Should The Government Fix Slow Internet Access? (fivethirtyeight.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a story from Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight site about "the worst internet in America": FiveThirtyEight analyzed every county's broadband usage using data from researchers at the University of Iowa and Arizona State University and found that Saguache, Colorado was at the bottom. Only 5.6 percent of adults were estimated to have broadband... It has some of the worst internet in the country. That's in part because of the mountains and the isolation they bring... Its population of 6,300 is spread across 3,169 square miles 7,800 feet above sea level, but on land that is mostly flat, so you can almost see the full scope of two mountain ranges as you drive the county's highway...

But Saguache isn't alone in lacking broadband. According to the Federal Communications Commission, 39 percent of rural Americans -- 23 million people -- don't have access. In Pew surveys, those who live in rural areas were about twice as likely not to use the internet as urban or suburban Americans.
In Saguache County download speeds of 12 Mbps (with an upload speed of 2 Mbps) cost $90 a month, and the article points out that when it comes to providing broadband, "small companies and cooperatives are going it more or less alone, without much help yet from the federal government." But that raises an inevitable question. Should the federal government be subsidizing rural internet access?

Comments

Isolation

[cirby]

So, those people who decided to live way the heck out in the middle of nowhere to get away from civilization need internet access? Why?

It would probably be cheaper to find the ones who actually want high-speed internet and give them money to move.

It's hilarious to see these "the US has a lot of people who don't get 10 megabit internet, when compared to other countries," while noticing that the countries they compare us to generally don't have a lot of wide open spaces to cover. There's a whole lot of countries that don't have (for example) places like Death Valley or the mountains of Colorado.

Re:Isolation

[LynnwoodRooster]

You are spot on. The biggest country in Western Europe is France, and it falls between the size of California and Texas. Most people simply haven't a clue of the scale of the United States of America, how it is absolutely huge compared to just about everywhere else (Russia and Canada being the only ones bigger than us), and how sparsely populated most of it is. For example, this county in question (Saguache) is nearly 3.5 times the size of Luxembourg. The county has 6300 people, Luxembourg has nearly 10 times that, at 590,000. South Korea is 10 times the size of the county, but has learly 10,000 times (yes, 4 orders of magnitude) the population. Makes construction and deployment of utiities rather difficult!

Re:Nine most terrifying words...

[Anonymous Coward]

The US government has been paying for nothing for years.

Verizon Knows You're A Sucker: Takes Taxpayer Subsidies For Broadband, Doesn't Deliver, Lobbies To Drop Requirements

Shocker: Billions In Broadband Subsidies Wasted As Government Turns Blind Eye To Fraud

Wired to fail