have it, and they didn't have it because it was economically unfeasible for a company to do it.
This meant that cost was not a huge consideration. It was a consideration though. We looked to see if cost per mile worked out right so the government wasn't getting ripped off. Cost per home or subscriber was out, as thats how cable and phone decide whether on not to build, and that decision was made a long time ago.
Well, living in a country with more than 80% of it's area being mountains, I can only wonder. The normal expectation is that I have HSPA mobile access anywhere, no matter if I'm sitting in the subway in the city, or skiing somewhere crazy. I mean how do you keep your kids quiet if they cannot surf youtube while you drive?
So if you have no highspeed mobile access on some mountain in the Rockies, your mobile providers are cheapskates. Or more correctly your politicians are better bought. Our carriers not only paid a ghastly sum for the UMTS frequencies, the license also included a condition that they have to bring coverage to 95% of the population (after a number of years for sure), or loose the license and forfeit the license fee. Guess your politicians did not think about including such a condition, right?
(The expectations are so that my daughter's school for her last school trip explicitly noted that the shelter on the mountain where they will be staying has no mobile coverage. That's kind of a definition that they'll be going to the end of the world and beyond, ..., here around.)
Hasn't anyone learned anything about the cost of private contractors engaged in national business. If you don't understand why Blackwater got into defense contracting, let me give you a clue - it had nothing to do with patriotism.
Robust network connections have clearly become a fundamental component of the national business. We should have nationalized the carriers 10 years ago.
At seven million per customer they would have to live on the moon to be unprofitable. I take that back - Laser moon bounce ain't that expensive.
Was half to 3/4's of the cost labor, cause I can see digging 100+ miles of ditch for a home to not be too cheap.
Also, where is the venerable WiMAX that was supposed to 'save' the physical line last mile requirement? Is it still tied up in spectrum backlog, hardware patents, or football humping between the ISP's and carriers to see who can get the greatest slice of pie?
The problem w/ a report like this, is a good portion of the costs are inflated due to self-generated ass-hattery, pseudo-reguation, and far-fetched bid estimates.
Why yes! I have installed rural broadband for population densities at =1 person/(Mi^2), why do you ask?
Heh... It MIGHT be more cost effective- but with the notions that most of these jokers have on pricing, etc. they're not much better right at the moment, really.
Let me give everyone a bit of thinking I've had to undergo trying to ensure that a horse farm in Northeast Texas between Sherman and Paris has something resembling broadband.
3G is available in many locations- though not all. Depends on whether the telco has opted to ensure mostly statewide coverage or if you're near a main highway corridor. 3G's problem is billing and bandwidth, past the availability. This is what I've opted to use for now out at the farm. The business partner's doing it w/AT&T, I'm doing mine through Verizon. Kind of hit-or-miss where we're at- I'm looking for getting a repeater or a boost antenna/amp for at least one of the dongles and pairing it with a Cradlepoint router. 1-3 Mbits down, .7-1.5Mbits up is the best you can expect, coupled with usable latencies. Bandwidth depends on signal quality with the tower, combined with the current load on the tower. However, if there's something screwed up on the backhaul, you're hosed (duh...). You could be on top of the tower with a solid signal and get little to nothing in the way of bandwidth or good latency. For many, right now, this is your only realistic option- just don't expect to be streaming Netflix very much with it...it'd be expensive. VERY expensive.
WiMax coverage is a joke. It's a bit of a source of disappointment as it could have been vastly more and Clear and Sprint pretty much dropped the ball there. WHEN it works, it's got decent bandwidth and latency. Just don't expect it to be available in most cases outside of a major metro area. Small players have built up their own WiMax network in varying areas, including North-Central Texas and the Longmont-Greely-Ft. Collins areas up in Colorado. Word is on those services that they're crippling the bandwidth to 3G speeds and the latencies are...heh...craptastic.
LTE coverage is even more of a joke right at the moment (But might change if they're all telling the truth on what they're doing...). AT&T? Not there yet- they're playing catch up with Verizon. Sprint? They're trying to decide to do their own rollout and jettison Clear- or keep 'em. How many towns and how much actual coverage does Verizon have there? They're claiming by end of 2012 most of the 3G plat being covered and 2014 the whole plat being covered. I'll believe it when I see it. It's a more compelling story bandwidth-wise than WiMax and it's got better propagation characteristics in most cases. But...it's not there right now. It probably won't be "there" for at least another year for many and possibly two to three. And, we won't get into what Verizon has taken upon themselves for pricing for it. While tolerable as a mobile/nomadic solution- it's less optimal for a fixed solution for a rural setting- $50/5GB and $80/10GB with a $10/GB overage charge...it's better than it used to be, but that's not saying all too much. Maybe someone will field a better structured LTE answer for this stuff. I'd have thought they'd have done this or a WiMax answer with all of that stimulus money- but it looks like the money was wasted, much like all the other Stimulus funding.
HDSPA+ coverage is...heh...as decent as T-Mobile's voice coverage. Mixed bag on that- but where you have good coverage, you've got the currently highest download speed for wireless, a weak upload speed and latencies that're just like WiMax or LTE (Adequate...). The problems are: T-Mobile's got this evil softcap that you can't really change from 5GB/mo and if you exceed it, you run the risk of being throttled back to 2.5G speeds for the rest of the month. The other problem is that AT&T has bought them and this will eventually go away in exchange for AT&T's planned LTE rollout.
Some areas nearby a township might have Time Warner or Cablevision or one of their affiliates around. In at least some of the cas
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Heh... One would've thought that this would be what they did with those Stimulus funds... But noooo....
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
last time I was in social security orifice, I over heard that they consider land line telephone service a luxury.
At least in Northeastern Minnesota, stimulus money is being combined with money from other sources to bring broadband to hospitals, schools, local government buildings AND residents.
Also we shouldn't confuse "rural" with "farmland". Northeastern Minnesota is a rocky, sometimes forrested terrain dotted by lakes. Large swaths of it are part of a couple of national parks.
Perhaps where you live it is very flat, but in much of the discussed area it is quite hilly. This means you might put your antenna on the top of one hill and no one will be able to get line of sight to it due to the fact that they live in another valley. Satellite might get lowend DSL speed, but the latency and usage caps are a giant drawback. It is also very expensive.
With the situation in the Northern Corridor, I would agree with the Mt Washington comment. People there are resisting the NH governments attempts to bring technology up that way. I imagine it's, in part, because they don't want major housing developments showing up. Unless moose and bears start showing up in Concord and demanding internet for their laptops.
you do know what subsidies are for, right? They're to ensure a steady and affordable food supply and prevent starvation. Unless you're really, really rich, you want this.
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I am fairly liberal, and I disagree 100% with your above statement.
You can not compare people who live in rural areas with minorities - for the simple reason that they CHOOSE TO LIVE THERE. No one is forcing people in rural Alabama to live there vs. in the city - and frankly I find it offensive that someone who lives in the city has to subsidize high speed internet for someone who doesn't, considering these people also pay far lower property taxes.
If they want high speed in rural areas, then they should raise property taxes in these areas to pay for it - not levy it on others who choose to live more efficient lifestyles in the city.
What possible need is there to set up mail service in the boonies? Can't these folks just ride in to the town every month when they get their monthly bath at the general store and pick it up then? We can't pamper these folks, next thing you know they will insist we provide them with a marshal and maybe even a county doctor!
Seriously. People think they can have it all these days.
Why should you get to live in the country, pay super low taxes, and have someone else in the city pay super high taxes to subsidize YOUR high speed?
Move to the country and pay for your own broadband hookup. Or live with satellite access. Or stay in the city. But don't ask for my tax dollars to pick up the bill for your personal choice to live in an inefficient location.
My parent's house is on the border between two service areas and dial up doesn't even work there because the phone lines are so bad...forget about DSL, and there is not cell coverage. Started looking at satellite and found www.mybluedish.com. Seems to be government subsidized, and while the speeds are not stellar (and latency would be poor), it's better then a kick in the pants:)
I used to have a roommate who spent all his time downloading. Games, apps, movies, the whole shebang. That was his sum total of computer use, downloading and burning. He never actually DID anything creative, or even enjoyful. There was no time, because all he did literally was download.
