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19 Million Americans Cannot Get Broadband Access

Posted by samzenpus on from the move-to-the-city dept.

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.

13 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. LTE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:LTE by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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...

    2. Re:LTE by frovingslosh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
    3. Re:LTE by h4rr4r · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why not just run cable the 200 yards?

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

    4. Re:LTE by HaZardman27 · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

      --
      Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
    5. Re:LTE by DJRumpy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:LTE by ducomputergeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    7. Re:LTE by ukemike · · Score: 4, Informative

      ... 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
    8. Re:LTE by cpu6502 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.)

      --
      My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
    9. Re:LTE by SillyHamster · · Score: 5, Informative

      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".

  2. Re:Rural folk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.)

  3. Blocked by the competition. by Nodar · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  4. Re:Those stuck with a farmer head of household by h4rr4r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.