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About a Quarter of Rural Americans Say Access To High-Speed Internet Is a Major Problem (pewresearch.org)
According to a Pew Research Center survey, 24% of rural adults say access to high-speed internet is a major problem in their local community. "An additional 34% of rural residents see this as a minor problem, meaning that roughly six-in-ten rural Americans (58%) believe access to high speed internet is a problem in their area," the report says. From the report: By contrast, smaller shares of Americans who live in urban areas (13%) or the suburbs (9%) view access to high-speed internet service as a major problem in their area. And a majority of both urban and suburban residents report that this is not an issue in their local community, according to the survey, conducted Feb. 26-March 11. Concerns about access to high-speed internet are shared by rural residents from various economic backgrounds. For example, 20% of rural adults whose household income is less than $30,000 a year say access to high speed internet is a major problem, but so do 23% of rural residents living in households earning $75,000 or more annually. These sentiments are also similar between rural adults who have a bachelor's or advanced degree and those with lower levels of educational attainment. There are, however, some differences by age and by race and ethnicity. Rural adults ages 50 to 64 are more likely than those in other groups to see access to high-speed internet as a problem where they live. Nonwhites who live in a rural area are more likely than their white counterparts to say this is a major problem (31% vs. 21%).
I think most of my coworkers are still using dial-up or ISDN at home here in Seattle. Even my boss that lives in a nice neighborhood can only get 1.5 Mbps DSL. Well, that's what CenturyLink claims. They haven't been able to make it stable so he still has a T1 that work pays for since we have a couple of back-up servers in his house.
It's not going to work for games that need super low latency but satellite delivers decently high speed for everything else.
You really can't fault the cable/DSL service providers for not investing tons of money expanding their wired networks out to the sticks if the number of additional subscribers they will get will not pay for said network expansion.
Sounds like if we feel the lack of high speed internet for rural folks is a big societal problem, then it would have to be the government that makes the investment. But most rural folks also hate the government so that might not go over well.
Is that an alias for Captain Obvious?
Get money, ruralcucks! (/s)
If rural folks have access to high speed Internet, I don't see how that's a problem.
I have in laws living on Iowa farms only a three or four miles from a town that has very good high speed Internet but their only wired connection is dial up. Lack of HS Internet is a real problem considering all the high tech graphical agricultural information available to them from a wide variety of sources.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Sure the internet is shit compared to the big cities, but they probably don't have to spend several hours stuck in traffic every day. If there were a perfect place where you could truly have it all, everyone would try to move their and that would probably ruin it. So ask yourself what's really important to you and realize that you might have to give up some other things in pursuit of that.
If rural folks have access to high speed Internet, I don't see how that's a problem.
Well, they generally don't.
I have in laws living on Iowa farms only a three or four miles from a town that has very good high speed Internet but their only wired connection is dial up.
It's like that across the entire country. Step outside of any city and suddenly, no internet. Go much further, and you won't even have cell phone service, at least not with any sort of data connection.
Let the rest of the USA escape from the paper insulated monopoly NN telcos.
Community broadband. Build that community out with new fiber optics.
Let communities have a say in when, how and what they communicate with.
Find a telco, ISP able to work in difficult conditions.
Why should federal NN rules set a monopoly pace for communities ready to get their own great internet?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Hi. I'm a hipster with a man-bun! I have a special hipster electric razor that makes it look like I always have a 5 o'clock shadow! I have a iPhone X cause that's who I am. I get all my fashion ideas from TV shows. Ciao! Peace out!
Amish people see high speed internet as a curse.
all owned by 18th CenturyLink, 5 miles from a university town. Only option is 1.5 Mb/s max DSL from those bastards. Without youtube-dl video would be impossible.
https://twitter.com/StevWork/s...
While major ISPs R jerking-off law-makers to keep monopolies,destroy NetNeutrality,pretend bits are huge/expensive/hard-to-move,U pay through nose while they Rape democracy/#FreeSpeach, countries like S.Korea have Fiber to every door.
Is that clear enough?
I work from home full time and tried to survive using basic home internet service.
I gave up and settled on full service business class cable. It's really fast and I get better customer service than the home guys.
If you do any service work at home, spring for business class. Even in the country, it's stupid fast.
I'm in a suburban area right next to a large city, and still have flaky service. We pretty much have only 2 ISP choices, and we are using the least-evil choice right now. Others in the area report similar.
