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Gigabit Internet With No Data Caps May Be Coming To Rural America (arstechnica.com)
Jon Brodkin, writing for Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission is making another $2.15 billion available for rural broadband projects, and it's trying to direct at least some of that money toward building services with gigabit download speeds and unlimited data. The FCC voted for the funding Wednesday (PDF) and released the full details yesterday (PDF). The money, $215 million a year for 10 years, will be distributed to Internet providers through a reverse auction in which bidders will commit to providing specific performance levels. Bidders can obtain money by proposing projects meeting requirements in any of four performance tiers. There's a minimum performance tier that includes speeds of at least 10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream, with at least 150GB of data provided each month. A "baseline" performance tier requires 25Mbps/3Mbps speeds and at least 150GB a month, though the data allotment minimum could rise based on an FCC metric that determines what typical broadband consumers use per month.
The ISPs shouldn't receive a penny until they do what they say they'll do. How much money are we going to give these guys for promises they never keep?
... but it won't be cheap. Posted from a 10/5 fiber connection that costs $125/mo. Gigabit is over $1k.
o Offer gigabit broadband with no data caps
o Allow a few years for Rural America to get used to having it
o Impose Shadow Datacaps on the biggest bandwidth users
o Complain about 'data hogs' and 'lost profits'
o Impose 'overage fees'
o Impose data caps for all subscribers
o Profit!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Sure, give the already obscenely greedy ISPs more money, surely that will get them to meet their prior commitments!
As long the providers don't get the money until after the project is completed. Have it held in escrow, even.
If they say they need the money for the build-out costs, I'm sure there are more than a couple banks that would make a loan on a business expansion where the repayment is guaranteed by the federal government.
They still haven't delivered what they promised when we, the people, gave them several hundred million in 1996.
lose != loose
I have a shocking idea! instead of giving all of this free money to the thieves and liars, the FCC should build the infrastructure themselves and rent it out to whomever wants to use it. Everybody wins. The FCC gets its rural broadband, the customers actually get the access, and the various service providers don't have to cough up and pay for any infrastructure they are not going to use. Once the initial investment is paid back, the FCC makes money on the deal.
Anything else is just another government boondoggle with all of us collectively footing the bill.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Several areas of VT already have gigabit fiber from Vermont Telephone.
Good stuff and works well.
Alternative headline for the same story:
City-dwellers with 10 Mbps service by govt-enforced monopolies to buy gigabit for farmers
Last year, taxpayers paid the ISPs $9 billion for rural broadband, so that people who like owning horses can watch more Netflix movies simultaneously. Another couple billion this year, and $10 billion more planned. (About $82 per tax payer). Meanwhile, those of us paying for it get whatever Comcast or the local government franchise holder decides to give us, because the government has made if effectively illegal for a competitor to offer better service in our area.
I'm from the government and I'm here to help, they say. How about get the fuck out of the way and allow competition. There has been some of that in some states, and average speeds have gone up considerably in the last year.
Like when us city dwellers were forced to subsidize their electricity too! Why they should still be using oil lamps!
Rural Electrification Act of 1936
In Seattle we already have multiple providers offering 1Gbps. Good to see that others will get the same opportunity.
Github, Gitlab, or BitBucket?
Use case: A few private repositories with scaling users. Maybe some open source GIT repos but not all.
Thank you!
In the 90's we gave the network providers billions to bring broadband to rural areas. They didn't do it then, what makes us think they will follow through this time?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I know! And how about all those childless people paying property tax to subsidize public schools? It's an outrage!
with that much government involvement you can bet more than a few congresspeople will want to show their pro-family credentials by mandating anti-pornography filtering on any government-funded network.
And don't forget abortions. There shall be no abortions on government funded Intertubes.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This. I live in downtown Seattle and have ISDN at home. The phone monopolies should be forced to provide DSL before giving even faster access to people that are even more expensive to provide service to.
The Rural Electrification Act was a (relative) success. So let's try a similar scheme again. Let rural governments create cooperative ISPs, apply to the FCC for their share of the funding and put in broadband. I have the feeling that the incumbent telecoms are going to get their hands on the money and it's all going to disappear down the same rat-hole that the last subsidy did.
Have gnu, will travel.
I hope this time Congress attached some performance requirements so they don't just TAKE the money and do NOTHING like last time.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Don't know about your circumstances, but I'm happy to subsidize them because I like to eat what they grow and raise. Everybody can talk about competition and how eager companies should be to provide electricity or internet in this day to the rural sticks, but no company is going to do that on its own at a price any farmer or rancher is going to be able to pay. Maybe if they get gigabit to the rural sticks the prices will come down where I live.
