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Remote Massachusetts Towns Welcome Broadband's Arrival
New submitter arnoldjm writes: This story from the Boston Globe tells of the effort to bring publicly funded fiber-optic data transmission capabilities to Western Massachusetts. The Globe Reports: "The network, financed with state and federal stimulus money, will extend broadband to 45 isolated towns where 40 percent of homes have no Internet access... Leverett [one of the towns involved] has contracted a private company to provide Internet service, which will cost subscribers $65 a month. That's about same as Comcast and Verizon FIOS customers pay in Greater Boston, but the speeds in Leverett are about 10 times faster."
Compared to many states (like mine) Massachusetts is a county.
For those of you new to the idea of the internet and its related jargon, here are a few definitions for words we use quite a bit:
Comcastic: When someone tells you its comcastic, it generally means an untreatable state of general malease and agony. Example: "the cancer has become comcastic"
bundling: this is a business strategy used by internet service providers to ensure that when your internet quits working, so does your phone and your television. the only thing that wont stop working however are the recurring payments you make for the service.
Also, when calling for technical support and service it is a common misconception to assume the phrase" your call is very important to us" is actually true. In fact, this is entirely false. Many ISP's have entire departments of hundreds, even thousands of dedicated representitives working hard to ensure your misery.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The public is going to be mercilessly taxed to provide themselves with high-speed internet, and the cost will be entirely on the people who benefit!
This failed in Chattanooga, in North Carolina, and everywhere else it has been tried!
So internet access is going to cost 9+ hours of minimum wage pay ?
So about 10 hours out of 160 hours in a full month.
Add 5 hours for cell phone and 4 hours for TV ( netflix/hulu cheap options)
That's about 10%+ of a person's wages.
Hopefully they have someone to share the internet and TV costs.
And I hope there is a lifeline option for the people trying to live on minimum wage.
Internet access makes so many things possible !
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
Nearby communities are not far behind in bringing broadband to their residents; they see high-speed Internet as an economic boon akin to rural electrification in the 1930s, one that could bring higher home values, better business climates, and easier access to the modern economy.
I've been saying that for a while. First was electrification, then telephonication, now internetification. High speed internet has become a basic service and necessary baseline for habitability.
If you're buying a house, you don't need to ask whether it has electricity, phone service, water, and sewage service. The last two might be self-service in the form of a well and septic system (hopefully not too close together) but you can be pretty sure they're in place or the home wouldn't be on the market. But you can't count on high speed internet. (Satellite and other services metered in 10s of gigs per month don't count.)
Last year, I picked the region where I wanted to semi-retire but I had to cross the entire area off my list because I couldn't get decent internet access unless I lived right in the middle of one of the little towns. Other areas were "up to" 6 meg DSL at best. I could have got 100mbit cable if I lived in town but, if I'm going to live in town, I'll live in a town with a Walmart, Home Depot, Best Buy, etc. A realtor said the first thing people ask is what kind of internet access they can get but, when I asked him what kind of internet access I could get, he had no idea. "I guess you could go ask one of the neighbors." Oh, sure. "Hi, I'm some random stranger. Can I come in and run some speed tests on your internet connection? I promise I'm not a serial killer."
So, instead of buying a cabin in the woods, I'm on the outskirts of a city within the sphere of influence of a cable company. As the rest of my generation retires in large numbers (in 20 years or so), those areas are going to continue to get passed over if they haven't got decent communications infrastructure in place.
And it's even more critical than electric/water/sewer. These days, it's possible for an individual to provide their own power. Solar panels, batteries, inverter, backup generator. Water can come from a well, sewage can go into a septic system. But creating a terrestrial internet connection 10 miles to wherever the local ISP is located can't be done by an individual.
My thoughts exactly. I'm in Iowa. We have co-ops that have spread high speed Internet access all across the state. For those not familiar with Iowa, we are very spread out with many people in rural areas. How in the hell does Massachusetts not have the same? It is a tiny state.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Same pipe -> same total bandwidth.
Very few users -> more bandwidth per user.
The Boston/Cambridge area has the highest density of left-wing, big government spending justifiers on the planet. They've even defined both the volume and effectiveness of their squeaky wheel in terms of smoots.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Oh it's hell here. Practically as bad as Sweden without the blondes. And so socialist nobody here makes any money. They tax us so bad we're all as poor as church mice, every last lost soul.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Hawkeye point is the tallest summit in Iowa at 510 meters (1670').