We had to pay extra for the "premium" service just to get normal service. It's as if you pay for a Chevy, but get a half-broken Chevy that stalls twice a day; and if you pay for a Cadillac, you get a mostly-working Chevy that stalls once a week, NOT a Cadillac. "Regular" service is really a Yugo sold as a Chevy.
If you complain, they simply offer to upgrade you a level. "Maybe you need a faster service level?". No, I need a working service, Dipwad.
But they won. Dipwad: 1, Us: 0. Oligopolies, gotta lovem.
Table-ized A.I.
Hopefully the various companies planning (like Oneweb & Starlink) to launch satellites for LEO internet are successful. Starlink already has a couple test satellites in orbit. This should basically fix this issue; a large enough LEO constellation of satellites should be able to provide access to all rural Americans (and rural people anywhere else that local government lets Starlink or Oneweb sell service to) at a price that is much cheaper than installing cable/fiber everywhere. By being in low Earth orbit, that fixes the latency issues that plague existing internet satellites in higher orbits, and the larger number of satellites will allow for faster service/more customers - Starlink plans on launching over 4,000 satellites in the next six years, and another 7,000 after that.
If the other three quarters are the majority of rural voters supporting Republicans who wonâ(TM)t fight service providers on their behalf, then there is nothing to see here.
Well they are mutually exclusive. Pick one and be happy.
Yup! You bet access to high-speed Internet is a problem.
There's a proven correlation between ready high-speed Internet access - particularly through mobile devices - and student grades.
I'm in the heart of Silicon Valley and I only have two choices that are more then 1.5mbps DSL, and that's Xfinity and AT&T. Meaning a cable company is your supplier, and you overpay for what you get and in return get bad service.
My mother lives in a rural town, not that tiny, maybe 20K population. She doesn't have cable so her only choice is 1mbps. It's great compared to her previous dialup or the spotty wifi connection to her neighbors (who have cable), but it's not broadband.
Even in the big city, the cost of high speed internet (because you're a slave to cable monopolies) is enough to keep most poor people.
Why don't you run a network cable from your mom's house to her neighbor with the spotty wifi? Then your mom will have a good connection. Obviously the neighbor won't care because the neighbor is already sharing wifi with your mom.
A couple of weeks ago they arrested thee Amish men and charged them with having sex with farm animals. So the Amish may be weird, but actually they are weirder than you can imagine.
42% of rural Americans surveyed have no issue with access to broadband internet, and the number increases to 76% of those surveyed that either consider broadband access a minor or no problem.
Wow.
Back in 2008 a similar number of Americans surveyed had similar feeling about their personal healthcare - then the government stepped in and "fixed things".
Ken
They sure have access to Fox News.
My mother lives in a rural town, not that tiny, maybe 20K population. She doesn't have cable so her only choice is 1mbps. It's great compared to her previous dialup or the spotty wifi connection to her neighbors (who have cable), but it's not broadband.
If her neighbours have cable then she also has the option of a cable connection; it's just a matter of running some coax in from the road. If the cable company wants to charge her an arm and a leg you could even run the cable yourself and just pay them to connect it. This is not remotely the same as not actually having access to high speed internet.
You can drive to where your food is grown, and pick it up; convenient, right? And your clothes? There's no traffic out here, so no problem. To grow your food we go without many localized services like medicine and car repair. It seems to break the social contract we've all agreed to (and paid for with taxes) like having things delivered locally...
The fuck do I care, they're just gonna stream Alex Jones.
The U.S. and: Japan, Sweden, South Korea, most European countries. The problem is the population of the U.S. is SPREAD OUT over a large area. For example, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, and probably most of Europe would fit pretty much inside Texas, maybe encroaching on one of the neighboring states. It is just not cost effective to run fiber to "John Q. Public" in the middle of nowhere Kansas, where his nearest neighbor might be 10 miles away, and the nearest town with a population of over 5,000 could be several hundred miles away. I know when I visited Mt. Rushmore in 2006, it was amazing driving I-90 between Mitchell SD and Rapid City SD. You would go for miles and miles without seeing ANY houses, then one here and there surrounded by large trees (blocks out the winter wind). If you've ever heard of Wall SD with the Wall Drug "free ice water", then you'd understand the problem. So many people live so far from "civilization" it isn't profitable to do broadband, because they would never make their money back. Wifi would probably be a better option than fiber. But, wifi obviously creates it's own problems.
If access was "a real problem" your in-laws would figure out a way to get faster internet access (satellite, cellular, etc.). That the lack of high-speed internet hasn't forced them to shutdown the farm and move into the better-served city a few miles away.
