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.

Comments

LTE

[Anonymous Coward]

LTE isn't exactly what most would consider "broadband" due to the incredibly low caps and high price. If you only get 5 GB per month (or less) you aren't going to be using it for streaming movies or anything.

Re:LTE

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

But it is a relatively cheap way to 'fulfill' any rural telco obligations you happened to pick up from the FCC in exchange for lucrative spectrum concessions or whatever else it is you actually wanted...

Re:LTE

[frovingslosh]

Absolutely. They should (also) be reporting on the number of Americans without access to affordable high speed access. And breaking down what all of the caps are both wireless caps and also caps that have been imposed on previously uncapped "land line" services. It is absurd how, while other countries continue to move forward, the US grants monopolies or near monopolies to Internet providers yet lets them chip away at the "service" imposing restrictions designed only to aid their business model and keep them from building out their equipment.

I was also surprised to see the standard stated as above 3Mbs. By that standard I don't even have the Internet, nor do some of my friends who live in very well served cities (although we might both be considered to have access to LTE). Actually AT&T does offer me a higher priced 6Mbs service where I live, but I stopped buying that when it was determined that they were not really providing more than I am getting with the 3Mbs service and they just laughed and said the service never promised 6Mps, only "up to" 6Mbs.

Re:LTE

[h4rr4r]

Why not just run cable the 200 yards?

You can rent a ditchwitch and have it done in short order.

Re:LTE

[Rei]

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?

Re:LTE

[h4rr4r]

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.

Re:LTE

[Skarecrow77]

LTE is not a high speed internet connection. not in any way that truly matters. Not while the standard cap is 1-2GB/month. yes you can buy more, have you seen the price on that? 5GB/month (which is still an absurdly low cap) contracts end up about the same as my CAR payment, several times higher than my landline internet.

LTE is a top fuel dragster. it's really impressive for a quarter mile. then you have to take it apart and rebuild it for a month.

"look how fast I can download over my phone!"
"yeah. that's great. you've already hit your cap for the month. it took 13 and half minutes."

what is the point of "high speed" internet that you can't use?

Re:LTE

[HaZardman27]

Perhaps it has something to do with Iceland's ~100km^2 land area as opposed to the US's ~10m km^2 land area...

Re:LTE

[Troyusrex]

Had you followed the links you would have seen that the US has "networks technically capable of 100 megabit-plus speeds to over 80 percent of the population through cable’s DOCSIS 3.0 rollout" which exactly matches your claims of what Iceland has. A surprising amount of those without broadband access are on tribal lands which are governed by different laws.

Not to say that the US couldn't do better on this front but the idea that Iceland is wonderful and the US "Suck(s) that bad" is hyperbole and ignores the facts.

Re:LTE

[oakgrove]

It's actually 5.9. This is a non-story unless people want to talk about LTE with data caps being counted as "broadband" in the same sense as traditional DSL and cable. Now that's a spin worth wringing one's hands over.

Re:LTE

[aicrules]

Just to point out, US of A has a population of 311 million. 19 million is about 6% of that. Which means 94% of US population does have access to broadband. Seems like that would have been some useful math for you to do prior to touting your country's amazing 80%. Though I do agree that 80% coverage in Iceland is not too shabby.

Re:LTE

[DJRumpy]

It's not only the density issue, but the lack of competition. The government is fully to blame here. They gave monopolies to a single provider for various counties, and now those same companies have little reason to improve service. I've lived in a major metropolitan area for 20+ years. Initially I had a simple modem connection, did a small stint with an ISDN line, and then went to cable right around 2000. At that time, it was a 7Mb/s line. 12 years later, it is still the basic offering with incremental improvement on uplink speed and down speed (10 mb/s down and 128 up), or a hefty price increase to get the 'new' 20 Mb/s speed.

The US has fallen so far behind other developed countries due to the lack of competition it's just not funny anymore. Even the density problem would be resolved with more competition. By it's very nature, more competition brings advances far faster, cheaper production of the necessary materials, and a general lowering trend in price. We see this in almost every electronics industry, but in telecom, the price remains static, or has exploded instead with little actual improvement offered.

Look to any overseas country to see what true competition produces.

Re:LTE

[ducomputergeek]

We were also early adopters and one of the first to really connect people in our country with electricity and phone lines. Also we weren't bombed out twice last century and as such we have a lot of legacy infrastructure at this point. My grandmother didn't have a private line until the early 1990's. It was still party lines and rotary phones in that part of the country.