Is this you?
From previous threads on broadband, I gather that Finland has 100% of the population covered with better speed anyone here would hope for and Finland has wide areas with very low population density. Apparently the Finns decided univeral access was a good idea. Recent articles have detailed horses carrying reels of fiber (here in the US) and the rider installing it on existing phone poles, That does not cost a million dollars per mile, nor does it tear up the countryside.
Finland 118,000 sq mi, averaging 44 people per sq mi
USA 3,540,000 sq mi, averaging 84 people per sq mi
For whatever averages are worth...
Having hispeed data for your kids while you drive seems to imply you were on a road. Even the major (and some minor) roads in Vermont get coverage. The problem is serving the small town of 5-600 residents, when it's 12 miles off the main highway. Even in Europe this may not be as common as you seem to be claiming, but I'll look for your assessment of that.
And ski areas have surprisingly good access. Again, look for service 30 miles away, in the woods, in those very small towns.
In Montana, some ranches are more than 60 miles apart. No cell tower reaches that far, and probably not WiMax. There are clever ways to leverage WiFi, but that requires creativity and cooperation amongst the locals.
And true, our government fails to elicit coverage commitments from carriers when they auction off spectrum. We are aware of this shortcoming.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I live in Portland Oregon where broadband access is well penetrated but my parents live in rural Oregon and have only had broadband Internet access available to them since 2004. It is just one company, Qwest, and there is only one speed available, 1.5 Mbps. There are currently no plans to bring the area faster Internet service.
My aunt and uncle, who live a couple miles inland from the Oregon coast in the foothills of the coastal mountains have only had broadband for the last six months, thanks to the federal broadband initiative. Unfortunately it is satellite Internet and stopped working after about four months. When they called to ask for help fixing their connection, they were told it would be $200 for a technician to come out and realign the dish.
Classic.
It is not a right when it takes from another.
Show me a right defined in the Constitution/Bill of Rights which imparts a debt on another?
That is why all this talk about new rights is so dishonest. You may be defining a right but your not doing it in the spirit of the Constitution yet so many people try to imply such. They do their best to take their new made up rights and imply that they have the same weight and authority as those in the Bill of Rights while completely running roughshod all over the Bill of Rights.
Your rights do not include taking from others, by defining it as such your also claiming a right to the product of another person. Now what about that person's rights. Yet most rights people like to lay claim to require a government to enforce these rights whereas the Bill of Rights requires the government not to do certain things, in fact it prevents it.
So stop calling them rights, their demands, demands which can only exist because government ignores the Constitution or so twists it that it becomes nearly meaningless. Apparently they only let us keep the rights which don't cost them money... so far
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It is close to the amount that each saved/created job cost, so what's the problem?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Farmers know how to move dirt. Let them do it. Broadband is a matter of digging a ditch, dropping a single mode fiber cable into it and putting the dirt back into the ditch. It is not rocket science.
It's not the state of the science that holds back these sorts of projects. It's the state of the laws, taxes, and liabilities surrounding employing American workers and farmers can't do this work without them.
This is a stupid, non-argument, if managed right. You start out spending the money to deliver broadband in the highest density areas. You get massive coverage quickly. The people who live way out there come last.
WiMax, or any other wireless solution, sucks in a rural area. I live on one of those roads with four houses. There are three Wireless providers in my area, all top out at 3meg down 160k up; however normal usage shows about 750 k down and 50k up for all providers. They have just placed caps on usage, 5Gb a month and 10 dollars a gig thereafter. we are getting robbed.
If that were true why was there parts of downtown Nashville with No cable or DSL when I was there a few years back? is the middle of music row in a cornfield?
No friend it is called 'cherry picking" and something the teleco duopoly has done for years. When my mom built her home more than 20 years ago the cable stopped exactly 2 blocks from her house. Now more than 30 households live on this small 2 mile stretch and how far is that cable now? Exactly 2 block from my mother's door, same as it was more than 20 years ago. They haven't moved a single inch in ANY direction in more than a decade here, despite ever more houses being built, because that would mean they would have to invest rather than put the money into their pockets and in the USA it is "damn everything but the quarterly report!" and has been for ages.
