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Microsoft Pledges To Bring Better Broadband To Two Million Rural Americans in the Next Five Years (recode.net)
Microsoft on Tuesday announced a new campaign to try to "eliminate" the gap in high-speed internet access in the country's hardest-to-reach areas -- an effort called the Rural Airband Initiative, which will set an ambitious target of bringing better broadband to two million Americans within the next five years. From a report: The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant plans to start its efforts in 12 states, offering seed money -- Microsoft wouldn't specify the amount -- to local telecom providers that are trying to improve internet access through means like "white spaces," which are the invisible, wireless radio airwaves that aren't already owned by broadcasters. From Microsoft point of view, this approach -- aimed at delivering speedy wireless internet -- is the best way to improve connectivity in parts of the country that broadband providers long have ignored, given the prohibitive costs of building and sustaining networks there. By Microsoft's count, more than 23 million Americans in rural areas currently lack high-speed internet access, despite billions of dollars in federal investment. But the company emphasized that it is not looking to become a telecom provider -- it's only providing capital to local firms -- and does not seek to profit from the endeavor. Through revenue-sharing agreements, Microsoft instead plans to invest any money it raises in additional projects in other states where internet access is lacking.
It does make you wonder what they are trying to get out of this
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Google should approach MS, Apple, Facebook, and Netflix and suggest that they invest into Google Fiber. At that point, rename it to American FIber and then push this all around America. Seriously, if all of these companies simply invested into this and focused on any of the places in which telcos were screwing over others (ok, all of America), then it would solve a LOT.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In Seattle we only get dialup because of Directors rules.
Sounds like something Facebook tried in Africa.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
I wish someone would bring better internet to mid-sized cities in the US.
We're still stuck with low quality monopoly cable internet paying 3 or 4 times what you guys in big cities with Google Fiber get after competition drives prices down.
Yeah... I'm sure very-rural America would love to have cable speed connections but a big bang for the buck could be had by removing cable monopolies on broadband internet in the mid sized cities.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
While it's nice to Microsoft embrace the white spaces of Python, I'm not sure how that's supposed to help with rural Internet access.
What did Google get out of Google fiber?
Don't you mean EDGE? That is their current browser of choice but your sentiments are correct.. Windows 10S is a glimpse of the future MS wants for everyone.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
It does make you wonder what they are trying to get out of this
They are increasingly in the business of selling subscribed-to services that individuals and small businesses (say, farming operations in rural America) can't use without reliable high-enough-speed connectivity. Tens of millions of people lacking decent connectivity represents a lot of potential that MS can't eventually market to. To say nothing of the near impossibility of someone living on the side of a mountain somewhere getting their copy of Windows 10 patched/updated over the wire when they've got - at best - DSL or awful satellite service.
Just spent the last weekend driving around parts of Virginia, in the outskirts of the Charlottesville area. We're talking about people who own multi-million-dollar horse farms and wineries who have to drive 30 minutes into town to use the WiFi at a Starbucks. But they can't get cable or fiber out to their properties because nobody will do it, almost regardless of the price offered. Some sort of terrestrial wireless solution on poles, hilltop-to-hilltop, is the only way to go. LEO sats MAY provide some relief, but not likely enough to bank on when you're trying to run a point-of-sale system at the tasting room of your thousand acre winery with two hundred guests trying to give you money.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
through means like "white spaces," which are the invisible, wireless radio airwaves that aren't already owned by broadcasters.
"invisible" - The only radio airwaves that are visible are referred to as "light waves".
"wireless radio airwaves" - Redundant? Is there such a thing as "wired radio airwaves"?
"aren't already owned by broadcasters" - That is the vast, vast majority of the radio spectrum, "broadcasters" control just a small fraction of the radio spectrum.
