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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Hang on city boy, that's not true at all. My brother has been paying high fees for a satellite feed out on the farm so that he can get weather and market reports and trade commodity futures in a timely fashion. An internet connect is as important to progressive farmers as it is to any other business these days. The sad thing is that his satellite feed out in an area with less that one family per square mile is a better connection than my DSL connection here in the middle of Silicon Valley in an area of $1M+ homes.
And it would be worth every penny.
Exactly. I know there were a lot non-tech people who didn't see Internet expansion as a stimulus, but you can't have any decent sized business without having decent Internet today. Hell, you can't have most SMALL businesses. It basically limits everyone there to advertising by flyers for lawn-mowing businesses.
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.
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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.
WiMax from water towers, silos, etc.
Out of general curiosity, can those tasks be performed over dialup internet?
(Yes, they have phone lines and dial up ISPs in Montana. My grandparents in Livingston did have share party line until the mid 80's, though.)
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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.
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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
You forget those who moved to rural places to conduct activities that more or less require the internet. You know. Raising a militia. Burying bodies. Honest, clean living folks.
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.
How do you think they got those phone lines out there? It wasn't the invisible hand.
There were probably people saying "Can't those things be done through the mail?" when they got wired up for phone service.
So it better for people who have Health Care to pay for the ones who don't though HIGHER bills? The Doctors and Hospitals will get their money from somewhere. I know I had to go see a Doctor before I had health care and he told me he had to charge higher prices to those who had health care so people who didn't could get health care...
The work was all/will all be done by corporate entities through contracts assigned. The GAO issued a report indicating that they have an unfunded gap in providing for evaluation of monies spent. see: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-371T. The very idea of providing services to rural areas (c.f. roads, electricity, gas/electric, mail) has nothing whatever to do with efficiency. If efficiency were a goal the government would have to mandate that all of you live in the city. This type of redistribution of wealth from urban to rural areas is what allows myopic ideas about taxation to thrive in the very areas that benefit the most: rural areas. If you want to hate the government for wasting your tax dollars then you should also want to communicate your distaste to your elected representatives. The problem is that said elected representatives aren't elected by you, but rather by the interest groups (see the private contractors being hired) who can afford to lobby for riders on legislation.
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.
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The work was probably contracted out to private business, but there probably wasn't any competition within bids. I wouldn't be surprised if the money was given directly to established ISPs, who got to retain ownership and control of the lines and were pretty much given blank checks and minimal accountability.
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Dunno, but there are parts of Mississippi where you can not get a phone line that you can hear people over the static, Much less broadband or even dialup.
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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.
You'd be crying about driving 150 miles round trip just to get to Target in about 3 weeks.
cat
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.
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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.
Umm. That's wrong. 1:2 is great, 1:4 is still good. It is certainly not extreme poverty. I don't know if you realize this, but those in extreme poverty generally don't own homes at all.
A good explanation of ratios based on interest rate
I own a home and my income:home price ratio is 1:3.2 I comfortably pay for expanded cable and a 20/3 fiber-to-the-home internet connection, and I live in a rural community. Most of the community has access to 3 broadband choices -including fiber from an independent/non-big-telco - which are not payed for through subsidy or tax credits.
I'm not sure where you are from, but $40-50k / year is certainly a livable, comfortable, not-anywhere-near poverty condition for most of the country.
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 median household income in these areas is between $40,100 and $50,900.
First of all they're dirt poor and not going to pay for broadband or own a computer.
The 2003 Median Income of US households was $45,018 per annum. [1]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
So the average American is dirt poor and can't afford internet or a computer?
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,
Health care and health insurance are two different things. Health care is what doctors do; health insurance is what pays for it.
Health insurance works by mitigation of risk. Everyone pays into a pool, and then everyone draws from that pool as needed. A slight bump can ruin your life, but most of us will completely avoid those bumps. Insurance helps smooth out the small bumps, but more importantly handles the moderate sized ones so they don't cripple us. They occasionally have to deal with really big ones, as per agreement.
To make health insurance work, they basically have to get rid of the bottom of the barrel. The idea of health insurance for all is a fantasy. Insurance costs are too high to insure everyone, and nobody can pay it. To increase profits, you increase customer base. To do that, you reduce prices. To do that, you cut away the worst, reducing overall risk, reducing the fees needed to operate. The fewer you cut away, the higher the fees go. To maximize profits, you stop cutting when you have the most people on health insurance; interestingly, this also denies insurance to the fewest. On top of that, you cut away a few more (without dropping fees) as a margin for control of risk variance, which also functions as a surrogate profit margin. Because this model is optimal, most insurance companies operate as NPOs: they can only bring in a little bit of profit anyway, so they file for a lighter tax burden.