Ken
My high speed internet is 1megabit per second when it is dry... grumble. (unstable DSL) There used to be cable in the area until the graders chopped it up maintaining the roads.
The other 3 quarters couldn't be reached for comment.
I kid you not. Frontier in CA. The copper is buried and badly maintained. I am too far from the CO for DSL.
ComCast want me to pay $300K to bring fiber to the door and $2k/mo for 100/10 mb/s service.
Our local WISP delivers 1gb/s symmetrical for $2k/mo. If the one-man-band can do this well, guess what, so can the big guys.
Ya, that's dumb though. Don't need or want cable but need to buy cable to get decent internet? Way outside of her budget, and the cable would have to be installed to the house first which is going to be a hefty one time fee. High speed internet is being treated like a luxury, the same way telephones used to be treated as a luxury, or electricity, etc.
and while he didn't spend hours in traffic he spent that same amount of time to get anywhere. Air was cleaner though.
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I donâ(TM)t think you really understand rural. An old boss of mine had the same issue. But he wasnâ(TM)t going to be running a cable through the woods to his neighbors house, because... that was over a third of a mile away.
Youâ(TM)re pretty daft or just like to be narrow minded. First off no one moves a farm for anything less than things that end up as scary chapters in the Bible. Second, âoeaccess can be a problemâ and not be fixed because the solution, moving, is an âoeeven bigger problemâ. Try to view the world with a few more shades of gray. Like even one. That would be great.
Anything under a kilometer isnt remotely far. You can use cots Wi-Fi extenders with directional antennae to bridge that. A fiber run that far is a grand , plus labor if you don't do it yourself. Add a repeater on top of the hill you will claim is in between houses.
Quit bitching and start slinging cable or radio beams.
Amish people see high speed internet as a curse.
Not really as a curse. Most of them just thinks that it distracts from family values.
Amish aren't necessarily against high speed internet. They just don't want people to waste their time on it.
Setting up a common computer that is only used for the common good isn't out of the question in some Amish communities.
Of course different Amish communities have different views on technology.
Some doesn't want to become dependent on it and others don't want it to interfere with the family oriented life.
If rural folks have access to high speed Internet, I don't see how that's a problem. I have in laws living on Iowa farms only a three or four miles from a town that has very good high speed Internet but their only wired connection is dial up. Lack of HS Internet is a real problem considering all the high tech graphical agricultural information available to them from a wide variety of sources.
That's because it isn't profitable to hook them up. But worry not, eventually the free market will come up with some solution that makes it profitable to provide rural areas with high speed internet. You just have to have the patience to wait ... any day now ... the free market is on the job !!!! .... in Socialist hell holes in Europe the state subsidises internet to such rural locations with the aim of achieve 100% internet connectivity because they regard internet connectivity as a basic service everybody has a right to. Makes you glad that Americans have the free market on their side doesn't it?
If it's that big of a problem move to a city.
Or move to a country with better infrastructure, say China for example.
Or quit bitching
Phone&telephone inclusive, 70EUR
If it's that big of a problem move to a city.
Or move to a country with better infrastructure, say China for example.
Or quit bitching
If everyone, as you suggest, were to move to the city, how long do you suppose your food supplies would last?
Trust me, this country *needs* people who are willing to live and work the rural farmlands.
Get 25 Mbps in my rural area and that will probably be the max for the rest of my life. Fiberoptic is run along our roads, but will never be extended to individual houses.Cost !!
Finding useful and valuable content among the useless dreck is a far worse problem.
I live in a city. I have FiOS. My service level is 1GB.
I still cannot reliably stream video without interruptions, disconnections, etc. from Amazon, Apple and YouTube.
Simply having the ability to PAY for a fast connection is hardly a panacea.
I don't think it's as big of a "problem" as the story suggests
Living in the country has its advantages and disadvantages. The people there know this and the ones who don't like it, leave. Conversely, many people are moving TO the country where they know broadband is not readily available.
The fact that the study shows only a minority of people think it's an issue means that it's not really an issue.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
You can kill them but you can't fuck them (the farm animals). That's wild.
I live literally 1000 feet from where the local cable company ends service (they have switched from Charter to Time Warner to Spectrum in 2.5 years). They offer 200M service 1000 feet away from my house. They quoted me $72,000.00 to run service to my house. I'm not deep in the country, I'm 1000 feet away from a subdivision with $1 million houses. I live 3 miles from a US Senator.
I can't even get DSL. AT&T is not deploying any new DSL (they claim all their circuits are full) and U-verse is not offered here.