> phone monopolies should be forced to
80 years of "should be forced to" is why downtown Seattle has internet 1/20th the speed of semi-rural Texas towns with 20,000 residents. You could keep trying the same thing and expect different results.
What has worked well around here has been to allow overbuilders like Frontier to come and offer better service, to have competition amongst providers.
You left off:
o horribly over-commit available bandwidth resources so 30/5 jerks and stalls like a horse being driven over a cliff
Wahoo. And stuff.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
*cough* BULLSHIT! *cough*
I'd rather pay for farmers' Gb lines than CEOs' blow jobs.
I get 6MPS top at work, its usually 4, since they don't want you to go to the top, so they set some numbers to cap it to not reach the 6, unless you want to go to a higher tier, but ti turns out the lines in the building don't support anything higher than 10 MPS, It all depends on how far away you are from a sub-station. The phone companies aren't going to upgrade the lines. In fact Verizion wasn't doing anything for years because they were selling it all to Frontier and they were not going to invest in infrastructure or upgrades. The building won't upgrade the lines either. And this is LA. So all this Mega Billions in money going where? Maybe we should start with the people that use it. But I believe that the companies should be paying for their own Infrastructure upgrades. Isn't that what we pay the bills to the company for?
Why are we giving anti-government red staters (what should be) public services with public money? Let them deal with the "free market". The FCC should spend that $$ on people who actually WANT government services.
I don't respond to AC's.
We never learn from our mistakes:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pu...
Our country and government should not give the telecoms a dime until they do what they say they will to the satisfaction of the auditors and regulators. Promises are worthless.
So they're going to take my "Universal Service" tax and spend it for gigabit no-cap internet in rural areas. Great! And here I am in a suburban town with a choice between AT&T (up to 18 mbps advertised, but 6-12 is the most really available, and normal throughput down is 1/4-1/2 of advertised while upload is never better than 2 and usually less than 1; note that AT&T no longer advertises "broadband" service (it's "high speed") because the best it can do is well below FCC's minimum definition) and Comcast (senior citizen plan with low data cap is 10 mbps; normal plans are 25 to perhaps 50 (have heard of people getting 100 but not around here); cost is through the roof with data caps that suck along with Comcr*p customer service and pricing). No prospect of anything better unless you're Starbucks and can grab a piece of the Level 3 fiber going by a block away. Running off your phone as a hotspot is an interesting alternative with a real "unlimited" plan but still nowhere near broadband (around 5 mbps up/down). So what benefit do I get for paying my U.S. taxes?
2. Throw a little money into astro turf organization to protest.
3. Astro turf will denounce it as Big Government, Obamanet, over reach and argue for the program to be axed.
4. Some law makers will be persuaded by the lobbyists to fake concern and axe the program.
5. The companies will blame the funding cut to renege on all promises
Lather, rinse and repeat.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We have a LOT of fiber in the ground around me sitting unused, unmaintained and in many cases unusable. I know some people in various utilities departments that have said that despite submitting "we're digging here" notifications they've hit big bundles of fiber on multiple occasions, no one had marked them, calls to the numbers on area "buried fiber" posts either met with voice mails, full message boxes or disconnected numbers. As a result these fiber lines probably have multiple breaks in them, probably with no records on where the breaks are. So even if they did want to utilize them in the future it would probably be far cheaper to re-lay an entirely new line rather than try to piece together the neglected one that is already in the ground.
without some form of subsidy, the greedy private carriers will NEVER develop the tech, or expend the cost to wire/beam just a few locals in a small farm town in the middle of nowhere America. I agree we should just require cable/internet services to be open and do away with utility protections. I happen to live in an area that has a couple of cable options, as well as satellite services, and the cost/service benefit is HUGE. When Astound/Wave came to town Comcast/Xfinity cut their cost and upped their data caps within a month to compete because they HAD to.
http://www.wavebroadband.com/
http://www.xfinity.com/
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
One operation based out of Oklahoma City deployed as far south as Corpus Christi. They showed great promise, but oversold their bandwidth and territory, winding up existing from check to check. Then they declared bankruptcy at year 3 when the Dept of Agriculture welshed on their next check, and had to go into bankruptcy. The liquidator's auction for the CDMA licenses looked like sharks in a feeding frenzy; with the telecoms outbidding each other until the licenses wound up selling around 15X-25X their face value.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
"The Federal Communications Commission is making another $2.15 billion available for rural broadband projects..."
Shorter version: Whether the federal government is redistributing our tax dollars to the middle of nowhere (see also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) or to telecoms, its cronyism all the way down.
That pig fuck is still costing us 1.5 billion$/year. There basically are no more 40 acre family farms left, much less ones that needed subsidised electricity. It's a case study in rent seeking.
Worse, if you need power in BFE, you pay fully loaded costs. $10k/pole last I did the research (NCal, Sierra Nevada foothills, about 2000).
