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19 Million Americans Cannot Get Broadband Access
First time accepted submitter paullopez writes "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced during its eighth annual broadband progress report on the state of broadband/Internet access in America, that 19 million Americans still do not have access to high-speed broadband above the 3Mbps threshold. However, the report also detailed the advances the progress that is being made, including 'LTE deployment by mobile networks.'" Also at SlashCloud.
Lol, how can you suck that bad in America? Here in Iceland we're approaching 80% of the population with 50-100mb *fiber*, despite having 1/10th the population density as the US. Even the capitol region's population density is only about the average population density of America, and that's only about 70% of the population; the largest city outside the capitol region is six hours drive away and has only 17k people. They're currently stringing connections in Vestfirðir, a large, sparsely populated, mountainous region where the largest "city" is just over 3k people. This here is all just counting fiber connections, let alone DSL. And people generally get excellent net service through their cell phones as well (2g map, 3g map for one provider). I've used Facebook on hikes, from the top of mountains before. And it's all cheap, too.
What's up with that, America? Why do you neglect your infrastructure like that? Here we've got multi-kilometer mountain tunnels leading to towns of around 1000 people, and you can't even make it possible for 6% of your population to have 3Mbps *dsl*? Over your existing phone lines?
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.
I work for a small rural (very rural) telco that is laying fiber to our customers, and supplying them with up to 100mbps speeds. Then the big guys come in, block our access to polls and such in attempts to service remote customers, but then, themselves, refuse to service them. We think it has something to do with hoarding funds that are available for servicing rural customers. Also, our customers, a large majority of them, can't get anything close to dependable cellular data, heck, most of them can't even get enough signal for cellular voice. Our voice will never get heard, because we are too small, but doing the best we can to service these people.
Don't Blame me if I seem bitter, I'm at work, and the TV only plays soap operas.
The USAs population density is highly misleading on one hand.
I have lived in places with my nearest neighbor sharing a wall at one extreme, and in another location where the nearest neighbor was 3 miles away.
On the other the USAs phone lines are also crap. Very few here want to pay the taxes or any other of that "evil socialist" stuff like that required to have modern infrastructure.
Not too long ago, there was talk about providing high speed internet to every household through the power grid. Even several test cities tried it with very good results. However, the major telecommunication companies lobbied to kill it. Go figure.
... and isn't your country even more bankrupt than ours?
I suppose you aren't to be blamed for the fact that the media has blacked out stories about Iceland for several years now. So it isn't your fault that you don't know that Icelanders threw out their government and decided that the people didn't owe the bad bank debt. So the banks in Iceland went bankrupt not the Icelandic people. In fact they are emerging from the financial turmoil better than the rest of us. I believe they are also prosecuting some of the CEO's responsible for the debacle in Iceland.
-- QED
Frankly, I don't think you have any idea of what 3 Mb/s is capable of, and what it is not capable of. If you want to volunteer a opinion about bandwidth requirements, I suggest you stick to what you have installed. How fast is your line? Is it fast enough for what you want to do? Do you videoconference, or play games online? If you degrade yourself enough to watch online video, what's the maximum resolution you can stream? What's stopping you from upgrading your line?
As someone who's lived with 56kbps dialup, 1/1.5Mbps DSL, and 10+ Mbps cable, there's nothing wrong with what he said.
You get the majority of the benefits of "high speed internet" at 768 kbps. Now you can browse text pages and google quickly. Watching video at that speed does suck, but you can still watch it either by waiting or by degrading quality (or both). It's generally enough for online gaming, though you definitely don't want to share it with a roommate/family member streaming video at the same time.
Yes, it's nice to have "instant" downloads, high def video, and so on - just like it's nice to have a gaming rig with cutting edge CPU/GPU and 3 monitors. We call that a "luxury".