No we are gonna have to open up the last mile to competition and we are gonna build it ourselves if the companies won't, just as they refused to run electrical lines and water to most of the rural areas. And how much of that "cost" is private contractors and no bid contracts? If one would let the cities and the states build instead of having them buried in teleco lawsuits which is ironic since they are suing for customers they refuse to serve even if they win, well then I bet you'd see that price plummet.
The problem is the current system like the "stimulus" bullshit was done classic government style, which means it doesn't get done if Sen Porkus and Congressman Kickbackus don't get to throw some to their cronies who promptly raise their bids by 600% and act like they won the lotto. We should do it ourselves and demand that the 200 billion we gave the telecos back in 96 for nationwide broadband (who said "Gee thanks! and then gave us the finger, just like GE who took a bailout and used it to send another factory to India) be paid WITH interest in 90 days or we seize the last mile.
The ONLY way we are ever gonna catch up with the rest of the world is to stop tying the hands of the local and state governments and bust up the teleco monopoly on lines. They want a monopoly? Fine we'll give you 20 years for every currently underserved or unserved neighborhood you give FTTH. Make it 15 for every large city you change out, 20-25 for every small town. Otherwise all we are gonna get is ever nastier caps while the CxOs get extra hookers to snort blow off of while we get the short bus to the information superhighway.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Obviously, they're fooling some people on Slashdot.
Let's run this past the smell test. Large parts of Sweden and Finland are sparsely populated, but they tend to have high-speed connections. Neither Sweden nor Finland is an exceptionally wealthy country.
Also, it wasn't prohibitively expensive to run telephone and electrical lines to pretty much everybody, and that was with worse technology and a poorer country. It can't be that expensive to run high-speed Internet.
In other words, there's no way it can possibly cost that much for high-speed internet.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"Don't take my tax dollars to improve the world for my fellow citizens!"
Guess what, hot shot.. THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT TAX DOLLARS ARE FOR.
Why shouldn't he live in the country if he wants?
You think there's a money problem in any western nation? You think any of us is broke? No fucking way, man. There's plenty of money. It's just being hoarded by the dudes at the very tippy top of the financial food chain.
This is the world we live in now, because lamebrains everywhere for a generation bought into Ayn Rand-style "taxation is theft" bullshit nuttery. You and I and everyone we'll ever know gets screwed, while someone walks away with another jet or small island or developing nation in his silk-lined pocket.
My home town , with less than 250 people, which is 1.5 hours from the nearest city has high speed. 5mbps down and 640kbps up for only $35 a month. The provincial telco company SaskTel has put in infastructure to cover over 90 percent of the comunities with high speed.
Check the website for more info - www.sasktel.com
I might agree with you, if it weren't for the fact that the people living in rural areas by and large are the same people calling for "low low taxes". Fine. You want low low taxes? Then be prepared for less services. Rural areas receive more tax dollars than they generate. I'm for ending that disparity. Let's see how the people that want those "low low taxes" do when there's no federal and state government donating more money to them to build infra-structure. Wanna bet who loses more, rural folks, or city folks when we cut services?
AccountKiller
Yet they pretty much all have telephone cables leading right to their homes. And electricity. And possibly water, sewage and gas pipes. How come that is affordable, and broadband not? It's not that the cables are that more expensive, and you guys tend to have most of it above ground anyway. Just hang another cable on those phone poles.
I agree, My house is in a rural area but the DLS connections stop one half mile from my door. There are another 15 houses within one mile of mine, all without broadband. I sit on a desert island, with nothing but dialup. I've contacted the telco, centurytel and got the response, "you're not on the list for any DSL at this time or in the future." BTW, They laid all new copper last year to support new housing in the area. WTF?