Not an argument for something. Rather the opposite.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Consider the potential of laying high capacity broadband along the Interstate Highway System, with tap points at exits that would be leased to local ISPs. The tagline could be 'You already know where it goes.'
The Rural Electrification Act was a (relative) success. So let's try a similar scheme again. Let rural governments create cooperative ISPs,
The oligarchs will never allow that. They fight that tooth-and-nail every time someone tries it, up to and including statewide /bans/ on coops.
Because it's better to never sell anything than it is to allow locals to do for themselves. *spit*
--
BMO
But then again, they probably won't.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
if those hicks out in the sticks want decent internet then they will be motviated to pay whatever it takes for it and the magic hand of the market will then service that demand and competetion will then lower the price to the cost levels seen elsewhere.
Almost all major US and Canadian university campus have 100 GB/sec ports and 40 GB/sec ports right now.
Rural 1 GB/sec is pretty slow. It's like having 1200 baud while everyone else has 28.8 kbps in the dialtone days.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Because program that's been around for 80 years has completed it's mandate and shut down, correct? Like all (no) government programs do.
You think people are going to quit working on farms due to lack of internet?
Bullshit. I live in the middle of Louisiana and I can tell you we don't even have digital fucking cable yet. I live 1 mile from a fucking horse racing casino that has fiber internet and 100000 digital cable channels. Best internet I can get is 3.0Mb DSL and the standard cable is worse than old analog rabbit ears.
THE LAST TIME THIS HAPPENED MY CABLE COMPANY WAS AWARDED A 1 MILLION DOLLAR GRANT TO EXTEND INTERNET SERVICE TO RURAL AREAS. I STILL HAVE NO CABLE INTERNET OR DIGITAL CABLE THAT WAS 2009! THEY"RE ALL FUCKING LIARS!
City-dwellers with 1 Mbps are paying the same fees. There are plenty of DSLAMS in urban areas which serve hundreds of homes that are backhauled with a T1 line. The telcos really are fuckwads and the government has no spine to push back on their bullshit.
People are already leaving farms and ranches in droves. Small towns are disappearing. Small farms are getting bought up by large corporations. There are a host of reasons for this and the vast majority of them won't be fixed by cheap fast internet. But in my view, the internet access is no different than electrification. Nobody would be expecting farmers to work their farms without electricity.
If internet access was not available in your city of x million and only 15 people wanted it - scattered throughout the entire city and suburbs and you were one of them who wanted it how would you feel if the providers refused to provide any access because they couldn't make a profit on just 15 folks. You can make the argument that you could move - and that is true. But the farmers and ranchers are stuck to the land and can't move. They do have some limited options for internet access - but nothing that would ever be considered broadband.
I don't object to escrow or other options that people are suggesting to force them to actually provide it and keep it going before getting the money - I'm just not of the opinion that anything will be done under those terms.
It is an outrage.
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How about fuck you and come live out here where your only options for broadband are some form of wireless/satellite service for a while, then see how you feel about all that tax revenue STILL not getting landline broadband anywhere out here? I pay $100/mo for a 15G data cap(unlimited use between the hours of midnight and 5 AM, pretty much the only time I can watch Netflix or Hulu, much less download any major software updates)with a claimed 12 Mbps DL that seldom goes beyond 2-3, if that.
Live on that for a few months, see what kinda song you'll sing.
Oh my God sometimes you can't stream multiple Netflix movies at once? Of course you want to watch two movies at once.
I want a pony, and it's too expensive to have ponies in the city.
You have ponies in the country. That's not fair. Buy me a pony.
Thanks for the offer, we're scheduled to close on the new place in country June 20th. Horse pasture is prohibitively expensive here in the city of Dallas. Fiber is prohibitively expensive out at the new place, so we appreciate your help paying for it. Houses are too damn small in the city too, our new country place is three times the square footage of our current place.
The new place in the country doesn't even have natural gas service either. Would you want to help put that in? I also worry a bit because there aren't the same educational and cultural opportunities for my daughter - no museums or anything. It would be cool if you could build a couple, so that the kids have the same opportunities as city kids.
Should I post my address so you can send a check or ....
This is the same government that gave money to the same ISPs to improve their existing infrastructure that took the money and are forcing people to wireless internet instead. Yeah, I can't see how this can go wrong.
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
It makes no sense to not install fiber, which is likely cheaper and is so much better for long range anyway. So in any new wired rural deployment the last mile at least ought to be capable of a gigabit (could it hit some cable network or even microwave so what comes after/before the last mile is actually slower?)
Let's spend billions to run new copper instead.. With a good enough deployment you might have e.g. reliable long range 512k ADSL. Your pride is safe but it's more expensive and 2000x slower.