Re:LTE

[ukemike]

... 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.

Re:LTE

[Targon]

There IS a basic concept that people who intentionally live in remote areas also ACCEPT the lack of services that living in a more populated area would provide. If you WANT to live deep in the woods, then you have to be willing to spend the money to install and maintain your own fiber optic lines from an area that has a connection, or not complain because YOU willingly are living that far away from where services are offered. In the same way that people in rural areas do not want their tax money going to pay for homeless shelters in cities, most people don't want to pay an extra $2000/year just so someone out in the middle of nowhere can have a high speed Internet connection. Broadband is not "a right", and the US government has not done anything to help providers, so who is going to pick up the bill?

CELLULAR based broadband is a problem in general, because with people moving around, excess bandwidth needs to be available EVERYWHERE, just in case some kid decides to drive somewhere and stream a movie. Now, I can see 802.22(not 802.11) fixing many problems when it comes to broadband availability, but until we see it implemented, I wouldn't count on it being the solution.

Re:LTE

[Stiletto]

The tired "population density" argument always comes up, and can be easily invalidated. If it was just population density, New Jersey would be a Mecca of ultra-high-speed Internet.

The USA's lack of broadband penetration compared to Europe and east Asia has very little to do with population density.

Re:LTE

[petermgreen]

Two issues spring to mind

1: he probablly doesn't own all the land between his property and the nearest property
2: if the cableco won't serve his property over something as minor as 200 yards do you think they will really hook up his own cable to theirs and provide him with service? I very much doubt it.

So the only way I could see this working is if he knows the owners of a property who can get cable well enough to have them buy service on his behalf and either can persude the owners of the intervening land to let him run cables or is prepared to take the risk of running unauthorised cables along the road.

I'm sure there are close-knit rural communities where you could do what you suggested but I can imagine in others it being very difficult, especially if you are an outsider who has only recently moved into the community.

Re:LTE

[Jeremy Erwin]

And really .. WTF?? Anyone can search google and do most web browsing just fine with a 3Mb/s line. OK . .they can't get video. Tough shit. I'm not willing to subsidize their internet access so they can watch Jersey Shore on their PC. YouTube videos are mostly crap. TED is elitist/visionary crap.

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?

Re:LTE

[mcgrew]

Iceland: 39,770 square miles
Illinois: 57,914 square miles
USA: 3,794,101 square miles

Iceland: population 320,060
Illinois: 12,869,257
USA: population 314,215,000

A single one of the fifty states (a middle sized state) has more land mass than Iceland, but far fewer people. It's a hell of a lot easier to get broadband in a high density population than out in the boondocks. When you see the scale of the size of the US you can see why it's not as easy here as it is there.

Re:LTE

[Rei]

You need to fly to Keflavík, rent a car, and drive to Borgarfjörður Eystri some time (almost as far). It's not size, its' population density. More people = more resources to allocate to something. In fact, generally the benefit is *more* than linear; doing projects on a large scale is generally easier per-capita than on the small scale. And you really want to compare "ease of construction" across flat farmland to construction going past Eyjafjallajökull, Katla, and Vatnajökull, as well as the mountains in the east?

Re:LTE

[Rei]

It's not that big. About the size of Kentucky. But - key distinction - about 7-8 % of the population of Kentucky, with a crazy twisty unstable volcanic glaciated landscape, located in the middle of the North Atlantic.

The larger the project is, the easier it is per-capita. And unlike us, you don't have to ship in all your hardware and cabling and fund the laying of trans-atlantic data cables with the resources of a population smaller than the city of Santa Ana, California.

Re:LTE

[cpu6502]

19 million w/o broadband. That's fewer than the "50 million without healthcare" the Democrats were quoting during the Obamacare debates. Do we really think that broadband is more important initiative than people having health insurance/coverage?

ALSO: I find it odd the FCC defines broadband as 3 Mbit/s. That means I don't have broadband in my home even though what I do have (1 Mbit/s) is enough to watch videos on the internet. Hmmm. I consider it broadband (100 megahertz wide)..... certainly better than the narrowband (3 megahertz-wide) dialup I used to have.

And finally a lot of those 19 million live in remote areas like Wyoming, Idaho, Dakota, Arizona. They *choose* to live far away from conveniences. Not only do these 19 million lack broadband but also public water & sewer. Many can't even get TV reception since they are so far out. This is a LIFESTYLE CHOICE and we should respect it, rather than demand conformity. (And if these people don't like living in isolation, they can move closer to the nearest city.)