Most really rural communities here got "broadband" ten+ years ago under Clinton. I wished that money had been available to me...I moved here in 1996 after selling a California ISP but there was NOTHING here then, infrastructure wise...so I could not invest my own money here and had to leave again. The BS part is that even Wisdom, Montana, population 114 or so, has broadband....and has for almost five years....well before this BS article. (They are a client of mine, so I know.) Our local cable provider got turned down for funds (used to work for them...they were cable, so I saw the writing on the wall and left), as did many local wireless providers (work with them routinely). The "seven homes" or whatever are the province of the rich and famous, IMHO. Fuck them...they buy our land at crazy prices making it so I can't have a cabin somewhere to take my family for just fun. -Liberal in Montana (we're rare)
To a point, exactly the case. If they have phone service "broadband" should not be that hard. In 1996 it was defined as 256kbps.. That's cake over all but really awful copper. And they don't have THAT yet.
Frankly, for the price in the article, somebody was being robbed blind. This would be the case for broadband over Powerlines, or something like that.. If only to reduce the cost and maintenance of the last mile ... But telcos fight BoP even harder than environmentalists.
All you need is to string a fiber-optic line between your home and two of your closest neighbors. (or maybe just one). If it is really far, and through tough terrain, directional wi-fi will work.
No government, no ISPs, no monthly fees. You trench your own line and buy it wholesale and the connection will be extremely fast.
The in Canadian Arctic, broadband (say 500k-1MB+/sec) connections are commercially available for around $60/mo., rate limited to dialup speed after 5GB (no extra charges, no cutoff.) Commercial broadband is available as far north as Grise Fiord.
The cost of space on a satellite transponder is on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.
Electricity is many times more expensive than it is in the south.
Flights to the communities for technicians to perform maintenance or repairs is at very least $3000 round trip -- that's just air fare. Accommodations and food per diem are many times more expensive than in the south.
The already small subscriber base is split between at least two ISPs.
There is no business case here -- it would not be possible if it weren't for government support.
Broadband is used in schools, libraries, health care services, government offices, weather stations, stores and restaurants (including card transactions) as well as by regular consumers (and yes, the Canadian arctic does have all of those things.) It has a massive positive impact on the quality of life in these places. The hope is that it will also have a positive economic impact over the long run.
In my opinion the government is doing its job by enabling the services that the majority of Canadian's enjoy to be offered to the most have-not parts of Canada. A government is responsible for ensuring a basic quality of life to all its citizens, not just those living in the cities. That quality of life has been improving all the time, with paved roads, hospitals, telephone and power lines and various infrastructure that allow people to live in what we call modern society.
Oh you want to hear a story that'll piss you off? In early 00 I had a decent amount of money from a settlement (rich asshole playing with his cell instead of watching where he was going, took the entire side out my car and laid me up for a couple of months) so I decided "fuck this I'm gonna help my mom and these folks out". So I went down the road and got EVERY house to sign they would be happy to have service, in fact most wanted the full boat, all the channels and every package they had.
So I march down there to the cableco with this petition and the knowledge of how much it would cost to run the line, as I talked to a linemen that actually went out and measured and the cost was $12,000 to run the entire length at the time. so I tell them "Here is the list of people that want it, i'll pay for the line, just hook it up" and you know what I got? They wanted $30,000 just to consider it and contracts for FIVE YEARS with a 25% markup. They said unless I could "guarantee the profit potential of the area" then they couldn't do it!
So I say it is time We, The People, whose land their wires cross, take back what is ours. it is time to seize the last mile and open it up to REAL competition! sadly if we don't those like you and my mom will NEVER EVER get service, just the finger while they raise rates on those of us that have it and give the CxOs more bonuses for hookers and blow.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I used to install satellite antennas, and a large chunk of those installations were out in the countryside.
I mean this in the nicest possible way, but fuck non-agricultural country dwellers and any others whose jobs require them to be there. People who live in the country merely to avoid the city are a fucking cancer on society, and they constantly whine about all the stuff that "the city" or "the county" (to whom they pay little or no taxes) won't do for them. They moan about what an inconvenience living in the country is, and yet they wouldn't have it any other way.
Farmers and other contributing members of society I understand. Anyone who lives in the country out of anything but necessity can just fuck right off. Make them pay for it; they moan the loudest. The farmers never complained.
