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What It's Like To Live in America Without Broadband Internet (vice.com)
Motherboard has an interesting piece which serves as a reminder that even today in every single state, a portion of the population doesn't have access to broadband, and some have no access to the internet at all. From the piece: Wilfong (an anecdote used in the story) is one of the more than 24 million Americans, or about 8 percent of the country, who don't have access to high-speed internet, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) -- and that's a conservative estimate. Most of them live in rural and tribal areas, though the problem affects urban communities, too. In every single state, a portion of the population doesn't have access to broadband.
The reasons these communities have been left behind are as diverse as the areas themselves. Rural regions like Wilfong's hometown of Marlinton are not densely populated enough to get telecom companies to invest in building the infrastructure to serve them. Some areas can be labeled as "served" by telecoms even if many homes don't actually have internet access, as in Sharon Township, Michigan, just a short drive from the technology hub of Ann Arbor. Others are just really far away. These places are so geographically remote that laying cable is physically and financially prohibitive, so towns like Orleans, California, have started their own nonprofit internet services instead.
The reasons these communities have been left behind are as diverse as the areas themselves. Rural regions like Wilfong's hometown of Marlinton are not densely populated enough to get telecom companies to invest in building the infrastructure to serve them. Some areas can be labeled as "served" by telecoms even if many homes don't actually have internet access, as in Sharon Township, Michigan, just a short drive from the technology hub of Ann Arbor. Others are just really far away. These places are so geographically remote that laying cable is physically and financially prohibitive, so towns like Orleans, California, have started their own nonprofit internet services instead.
Already got nonsense about mountain men and what not, so why not "broadbandless"!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
satellite broadband: when you're too distant for cables to reach
As the article points out (but casts away as impractical) wireless broadband is not excessively expensive and can allow coverage of vast portions of "digital divide" areas with little effort, using sound technologies such as 5G and WiMax
At current the Internet is kind of a waste of time, they're probably better off without it, are getting more important things done, reading more books, etc.
Without internet, all your porn is analog.
It appears;
"no access at all" = "no wired ISP service to home"
It appears there is no other way possible for any of the people living in those homes to EVER be able get on the internet.
Get off my lawn!
We just recently got my Father in Law off of the craptacular satellite internet connection he had for several years, and onto a decent broadband that finally got offered in his rural Alabama community. He went from about 128kbps to 100Mbps, which is faster than I get in metro Atlanta.
From the article:
I operate the internet connections to two remote communities in Washington State. In the end, I have between 80 and 100 people connected via a 3.3Mbps/900kbps satellite link. Collectively, they push between 20 and 30 GiB a day through the link. The only thing that makes it usable is the extremely aggressive QoS I have on the link, ensuring everyone gets a fair kick at the can.
So why Satellite? In the case of these two communities, it's the only viable option. They are both in extremely rugged terrain, surrounded either by National Park or federal wilderness area. The nearest cellular tower is probably 50 miles and 2 or 3 valleys away, the nearest telephone pole about the same. It would be theoretically possible to lay a submarine fiber cable up the lake, but the lake is 1500' deep making a cable laying effort comperable to a short oceanic cable run. And there's no way the costs would be recouped from under 200 residents.
I once plotted out what it would take to link out via fixed wireless, and it would require two self-powered repeater sites, in areas that easily receive 400" of snow a winter. The added bonus is that one of these repeaters would have to be located on a ridge in the federal wilderness. Making this happen would literally require an act of congress to approve, and given how dysfunctional congress is... Plus the whole system would probably cost about $400k to build, again not something that's going to be recouped from the small number of users.
So, in the end, we pay our satellite fees. Those who want faster service arrange their own links via ViaSat or similar, and we continue on. If SpaceX ever gets StarLink off the ground, that could easily be a good option. However, I'd love to see how their flat Ku-Band antennas will work in areas that get significant snowfall, and have a limited view of the sky due to rugged terrain.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Cellular is getting a lot better.