The ONLY option I have at home is satellite, which is 5 times the price with ridiculously low tiered bandwidth and data caps. The best I could find is worse than cellular service (which I need a signal booster for).
Last I checked (February 2018), the U.S. FCC defined "broadband" as 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. This was true since 2015. In 2010, the definition was 4 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. Are you using the FCC's pre-2010 definition of 0.2 Mbps symmetric? If not, whose definition of "broadband" are you using that includes 1.5 Mbps down?
I'm using my definition from memory when I left the USA, which was 2005 :)
That was a reformatted memory from the Microsoft MCSE study materials, which said broadband was a signal split over multiple frequencies (frequency domain multiplexing).
Take off every 'sig' !!
Most rural areas have shoddy infrastructure to begin with. Many of these areas with garbage internet are usually running on phone lines whose call quality is that of 2 cans tied together with string. The companies that own these lines have been paid millions of dollars by federal, and state governments to upgrade this infrastructure but many appear to have pocketed the cash or used it in more populous areas.
I've been told by technicians in these companies there is no interest in fixing these issues, because there's no competition in the area. There's no cell service, satellite internet is a joke, and there's no other provider that deems it profitable enough to run additional lines. When technicians are coming out and "fixing" these problems they're simply swapping connections with another line only to come back out a week later to undo what did. It's an endless cycle of shuffling equipment across lines to try to appease people for a short time period.
In my rural area of North Dakota we have a regional co-op as our only option for wired service. For a while I was stuck with HVDL service that was a slow but consistent 756 Kbps down, had fair/OK latency for gaming.
The co-op was in the process of expanding their fiber network but they hadn't yet reached my area. I suppose that's understandable, I live 30 miles out. My nearest neighbors are about a half-mile down the gravel road in either direction. Even now the cell phone coverage (Verizon tower, I think) is spotty at best.
A few years went by but sure enough, they eventually came and trenched in fiber up to the house, for free! They also installed an indoor ONT with 802.11b/g/n wireless and a four port 1Gb Eth switch. I know it can go up to 1Gbps, but I currently have the 100Mbps service and it's fantastic.
I have to acknowledge how fortunate I am. Especially after reading about the trouble that others have, even in urban areas. IMHO, the larger broadband monopolies have no excuse for not doing better. Shame on them!
High prices for internet services are also an issue. Competition is one answer. I see no reason that I can not have three or four cables running to my home. One possible consequence is local governments providing net services at no charge. The suburb I live in is over 200 miles long and with a large, dense population. That makes it hard to understand why we don't have competitive cable for all homes and businesses.
All political power today is concentrate in powerful hands of liberal insiders and welthy elite. Hard working rural american is hurt bigly by liberal ignoreance of rural issues like High Speed Internet. So many many people are talking about why rural voters support republican party very strongly is because liberals hate heartland people, just want to give tax dollars to urban thug welfare queens.
I run a computer shop in a small rural community, that said we get high speed in the village itself, via comcast and spectrum, but the second you step out of the village limits the only option is satellite, not only is the speed absolutely horrible, but most of them have data caps, they pay just as much as people who are on standard highspeed here, but if they go over their data cap they are hit with additional charges, they don't have the ability to do the required updates for their computers without paying a substantial amount(windows updates are a huge issue, in both the amount of time and the amount of data that are required, i'd be suprised to learn that most of the people out here have managed any recent creator update do to this, in addition trying to keep AV, browsers, flash etc is nearly impossible as well if they want to do basically anything else online) This is something that really needs fixed imho.
15/3 Mbps here, metro Atlanta. I pay $112/month.
I can get 250/15 Mbps Comcast service for $499/month + $xxx installation.
In about 6 months, I think AT&T will offer Gbps fiber here - they dug up the yard about 3 months ago. I'm afraid to ask how much.
I live in Podunk KS. We now have decent terrestrial microwave fixed wireless technology. It is generally in the range of 12mbps for $65-ish with no caps, which is enough for a few Netflix streams and the latency is low for command line work. The commute is rough going from my bedroom to my office. We also have unlimited Verizon that works well in rural areas. The options have definitely gotten faster and cheaper since competing companies and technologies have entered the area. I guess that is the trade off for living in the middle of no where with no traffic and peace and quiet.
Here we just don't have any Internet in Rural areas. You can surf thought your phone at a premium rate in some places though.
It wasn't a problem for everyone. Some will still be left.
Chinese farmers get internet.
If they stop making as much food, the prices will rise, they will make more money, then they will be able to afford to put in their own internet infrastructure. Let the free market run its course.