As many of you probably remember, the Finnish government stated last year that broadband access is a right and that every household in the country should be able to get broadband access at reasonable costs. The way this is financed is that the government basically forces the largest ISPs to provide service to them. The costs for the operation are divided among three entities: the customer, the ISP and the government. Last time I checked, DNA (a fairly large ISP) charges around 1000 euros (the price is not fixed, it varies depending on what hardware is required) for equipment installation (they use 3G or long-range wifi depending on your location) and then around 40 euros a month for the connection (this is what our government considers "reasonable"). I'm not sure how much the government pays the ISPs to do this but from what I understand they only do it if the real costs of connecting a customer are really high.
Sadly the U.S government is probably too weak to be able to force ISPs to do this without having to pay for the whole thing themselves.
People in Rural America already have access to broadband - by way of a number of satellite providers. Yes, the lag sucks, but satellite is an efficient means of delivering high-bandwidth data to a large swath of countryside. There is even competition in the market - HughesNet, Starband, SkywayUSA, and WildBlue, to name a few.
Some areas where there are a decent number of homes clustered, fixed-wireless services become feasible. Equipment cost is about the same as satellite, but the lag is lower and it still covers mere ground with less money than hardwire. This is already an option in many towns thanks to Clear and a multitude of smaller WISPs.
If we want to get broadband into the countryside, offer to subsidize the one-time cost of purchasing satellite or fixed-wireless equipment. That will cost a mere $100-$300 per household, rather than $350,000!
Then again, Congress has bigger fish to fry... namely the debt ceiling.
The same place the $6 billion 'lost' in Iraq went. Let's just say, Dick Cheney won't be the only evil bastard that lives forever.
I don't know what drugs some of these 'experts' (an unknown drip under pressure to be sure) are taking. We live in rural Ontario, on an island no less. Our internet service is satellite and Wi-Fi from two different providers. The satellite was the first source and it has been reliable although the two second latency makes video Skype a bit surreal. Then we got Wi-Fi from another provider -- it is faster but curiously much less reliable. I would love to have fibre but the two mile wide channel that is quite deep makes it a bit of a challenge. Our problem is that while the Wi-Fi service is pretty decent the leased line that links our tower to the local fibre was a bit under-configured. When the kids come home from school the thruput falls off rapidly. And the ISP is a bit casual about system uptime, which makes it worse. One problem we do have is that streaming video or music is pretty much unusable - it comes in chunks with disruptive pauses. So we shudder when yet another media site blathers on about how happy they are to put in more streaming video. And Netflix or VOIP are completely unusable. And the odd part is that out here in the boonies those kinds of services are exactly what one might want. But I guess the level of paranoia about potentially redistributable media files trumps the extra business potential. Yeah, its a drag providing services for us rural folk. But solutions exist that work well -- although never to what an urban troll with local fibre would get.
Hmm... I seem to recall seeing, for the past decade or so, a charge on my monthly phone bill so that the phone company could be installing that rural broadband. Where did that money go? (Probably to aid in the reconsolidation of the former Baby Bells.)
Right. Just who was doing the installation? Halliburton?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
You know how to use a shovel, right? Why not run a few strands to your house then?
Maybe the distance to the CO becomes a factor?
Cheap DSL. That aside, I once helped bring fiber to a student home. There were cable ducts though.
Thank you.
I knew that I read a story like this on Slashdot, a while ago. It might have been from you, but I recall it being about broadband. It doesn't matter though, because the ideas are the same.
Just recently Canada Post had a strike and lock out, and people were saying that Canada Post should be privatized. That is silly because it is currently profitable.
I tried to explain your type of a story to a friend who said that Canada Post should be privatized, but I think that he might not have believed me.
I going to post a link to your story.
testing out my trending skills
Want another one to give your friend? Because I have a doozy for you about why giving power to these monopolies will screw the common man, Check it out 100% true...
I had a friend in a similar situation, the business he co-owned was about a mile from the end of the line and it was hurting them. But he got a different idea than mine, he went out and after getting his partner to go in half with him had a T1 ran from town which all told cost them nearly $20,000. You see this area had NOTHING but dialup and would get as a response from the duopoly "we have no plans now or in the future for that area". Now we are talking about a good 125 houses plus, including two apt buildings. So what my bud's plan was was to rent off access to their T1, set up a local server for WSUS and popular FOSS software, to give everyone a nice setup that was better than the $70 a month the teleco was sticking for dialup. Capitalism in action, right?