Moved to rural acreage a while ago. Only reliable broadband available is cellular. Prices and caps are ridiculous. trees and privacy are worth the cost imo.
http://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/photoshop/4/2/3/654423_v2.jpg
What might get interesting is that for some newly constructed homes, there's one choice or zero choices of broadband too.
At least new homes aren't being built with copper phone service, so no dialup, and if a cable company doesn't pick up the slack, you'll find no broadband other than cellular available.
I've lived in one of these "underserved" rural areas for almost a decade, and have become something of an expert in non-traditional internet options. I've had fixed microwave (Rise Broadband), mobile cellular (Verizon Mifi, Sprint), fixed cellular (Verizon LTE installed), and currently have Viasat satellite. With the exception of Rise Broadband (which was horrible), all of the options worked reasonably well (stable, speeds consistently north of 10Mbps) and would be defined as broadband.
For this article to act like someone in my position has no good options for internet is disingenuous at best. It would be more accurate to say there aren't good, CHEAP options for internet. In most areas you will pay at least $100/ month to get more than 15GB of data per month. This greatly limits the amount of video you can watch online, but allows most other critical functions. I currently pay $120 a month for 150GB cap with Viasat, The speed is good except when there's a thunderstorm in the area, and I'm overall satisfied with the service.
I see articles like this and think it's overstating the problem to cause pressure on lawmakers to throw more money at building infrastructure in these areas. This may seem like a good idea, but the issue is that infrastructure is an ongoing cost. If there's not a population base to support the cost of the infrastructure, then the government will always be on the hook to pay for upgrades and maintenance. I think we'd be better served to help offset the cost of the options that do exist.
As someone being "on the Internet" since 1992, I can safely say the Golden Age has long passed.
If it wasn't for a paycheck, I'd have joined them long ago. When I go home I use the Internet and my computers less and less to the point I power them off now ~ I used to run them constantly.
Ode to a bygone era indeed.
Jeez! Only 20 years ago, I had to use an acoustic-coupler modem strapped to a payphone handset to get e-mail.
This is the problem when we let corporations run things. They only go to areas that are going to be profitable. We even let the corporations determine what percentage constitutes coverage. And then, when we decide to subvert the corporations and go at it ourselves, said corporations hold up these efforts in the court system.
Meanwhile, here's what the good people at the FCC are up to:
https://boingboing.net/2018/04...
You are welcome on my lawn.
It appears;
"no access at all" = "no wired ISP service to home"
It appears there is no other way possible for any of the people living in those homes to EVER be able get on the internet.
Assuming that's sarcasm: Would you be more willing to drop "wired" or to drop "to home"?
Enjoy paying $30 per PC for Internet data transfer quota overages at $10 per GB when your PCs all decide to automatically download a 3 GB semiannual operating system feature upgrade.
Unless you're in a valley with no view to the south, you can get satellite broadband. May not be the best, and may be more expensive, but is better than dial-up.
Stop giving vice and mic and similar shitholes traffic.
My friends came over to play video games or we did other stuff.
Well in any case you *should* be able to live just fine without access to broadband. Unfortunately more and more companies seem to think that if you don't have broadband access you're not worth dealing with. But I digress...
My mother in-law still only has dial up internet. At best she gets 56K speeds although I sometimes doubt it's better than 28K, but she seems to survive just fine. She can still use e-mail when she absolutely has to, but does everything else 'the old fashioned way'. No broadband, no smart phone, limited cable TV (only because OTA stations in her area are practically non-existent), and yet she survives. I honestly admire the simplicity of it all.
Internet =/= Broadband
Lacking broadband does not mean lacking internet access.
Not everyone wants/needs broadband internet access, many/most do, but to just blanket assume that everyone wants/needs broadband internet is just wrong.
Ken
Whatever happened to internet over power lines? Are they still working on that?
"towns like Orleans, California, have started their own nonprofit internet services instead."
I live in Missouri where AT&T, Comacast,... have (made campaign contributions | paid off | bribed) the state legislature so communities aren't able to create their own internet.
https://motherboard.vice.com/e...
