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.

Comments

Re: This could be interesting...

[ZeroWaiteState]

As someone who has clients in one of those areas I can tell you: you have to contact your state legislator to get ordinary service orders completed. I'm not even kidding. AT&T only wants to do wireless now. From where I'm sitting, it looks like they are stripping the wireline side bare and are waiting for a regulatory opportunity to spin off the carcus.

sure, let's DOUBLE DOWN on STUPID!

[Thud457]

I hope this time Congress attached some performance requirements so they don't just TAKE the money and do NOTHING like last time.

Re:sure, let's DOUBLE DOWN on STUPID!

[Nethemas the Great]

I'm not sure where you got that statistic from but I can tell you that nearly all of rural America has a median family income half that.

Re:sure, let's DOUBLE DOWN on STUPID!

[dgatwood]

Even better would be to just kill this subsidy program entirely. Median farm income in America is over $80k, about 30% higher than the overall median. Why should poor people be taxed to subsidize other people that are better off?

That covers the farm owners, but what about all the other people who work on the farm?

Besides, you don't seem to comprehend the scale here. Areas defined as "highly rural" have fewer than 7 people per square mile. So at most two or three houses per square mile, and possibly not even one house per square mile. Urban areas have over 1,000 people per square mile. We subsidize services for people who make twice as much money as others because otherwise their Internet connections would cost potentially three orders of magnitude more, and even that's potentially an underestimate. That $200 setup fee suddenly becomes a $20,000 setup fee.

The government tried this already

[zerofoo]

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.

Competition vs monopoly in the market.

[Archfeld]

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/