The one and only way to increase the number of people on health insurance is to decrease the cost of health care. This is hard. Doctors are well-off, but not really that well off; they are the remainder of the middle class, living in upscale neighborhoods with fairly large houses, with two cars, but without their own private jet or yachts or 180 days of vacation per year. Still, doctors carry a lot of risk: they come out of medical school with huge loans; they have to worry about malpractice suits and insurance; and in general the job is commission based, which carries all of its own problems.
So somehow, you have to reduce the risk to doctors; you have to reduce other costs; and you have to do it without lowering their standard of living to the point where it isn't worth it or producing shitty doctors. Your basic general practitioner is, for his PCP patients, generally laid back and doing pretty much nursing duty; he's also cheap, at worst trying to extort a $300 office visit from you if you're uninsured. Insurance pays $80-$120 and bills you $10.
The real costs come from in-patient work, especially surgery. Doctors often juggle multiple ICU or other overnight patients, with nurses keeping watch, sometimes stretching their hours. Surgeons, on the other hand, always get overtaxed, working 36-48 hours without sleep because changing over to another doctor is infeasible. The risks they take are huge; but the risk of mistakes from sleep deprivation are lower than the risks of mistake from someone who's been told about all the things that have gone on thus far and handed a knife to continue poking around inside you.
Recall I said I didn't want to lower the general standard of living for these people. How often do you have lives on the line that you can't find conscionable to leave in someone else's hands, when you've been awake for 30 hours, under high pressure, one tiny mistake away from crippling or killing someone, always just one breath away from being too late? It's a rough job and they've earned the private jets, yachts, and half-year vacations they're not getting far more than the big oil tycoons that have 'em. Besides, their overall take-home is what, $80-$100k/year after all taxes and doctor-specific expenses (malpractice insurance etc.)? Whew, good chunk of change, and it's also a surface scratch on the cost of health care.
Tough problem. It needs lots of study to fix. Fixable, but requires study. The closest guy to bludgeon with a club isn't really causing most of the expenses.
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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.)
The median household income in these areas is between $40,100 and $50,900.
First of all they're dirt poor and not going to pay for broadband or own a computer.
The 2003 Median Income of US households was $45,018 per annum. [1]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
So the average American is dirt poor and can't afford internet or a computer?
Are you one of those people who thinks the median households in the US are still middle class?
I wonder what it would cost to get yourself qualified as a lineman and do the work yourself. Cheaper than $15,000 I bet. It can't be impossible, because the guys who do the work for those private line companies come from somewhere.
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
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.
I'm at 1:3.5, and bought about a year before the housing bubble burst. The lending agencies were overjoyed to approve my loan, even though they could see the mortgage payments would be 65% of my paycheck. I've a friend who was more like 1:5 and she, too, got approved. (Although that's a whole different kettle of fish: the loan officer verbally told her what sort of loan they were setting her up with, and *after* she'd paid her $5K "earnest money" and was actually signing the papers, she realized in reading them that the loan officer had lied and she was actually getting an interest-only loan.) They love finding people who will be likely to both pay a bunch of money and then default, giving them the title to the house as well.
You don't have to eat ramen to survive: you just need to minimize your fixed costs (aside from the mortgage) very aggressively. No cable, no cellphones, no cars that require monthly payments, nothing other than what you absolutely need. (Mortgage, utilities, food.) It's not a huge amount of fun, but it's manageable. We do have computers -- 10 year old stuff -- because people give them to you for free if you look around, and they work fine. We did splurge on $20/month internet along with the POTS service. It's not extreme poverty, it's just being careful.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
The problem is, this is America, where the government is even more corrupt than the governments of Mexico or Zimbabwe. It costs so much to string wire to a house because you need to give the CEO of the telecom company that received the government funds a giant bonus with those funds.
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.
Are you one of those people who thinks the median households in the US are still middle class?
Middle class enough to afford internet and a computer.
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.
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.
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.
There are places you can't get mail delivery. It's not uncommon for the USPS to insist you come into town for your mail, or if not that, to a major road where a bunch of mailboxes are grouped together.
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trial by jury
what kind of geek are you? go realign their damn dish for them, you lazy git.
You're not familiar with rural life. If you live on your own farm, your food costs are (mostly) covered.
Rural building costs are astonishingly lower than city. As a rule of thumb, 2/3 of the cost of a house is labor. Rural labor is non-union, often unregulated, and much cheaper. (Especially if it's your labor).
Very importantly, the $40100-$50900 figure is current income, and the $94400-$189000 is current estimated home price. If the family moved into the house 20 years ago, the dollar cost was half that amount and that is what they're now paying interest on.
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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.
In 2006 the median household income in the U.S. was about $50,200. I doubt the median has gone up much since then. They aren't dirt poor; they're right about in the middle. I think your sense of proportion is way off on economics, which makes most of the rest of your argument must less viable.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Last time I checked, education in the US is free. You don't get tax breaks for home schooling or private schooling. Now rant about that, I'd like to read your opinion.
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
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
Trial by jury. Defense. Education. Public defenders.