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
I live very rural and have broadband, but I know a lot of people who don't because they don't have electricity (it's all off grid) and can't afford or understand how to hook up a few solar panels.
As a part-time denizen of the Ozarks, I can tell you for a fact that Russian Trolls are nowhere to be found ...
91748 zip code not far from downtown Los Angeles. It's unincorporated - informally called Rowland Heights, but not a city. Services are provided by the county government (Los Angeles County). It's fairly close to Newegg's HQ (City of Industry) so by no means is it in the sticks. The county awarded Verizon the local phone monopoly, and Time Warner the local cable monopoly. Large portions of the community are low-income, so Time Warner never bothered laying out cable to many areas.
Verizon was thus left with an internet monopoly for a large percentage of the population. Since there was no competition, they opted to simply leave the existing phone infrastructure in place and rape everyone for Internet access. The maximum DSL speed available was 3 Mbps, but that was only possible with about 1 in 10 phone lines. Most lines could only get 1.5 Mbps at best. Verizon charged $30/mo for 768/128 kbps, $40/mo for 1 Mbps/256 kbps, $50/mo for 1.5 Mbps/384kbps, and if you were fortunate to have one of the phone lines which were capable of it, you could pay $70/mo for 3 Mbps/768 kbps. Those were best case speeds too. The phone lines were so old and full of noise that service was spotty and would often go in and out like a poor wireless connection. For comparison, the lowest priced Internet I saw in neighboring cities was about $20/mo (rising to $24/mo recently) for 6 Mbps DSL.
This was the situation from about 2002-2016. Not once did Verizon use any of the money they were making hand over fist from their zero investment in infrastructure to upgrade the phone lines or roll out FIOS (which was available a couple miles to the east in Walnut). In 2016 they sold their phone service contract to Frontier, who kept the prices the same yet somehow managed to make service worse. Now instead of the service sucking when the phone lines experience noise, it simply stops working entirely. Residents and business tenants I talk to frequently end up accessing the Internet on their phones. (Sprint upgraded a tower recently so 4G cellular Internet became an option a couple years ago if you could cope with the price and data cap.)
After the Time Warner / Charter merger, the new company - Spectrum - has been much more aggressive about expanding service. I dunno if this is due to government regulators setting conditions for their merger, or if Spectrum just as a different philosophy about service coverage. But since 2017, 100 Mbps cable Internet is finally becoming an option in many parts of this zip code. Many of the businesses owners I talk to didn't just switch their Internet to Spectrum, but also their phone service as well - Verizon/Frontier's price gouging also extended to phone service. One doctor I spoke to recently was paying Frontier over $300/mo for 4 phone lines + 1.5 Mbps Internet.
These government-granted service monopolies really need to be prohibited.
"Zombie" stories are about fighting of the hordes of people who don't no how to take care of themselves and have no useful skills when civilization collapses. Most people will not be much more (behavior-wise) than Zombies when they can't just go to the grocery store, turn on the lights, and get clean drinking water just by turning the faucet.
I think this headline could best be depicted by a meme rather than an article.
If you don't want to live near an urban center, then you don't get the benefits (or conversely the negative consequences) of living near an urban center.
If you want to live out in the middle of nowhere then it's your problem to find communication solutions that suit your needs.
Sometimes I wish I lived out in a rural area. No pollution (environmental, noise, light), lot's of wildlife to explore, little/no government intervention (speed traps in particular), etc.
But I just happen to choose to give all that up for better internet, more social activities, a better paying job relative to the rural area (better QoL, not just numerically higher pay), etc.
Some people choose not to make that trade. That's their choice but they can't then complain to daddy government that they aren't getting Netflix fast enough. To that end, good on those that choose to take this on themselves and provide a solution for themselves. I just don't want them demanding others pay for their choices.
And we still haven't heard from the guy who claims that everyone in Seattle is on dialup. You're dropping the ball, dude!
#DeleteChrome
Mmm. They're so deprived, they can't buy the ingredients for meth on the internets. Or pain killers!
They keep lowering the definition of "broadband" and keep excusing companies for not supplying what customers pay for.