This plan is to allocate and dedicate one unused UHF Broadcast TV channel in each market for high-speed data transmission. So this proposed service, which broadcasters object to, would be located in the midst of spectrum controlled by TV broadcasters
Ken
telcos that were already paid to build out their networks by the taxpayers
Please explain how you imagine the "taxpayer" directly paid telcos to "build out their networks"...
Some telcos were/are given cash subsidies, collected as fees from telephone subscribers by the federal government to improve coverage and off-set increased operating costs in under-served rural areas, which represent a small percentage of the telephone network.
"Telco subscribers" is no the same thing as "taxpayers" (but there is a lot of overlap between the two).
Telcos were able to deduct the business expense of building-out their infrastructure as a normal business expense, just as a manufacturer can deduct the expense of a new piece of plant machinery, or an internet start-up can deduct the cost of their servers, or a corner pizzeria can deduct the expense of their new pizza oven.
The "taxpayer" did not directly fund the Telco networks, anymore than the taxpayers directly funded your employer's IT upgrade last year.
Ken
Xbox Live subscription revenue.
...will detect what kind of system you're using and block access if it isn't Windows, Windows Phone, or Xbox.
Says somebody w/ no clue about Microsoft's recent marketing on Windows Phone. It's pretty much disappeared from the Microsoft Store. While they do sell an HP Icon as a Windows phone, the other phones they have on display are Galaxies. The main thing they now promote is Office on Android, which anybody can download from the Play store. And their apps - like OneNote, OneDrive, Office - are all there both on iOS & Android.
Actually it would be a good idea if Microsoft drops the idea of a Windows subscription, and instead entered the broadband business. Unlike in the 90s, it's not difficult to live w/o Windows today: one could use a Mac or Chromebook for things that they can't already do on phones or tablets. Forcing people to pay something annually for their OS would just turn people away towards those alternatives. Better idea is Microsoft stop using Google's model of revenue through ads, and instead revert to what they used to do up to the Windows 7 era. And then toss in Microsoft Broadband, pre-built in the OS as an option, and let it get self-configured during installation if the user wants it and it's available in the place in question
I'm pretty sure Google wanted to float balloons over Africa and create a mesh network, so that neighboring tribes in rural Africa could "like" each others Facebook postings...
Seriously, they do have a Project Link to tie cities together with fiber optic cables and yet another plan to use vacant TV spectrum for wireless internet in a very select region of Africa...
Oh look, Microsoft trialed this technology in Africa a couple years ago.
Ken
The government should be nudging (gently at first, then onto a hard shove) the private sector to deliver high speed internet to rural areas. Not private companies.
It does.
Private companies will place their own ends above what's best for the public.
Then why not outlaw private corporations, since they only serve their own needs? Then everything will be great, like in Venezuela.
Ken
We did not build out the electric power grid to "every household", nor did we build out the telephone network to "every household" in America. We did build out both to "nearly all" households, and this initiative hopes to address the gap between "nearly all" and "every household" for internet service.
It's not uncommon for a person building a house in ultra-rural America (miles away from their neighbor) to have to invest upwards of ten thousand dollars to run power and wired telephone service to their house... some houses are simply unreachable due to the terrain and distance involved.
Ken
Updates too big, cheaper to deploy broadband than fix Windows Update.
This is the phone company's job, not Microsoft's. WTF am I paying a Universal Service Fund then?
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
The "taxpayer" did not directly fund the Telco networks, anymore than the taxpayers directly funded your employer's IT upgrade last year.
Pure semantics! When the govt. forces you to pay extra so that said money can go where they want it to go, it's a tax! If they renamed the Income Tax deducted from you paycheck every week to Employee Usage Fee, would you fell any better?
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Yep. This will surely require a Microsoft Modem and the modem driver will keep resetting your browser preferences.
Always-on Internet will also help with the tracking, the massive 'updates' to the OS and whatever lame device they come up with to try and compete with Amazon Echo.
Zune II?
No sig today...
Me? I'm guessing the package will include Microsoft's "Zune II".
