Slashdot Mirror
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.
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"
Amish people see high speed internet as a curse.
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.
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.
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.
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
The other 3 quarters couldn't be reached for comment.
and while he didn't spend hours in traffic he spent that same amount of time to get anywhere. Air was cleaner though.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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' !!
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.
On average, there is only 1 hydrogen atom per several cubic km in the Universe. By that statistic, humans don't exist. The lesson here is, please don't use averages unless you actually understand what they represent. The median population density is higher in the USA than Japan or South Korea.