It'd be easier to ask you to enumerate rights that come without a cost to anyone else. Instead of your flavor of sophistry, we can all show how everything ends up costing someone else something. It'd all be bullshit pushed to silly extremes, but that's your claim, too.
Its the opposite. If you have health insurance your health insurance is charged LESS than someone would pay out of pocket. This is because the health insurance companies organize bulk deals with the hospitals.
The people who screw you over are the people without insurance who go to the emergency room when they are having a heart attack etc. The emergency room must treat those individuals even if they can't pay (assuming it is an actual emergency). Basically they can't let someone die who is sitting in the waiting room but can't pay. Unless you suggest that happen it actually would be CHEAPER for you if you subsidized those people's health insurance so they would get preventative checkups and not wait until they are about to die to go to the emergency room.
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.
There is a serious problem with blanket reasoning like this:
I live in a 3 bedroom, 1 bath house, with 2 stories. It costs a whopping 25k. I make 35k every year.
The reason my house is so cheap? I live out in timbuktu. It is literally a 40 minute commute. You know, the kind of place that this kind of broadband deployment is meant to service.
Computations on house price discounts the quality of the homes being purchased. My house is pretty nice actually. It is just inconveniently located. The adjusted price it would fetch if it was in a major city would be closer to 100k+. (In CA, it would probably be closer to 250k+. HELL, when I went on vacation to the valley area last year, I saw a realestate ad for a FUCKING SHACK WITHOUT RUNNING WATER and dubious utility permits being sold for 280k. My house is leaps and bounds better than that! --- At less than 1/10th the price!)
Then there is the financial income disconnect, which as stated appears to completely disregard local economic factors that change the cost of living. In CA, my 35k/year would have me living in a garbage can. I wouldn't even be able to buy food on that. Yet, where I live right now, I can afford to eat out pretty much every day, afford over 100$/week on gas, and I can easily afford broadband. I pay 70$/mo for DSL, in fact.In fact, I am fortunate enough that the tiny town I live in could garner enough clout to *get* DSL (Probably because it houses the state's largest Rodeo event every year, depite having less than 1000 residents.) . It is not the most fantastic DSL in the world, but at least I can freaking GET it.
Most other rural people in Kansas cannot get even reliable telephone service! (My mom for instance. Landline phones? HAH! The telephone infrastructure out there is over 50 years old, and I am NOT kidding. The lines hiss, pop, crackle, and are useless for even voice communication, let alone data. The amount of crosstalk on the circuits is obscene. I have actually TESTED her dialup performance out there-- Less than 28.8, on a GOOD day, with a GOOD hardware-based modem! Dont even ask what your typical software flow control winmodems get... We are talking 3rd world country style connects here.) We had to break down and get her and my dad cellular telephones just to have reliable voice service, and even that isnt terribly reliable. I am fully expecting to have to build a utility pole in their back yard with a cellular repeater on the top of it to get them reliable service.
The only reason why there is telephone service *AT ALL* in most rural places in Kansas, is because an act of congress similar to the discussed one went through in the late 40s/early 50s.
(This is also the EXACT reason why the telephone infrastructure is literally 50 year old technology, with manual copper tie-ins, and the whole enchelada. It went in, and they promptly forgot that it existed--- Oh, except to charge for fees, of course.)
The real reason why reports like this one, disparaging the implementation of such directives, get created and passed around is because telephone operators, and now data network operators (Is there really a difference?) REALLY enjoy their natural wire monopolies, and like to offer the minimal level of service, regardless of the region being serviced. This is why San Francisco residents get the same crappy DSL service (Comparable anyway) that I get in Nowheresville Ks.
So, the reasons for this report, and others like it, boil down to these basic things:
1) The telecom companies like to get fat paychecks without investing in infrastructure, regardless of the venue.
2) Because of 1, they like to build out in areas of high population density-- Not because it is easier to service (That is merely a tangental issue)-- but because you can get a higher density of fat paychecks for minimal service, per service franchise area. That is to say, it is less about cost of maintenance, and all about cashflow density per LEGAL interaction.
3) Also because of 1, such buildouts are the minim
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.
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?
I was going to give you a nice long answer, but I realized you were a complete tool.
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.
Well, it's how you define the task. You could check for a short, delayed, weather summary or get delayed commodity quotes over dial-up. You can't get simultaneous real-time weather radar feeds and a real-time commodity ticker. It's hard to place timely commodity trades over dial-up. My dad survived on daily farm market reports that came over the AM radio every noon. Things are different now.
(Off-topic aside: I knew I had moved to a different world when I was driving through Napa Valley during the crush. That familiar monotone drone of the news reader giving the farm markets came on, but instead of hearing "St. Paul fat cattle seventy-two-fifty per hundred weight" I heard "Pinot Noir one thousand fourteen a ton".)
You are full of hot air, and prattle and blather on while utterly ignoring the truth that a jury trial costs the jurors and is a right that comes at their expense. Volumes of wrong words do not contradict the truth.
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.