Re:LTE

[Rei]

Only in Alaska, where huge chunks of the state are just a couple counties, including one that's like half of the state. The largest county in the continental US is half the size of Iceland. Iceland is about the size of Kentucky.

Key difference: while Iceland has 1/100th the area of the US, it has 1/1000th the population to fund such construction projects, which furthermore mean importing everything across the North Atlantic, laying transatlantic data cables, and running domestic cables across what's predominantly unstable twisty mountainous wet volcanic/glaciated terrain.

Re:LTE

[SillyHamster]

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".

Re:LTE

[cpu6502]

>>>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.

How can you suck so bad in EUROPE? Over in Greece my relatives can't get anything faster than ISDN (128k). I hear it's just as bad in rural parts of Portugal, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Ireland, etc. I have fiber in my American neighborhood, but these poor europeans can't get better than a few kilobits.

Sad. (I'm making a point here: The citizens of the U.S. is no worse-off than many citizens of the EU. We both have the same average broadband speed according to speedtest's published studies. Furthermore comparing an island nation to a continent-spanning nation is silly. We have people living on million-acre homesteads..... an hour from the next nearest family. So far out they can't even get TV or radio reception. Does Iceland have anything like that?)

You should compare like to like: U.S. to EU to Canada to Russia to China.....

there's always a bottom 5%

[Jerry Smith]

Especially the rural area are a bit difficult to service (yes I read part of the article). On the other hand: people that choose to live there, do they nééd fixed-line access?

Re:there's always a bottom 5%

[drinkypoo]

I cannot get the speeds now defined as broadband where I live. The fastest thing I can buy is 2Mbps for over $100/mo. For $50/mo I get 768k bursting to 1.5Mbps delivered from the top of my local volcano and bounced in from four mountaintops away. AT&T owns literally every fiber link into my county. It's cheaper for them to do this than to buy it from the one AT&T reseller who operates here, or god forbid, directly from AT&T. And the line going up the volcano used to fail all the time, in spite of it not being in a particularly challenging location to maintain (it runs through scrub, not a forest, and there are access roads.)

You can get cable internet or DSL within a bowshot. I'm just getting fucked over.

Re:there's always a bottom 5%

[KillaBeave]

The problem generally isn't the communities of more than 1000, it's all the dispersed "neighborhoods" in the rural parts. Back in my hometown there's multiple rural parts that probably have around 500 or so people living in them, but they're all on between 5-20 acres ... with tracts of farmland thrown in for good measure. The houses will generally cluster in groups of 5 or 6 along a stretch of road, each one on multiple acres and these clusters will be a mile or two apart form each other. Thus far it hasn't been feasible (read profitable) to run cable lines out there between these dispersed clusters of houses and this is only a few miles (about 3-5) out of town where broadband is available. It's not like they are in the middle of nowhere, but they aren't organized into communities either.

If I still lived there I would want a house out there. It's a really good life, quiet, peaceful plenty of room for the kids and dogs to play. But in reality I would have to buy a house in town because of lack of broadband. My brother that still lives back home is currently in the same situation ... and he's buying in town.

Re:there's always a bottom 5%

[the plant doctor]

On the other hand: people that choose to live there, do they nééd fixed-line access?

Except we didn't have this attitude toward electricity and telephone. We made sure that everyone was brought up to par with everyone else in rural areas.

I'm sorry to see that we have this attitude toward Internet connections now. What has happened since the Rural Electrification Act that we find it acceptable to say "they chose to live there, therefore should go without"?

Re:there's always a bottom 5%

[h4rr4r]

A massive political shift to the right is what happened.
Just 20 some years ago conservatives were the ones who were pushing for everyone to be required to be insured for their health as they were for their cars. Today that is seen as almost socialism.

FFS

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Can we stop fretting about the fact that there isn't a hard link run to every last spot in the boonies and start fretting about why access is so damn slow, and so damn expensive, even in the parts of the US where the economics of deployment are most favorable?

Re:FFS

[second_coming]

While people are "happy" to pay high prices for capped and low speed / unreliable services there is no incentive for the internet providers to spend vast amounts upgrading the infrastructure.

You either need a government backed incentive to roll out high speed internet country wide (meaning to everyone not just people in cities) or you need some foreign companies to start moving into the US market to introduce some competition that will force the existing companies to become more competitive in the price and quality of what they offer.