Meanwhile, in civilized countries, they're getting 90 mbps - 500 gbps rates in remote country villages halfway up the sides of mountains or in remote hills. For a fraction of the price. Which goes to show it's not about the money, it's about the profit the companies want to sponge off you.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If somebody lives remote in the boonies, in a swamp (Shrek), or on a mountain, chances are they picked it precisely because it was away from civilization. They aren't complaining about lack of Internet any more than they complain about an hour drive to buy groceries. Unless they are farmers (for which there should be an exception, because I thank them daily for providing us food), we really shouldn't care.
If you are a farmer with acres of beans or a ranch raising cattle so I can eat steak, then yes, we should try harder to get you Netflix or porn. Otherwise, shame on you for building a log cabin in the middle of nowhere expecting modern amenities.
From a purely technical perspective, sure, they can put outdoor antennas on their homes and set up a cellular router. The problem is, a significant percentage of the folks who are unserved by wired broadband are also poor. That's usually the real reason those areas are unserved. So the high cost per gigabyte of cellular connections makes that out of reach.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No longer an issue. I simply refuse to live anywhere it is not available.
Now if I had to do so I'll do what I did when deployed to the desert. I brought my kindle fire with me, downloaded everything I wanted to watch when I could find a hotspot that wasn't being overused, and simply gave up on all the rest. You tend to read ALOT of books, limit your surfing to buying things, and use IM or email a lot more instead of video or voice calls.
This situation is exactly why I despise streaming without buffering/downloading. You can get away it with your Kindle, but things like online videos or say Netflix/Fire TV it is annoying that you can't download it to watch on the TV>
Hopefully Space X is successful in rolling out their Starlink satellite internet service over the next few years; that should make broadband available to everyone in the US; and can probably be expanded to other countries as well. Starlink's plan has a huge advantage over existing satellite internet in that they intend to put up thousands of satellites in LEO, so it won't have the latency or bandwidth issues existing GEO internet satellites have. I know they just launched their first test satellites like a month ago.
when I was 10 I started programming. Single mom raising me (she was a Nurse) and few friends and I hit a wall pretty early on and stopped. The books at the library where all I had after all, and I didn't understand them. I picked it up again when I was 18 and did fine, but I'd lost 8 years. If I'd had stackoverflow I'd have had those 8 years.
My bro has a similar story but with his guitar. His teacher taught him bad technique. With the Internet he'd have known this and learned the right technique. He'd have been a better guitarist with the Internet.
Books are limited to the books you can get. They're hard to come by unless you're in a major city. You're at the mercy of whatever's in stock. There's catalogs, but you can't flip through a book in a catalog. And they're _expensive_. The Linux books I had back in the day were $50-$60 a pop for information I get free online now.
And this is before we talk about the political implications of a generation who grew up with the ability to google any little lie they're told when they're young. Imagine being 8 and finding out what Christopher Columbus was really like? How much less likely are to question authority when you grow up not just believing adults are full of shit but _knowing_ it?
You're looking at a few gossip sites and Facebook and writing the internet off. But the value of the Internet to somebody who wants to learn and isn't wealthy can't be overstated.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
nt
Before the Internet became widely available things were A-OK, so to answer the OP question- Boo. Freaking. Hoo.
Deal with it.
I live about 20 miles from a tech city in England. When we move there British Telecom were promising FTTC broadband in December. December came... and it slipped a year. So we limped along at a couple of megs for another year. Then guess what? BT slipped it another year...
This went on until finally we started to get a community service together. Two things happened at that point: (1) BT told us it would cost us ££££ to get a fibre to our hub and (2) they finally sorted their system. I now have a fibre into my 300 year old house.
I guess they didn't want any competing systems.
I can not get cable Internet but yet here I am. If you can see the sky you too can have a form of broadband. Eighty dollars a month gets me 50 GiB of supposedly 30 Mb satellite Internet service. Hughes Net does throttle YouTube but with a little buffering I can watch them. My Firestick works fine, as long as I don't stream more than an hour and a half a day.