(Or whatever the hell they decide to call their answer to Amazon Echo/Google Home)
No sig today...
Through both direct government subsidy and extra fees, the phone companies have been collecting money for years that was supposed to be going to exactly this purpose.
The BIGGEST problem with having "broadband for everyone" is how spread out America is. ALL of Europe, including England, would fit inside the land area of the USA, with room to spare. It's why it cracks me up, when I see misleading statements about how poor the USA is, in broadband speed. Heck, you can take a ferry from England, to Holland, rent a car, and drive across Europe in about a day. If two cars leave the Texas/Oklahoma border at the same time, one traveling north, the other south, the one traveling north will enter Canada, before the one traveling south hits Mexico. And that is just ONE state. I drove from the southwest part of Missouri, near the Missouri/Oklahoma/Kansas border, to Detroit Michigan, and it took TWO days, and I don't drive the speed limit, and, all of my trip was on interstate highways with 70mph speed limits.
The fact is, there's no substitute for good, wired broadband connections. All of these attempts to provide service to unserved areas with wireless technologies are second-rate solutions that still leave rural customers at a disadvantage.
Pretty much anywhere in the U.S., I can set up a satellite broadband connection and have "high speed Internet" -- only it's subject to a lot of terms and conditions. High latency is a big show-stopper with it for many things, like online gaming or VoIP telephony. And then you have the high cost and bandwidth caps that come with it.
In many rural areas I've been in, you have at least one area ISP offering microwave type broadband, where you put one of their receiver antennas on your roof and get service that way. Again, it's better than only DSL as an option, but it's not great. It's costly and slower than speeds people are used to getting with cable modems.
In other places, you can hobble along with an LTE cellular hotspot and whatever limitations come with the cellular subscription you've got with it.
The point is -- none of this stuff is really very good. They're all wireless solutions that inherently have more issues than a piece of cable stuck in the ground or running along a pole to your property.
We should be demanding municipal/state fiber or copper to fix the last mile issue. Something like the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. That's what we pay taxes for, so yes, we are entitled..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I don't tell people I use Edge.
"I was at my computer Edging."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Or the effort to float balloons over Africa?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
But it's not a "last mile" problem. It's a "several miles between houses" AT LEAST problem, often where there is at best some electricity, but nothing even resembling the sort of infrastructure needed to run fiber/coax. It would cost tens of thousands at least, often six figures, to get the "last mile" anywhere within a mile of each of millions of homes. That's why wireless makes more sense in such cases.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
They run the power lines and even the phone lines. They can do the same for coax or fiber. Fiber should be cheaper than copper anyway. And I'm not against wireless. I'm only against the corruptly granted monopolies. The market should be wide open to everybody, including the state.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Buckets of red ink.
I think the solution is going to be fixed wireless, whether it's dedicated infrastructure or piggybacked on cellular. Current LTE deployment in those rural areas is fair to middling, and can provide acceptable speeds and latency in most areas. The advent of 5G could shake things up even more, not only by increasing the infrastructure capacity on 5G itself, but also by freeing up capacity in 4G as more device move to 5G. The only problem is that all cellular providers, and most other fixed wireless providers institute usage caps that are way to low for any modern internet usage. However, since they're still technically providing what's considered "broadband", regardless of whether it can actually stand in as a replacement for physical wireline connectivity. As a result, they can proceed to rake in federal and state-level grant money, despite not providing what is actually needed: a wireline replacement connection at an affordable price. About all that's needed to make these connection more feasible is to get average usage caps raised by an order of magnitude, from 10GB to 100GB.
Multiple counties in that area (including my county just north of Cville) are trying to find solutions, but the best thing us techies can do is to convince them that they need to push not for universal connectivity, but for universal "wireline equivalency". As long as fixed wireless companies (like VABB) and cell providers keep doing what they're doing, they will continue to take credit for providing access, while failing to present any real competition to wireline providers like Comcast or Centurylink.