Re:Rural folk

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr...no.

Speaking as one who just moved away from a rural area, a decent broadband connection would have been highly desirable for both work and personal reasons, and I would have (and could've afforded to have) paid out the nose for it.

The lack of broadband access in rural areas has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the rural community wants / needs / can afford access; rather, it is a function of whether the telecoms can be bothered (they cannot.)

Re:Only 19 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a high school diploma, no college experience, make 14.65 an hour, a wife and two kids, one car, no cable TV service, one cell phone, no landline, 12mbps net connection. But I do elect for the insurance and we are covered. So find a way to do it, stop bitching about whats fair and what's not, and just do the best you can.

Those stuck with a farmer head of household

[tepples]

There are those who are stuck on a reservation, and those who chose to live where they do. The first group has a legitimate beef. Why should I have to pay to support the second group's lifestyle choice.

For one thing, not everybody who lives in a rural area chooses to live in a rural area. Some of them might be members of a household whose head has chosen to live in a rural area. Why must, for example, the daughter of a farmer miss out on being able to participate in online communication with her peers?

For another, why must someone's participation in mainstream culture be incompatible with growing the food that you will end up eating?

Re:Those stuck with a farmer head of household

[h4rr4r]

Because for some strange reason Americans no longer see any value in enriching the lives of anyone but themselves. We no longer value having an educated society, nor a a well connected one.

Enlightened self interest is dead. The "I got mine, fuck you" mentality killed it.

This is what happens when you have the kind of political shift to the right we had over the last 20 years.

Re:Those stuck with a farmer head of household

[__aaeihw9960]

That's exactly right. Every argument that is in the news right now, whether it's related to right to life/right to choose, gay marriage, the 1%, whatever it is. It's all related to "Fuck you people." I don't know when, or where that attitude came from, but it is e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e.

I think, quite honestly, that what we're going through now is because heavy investors got a small taste of victory in privatizing Russia, South America, Poland, the various middle eastern countries that got shafted, and Greece and other parts of Europe starting in the 70's and 80's, and moving in steadily stronger steps to today. I think that these heavy investors are hungry for the next cash cow - they tried Asia, and the Asian tigers shut their asses down, so who's next? USA, USA, USA. We're fat and happy, so why not break us for a profit? Why not 'shock' our economy back to health so they can win some more? ('They' doesn't equal some tin-foil hat amorphous blob, it equals heavy hitters in the telecommunications, chemical, food and plastics industry, along with institutions like the IMF and World Bank)

I genuinely believe that in the next 10 years or so, this talk of 'austerity measures' are going to revert back to what they used to be called 'shocks to the government to stimulate private economic growth'. I also believe that in the next 10 years, we're going to see this attitude that was developed in the US turn its teeth inward and start taking bites out of our country. I firmly believe that we will have more rampant unemployment for young folks - fuck them, right? - and the money will funnel faster to a few people. I don't believe that we're headed for a collapse, because if we fall, so do most others (or at least it won't help), but I do believe that we're headed for a lost generation of workers.

WOW, that got off topic. Sorry.

Small WISP do more

[pcjunky]

Small WISPs do more to service rural areas than all the big cellular carriers combined. If the FCC wants these folks to have access to high speed Internet then quit selling all the spectrum to the highest bidder and make some of that "white Space" spectrum free and un-licensed.

Thee Megabit?

[kenh]

Are we seriously calling anything under three megabit unacceptable?

The 19 million people mentioned in the above write-up are not without any means of Internet access, they are without Internet access in excess of 3 megabits - they could have 2 or 2.5 megabit access and fall into the 19 million Americans the article discusses.

What would the number be if we ratcheted back the cutoff from the three megabits in the report to say one megabit? How about if we made it 768K?

There are honestly tens of millions of Americans that care very little about either Internet access generally or high-speed Internet access specifically.

Re:Thee Megabit?

[Dcnjoe60]

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.

Re:Rural folk

[MickyTheIdiot]

Personally, I would place access to decent internet one of the #1 priorities if you want to get industry and business into a certain area. In those areas it is already a necessity. That's why comments like this one (as well as the belief in some circles that money put into broadband development is wasted) baffle me. If you want quality of life to improve in these areas you need to get them the basics. Decent internet access is now one of those basics.

Blocked by the competition.

[Nodar]

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.