Well the teleco got wind, probably when they saw their $70 a month dialup take a nosedive so the cut off his access to the backbone as well as made a few phone calls so nobody else would sell him access either. Their words were to the effect "Go on, just TRY and sue us!" and his lawyer said "Sure, you'll win. No doubt about it. But it will cost you a million dollars and a decade in court to fight the legal bullshit they'll throw in your way".
So after losing $20,000 on a T1 and still getting nothing but dialup they said fuck it, closed up shop and moved away. Cost nearly a dozen people their jobs and even though this was in 2000 to this very day ALL those people there have is dialup with the same "we have no plans for that area now or in the future" bullshit.
So send THAT to your friend as well, and also point out a couple of links to the cities that have tried running their own lines only to get sued by the telecos for 'unfair competition" even though they have no intention of supporting them even if they win just forcing them to keep the same worthless dialup or low rent DSL horseshit they currently have.
It makes my damned blood boil I'm having to pay out the ass for shoddy WISP service to my mom's place and my nephew has to run into the shop from school at least twice a week because he can't even get his college work done with the piss poor "options" they have, which is dialup or WISP that is down more than it is up. And sorry about the length but as someone who has been fighting the pricks for over a decade now it REALLY pisses me off!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
and the phone lines don't go to a CO right?
There is no DSL, Cable, ISDN available also ISDN is super expensive because Telephone companies don't want to provide it. Were I live there is only Satellite Internet"Crappy and expenseive", WISP"IF a heavy bandwidth or poweruser you pay about $120US amonth on top of a $100 install", Dial-up 46.6Kbps w/ very high corruption, 3G "limited with connections". I am on 3G right now with Virgin Mobile 3G because the this is all I can afford because I can't afford Dial-up or Satellite internet because I am on limited income, when I was on Dial-up I was paying a total $80 permonth $70 for phone line and $10 for Dial-up ISP. I had no other choice but to move up here back in Oct 09 because my rent is Cheap, I would like to move to a town with Broadband but with me being on limited income I can't afford the Rent. In my area I moved up here in Oct 09 before I moved there was DSL I checked before like anyone does they check for broadband but then After I moved and got settled Verizon said sorry all we can offer you is Dial-up because the Central office is pack and now when people cancel there DSL they are not opening back up the Slots for some one else and leaving the area with Dial-up. I am in Phelan, CA and is a Rural Area and People want something better then Satellite internet or expensive WISP or Dial-up or 3G. You people in a city with Broadband need to experiance being in a Rural area before you pass that Rural areas get the short end of the stick. Keep in mind Rural Area people can't do services that they want to do like Youtube or maybe netflix, hulu, vudu. Also keep in mind there are people in Rural areas with Bluray players now and those bluray players need Firmware updates and can be 60MB+ try to do that over Dial-up. Also keep in mind since Big broadband Companies didn't want to go into Rural even to expand slowly it now Costs WAY MORE to get the Rural Areas equal to an area that has broadband the Cost is more and Coming around and Kicking the Big Broadband Companies in the butt.
At least here in MN, some rural areas simply don't have the baseline infrastructure (fiber or other large pipes from large population centers) - see this story from last January (MPR News Story):
Also, as far as efficiency with stimulus numbers,I don't think many liberals would argue that the federal government is efficient with dollars. However, it's the fact that the private sector was unwilling to take the risk (due to the economic downturn - self fulfilling downward spiral there) in so many areas that necessitated government spending.
JGG
I'm Canadian, and assume that you're American. It's probably the same in Canada.
Why can't grassroots organizations build their own backbone?
I can understand the hassles of extra wiring to homes, but not from business establishments.
Although I believe you, I find it difficult to believe that it would cost the companies so much to connect to these people. Obviously, they keep the phone contracts going.
By the way, he responded, and acknowledged that the private sector gets it right some times.
I'll tell him of your response.
testing out my trending skills
I mean how do you keep your kids quiet if they cannot surf youtube while you drive?
We installed a dvd player, as the phone won't do youtube over HSPA for 6+ hours. let along 2+.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
I'd love to. where do I plug the other end in?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.