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In order to qualify for broadband, you must agree to a 15% increase in you property tax and a 20% increase in your state tax.
Low income households can qualify by boarding up any remaining windows.
I went thru the phone tree (something like, existing service, changes, remove or downgrade...) and I am sure I am per-routed to the "customer retention" expert.
I want to cancel TV altogether from Cox (Keeping Internet only). All representatives busy... estimated wait time 8 minutes. (I am in minute 10).
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Compared to many states (like mine) Massachusetts is a county.
You ain't seen nothing... I live in Texas and we WHERE our own country, having broken off from Mexico in 1836 and joined the US about 10 years later... Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we had stayed the Republic of Texas just a little bit longer than 10 years... Darn pesky war debt... Should have put up the "Come and Get It" flags again and held out for something more, but I guess another war wasn't a good idea, but coming into the union as a slave state wasn't either.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I bought a small ranch house about 4 1/2 miles from Western Mass' powerhouse of Umass Amherst, in the mid '90s, right off the main drag in the area, route 63. I could stand on the (low) roof and actually see Umass from the house. All the computing power there, and all I could get was bad dialup that would die if the humidity got too high, no dsl, no cable, and until I cleared a few trees, no satelite tv. For cell signal, I had to walk out to the yard, near the road. What a (relative) treat to move to Georgia, and could choose from ATT, Comcast, and others, at really cheap rates.
Compared to many states (like mine) Massachusetts is a county.
To most of us outside New England, all of Massachusetts is Boston!
It's hard to believe that this is the state that once gave us DEC. That was a glorious company, while it lasted.
Obviously, this can only be legal because the gov't is paying a private company to provide the service.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
45 towns with 40% of homes without internet access? In the north-east U.S.? The U.S. truly is a third world shit-hole in many places. It makes it even funnier seeing all these young Americans who fall squarely into the "fuck you, I got mine" category of people, boasting about their "freedoms" and how South-America is the third world etc.
Just because I love picking nits: were vs where and the latter is wrong in this case
Only the right-most 20% of Massachusetts is densely populated. The remainder is tiny farming towns, separated from each other by half an hour of emptiness. Most of these towns are poor and have an elderly and old-fashioned population, so there may not be much incentive for Comcast or whomever to lay fiber. Additionally, unlike Iowa, Massachusetts is a very hilly/mountainous state. Entire towns are occasionally cut off when a storm takes out the 10-degree-incline road you need to use to get there. I'd imagine this makes improving internet connectivity difficult as well.
Source: I live in Leverett.
As someone who escaped Connecticuticuticuticut 15 years ago.... I think Massachusetts and Connecticut are in direct competition for how costly and corrupt each government can make their respective states. But there's one thing that Connecticut has claim to that trumps Massachusettes: CT elected and re-elected current RIAA CEO and Chairman Christopher Dodd to the senate for 30 straight years! Beat that ya wannabe Irish Bastards!
Leverett has had broadband internet for years through 4G LTE from AT&T and Verizon. This yet another case of AARP card-carrying clueless voters sacking the community for last century's technology. Because smartphones are so complicated to use, unlike Windows PCs, or so they bleat.
The towns themselves, along with a state grant is paying for the project. Otherwise companies like comcast and verizon et al could care less about supplying internet to the people.
I lived in Leverett, MA for 5 years. Slashdot lurker as well. Leverett has a temperate rainforest climate. The copper phone lines in town have issues. When it rained, my landline phone would not work. I tried to get this repaired for two years, only to finally get it solved by showing the man from the phone company a case of beer and telling him he could have the beer if he would just fix my phone problem.
There is also no cell service in most of Leverett, because it is on the densely forested side of a mountain. Many residents like it this way.
That said, the reason Leverett has no internet is because the cable companies are assholes and promised to provide internet to this area, but never did.
I'll miss everyone very much, but I had to leave my job there as a cheesecake-truck driver.
Yes. Comcast and Verizon would flip out if, instead of paying a private company to do it, the towns did it themselves [regardless of whether Verizon or Comcast was ever interested in providing service there].
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
If only there was a way to provide access without running cables....
Oh well.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson