Many Rural Americans Lack Access to High Speed Internet in Their Area

My poor mom and dad can only get 28.8kbps dial up. The sad part? Several years ago they ran a fiber line right infront of there yard and cannot tap into it.
 
Nobu said:
I have a few options at 20mbps, two or three at 40. Or I can get 4g through att. They're all overpriced, though. (Minumum $40 before equipment and other misc fees, $25 if you bundle with $60 tv package)
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And right here is the issue. The fact that you think $40 is overpriced. When battling against people that think anything over free is fucking them over most companies will decide to just fuck you over by not investing in your area.
 
ThatsAgood1jay said:
Ahem: https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service-fund
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USF only covers phone service not internet. Also the government does whatever they can to not actually give that money out. It is kind of like charities. They collect the money but then suddenly, oh we need to keep X for processing fees and management. We also need to take some out to cover the cost of figuring out who gets what. They also have been cutting who can get money for what.
 
Exavior said:
And right here is the issue. The fact that you think $40 is overpriced. When battling against people that think anything over free is fucking them over most companies will decide to just fuck you over by not investing in your area.
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So if I just payed $80 a month for their 60mbps internet package they would upgrade their service in the area and offer gb for $200 a month? And then would they expect me to upgrade because that's now available? No, the reason is because median income in the area is low and most can't afford $200 a month for internet, nevermind $60. Dialup was free or less than $10 a month. Yes, 10mbps is overpriced at $40 a month, and so is 20mbps broadband dsl.

Edit: here's a map showing median income near where I live...$20-40k a year. That's not just low, that's poverty level.
Screenshot_Chrome_20180910-221813.png
 
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brentsg said:
I live in a pretty affluent region, and within a mile of the largest, best high school in the area.. Yet I still have exactly 1 option for high speed internet.
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Same here. Only cable. (I don't consider cell phone wireless a viable option at this time), and I'm in the middle of large population center in south orange county, California.
I can't even get slow 1.5mbit DSL anymore.

Could be worse. Several years ago we visited some old family friends of the wife.
They live about 20 miles past the middle of nowhere.

They where still using dialup, and it was a toll call. :eek:
Only cell phone access was about a mile away at small town with about a dozen buildings. Cell was voice only, no data.
 
Colonel Sanders said:
These days, with the amount of data required to view your average website, that might as well be 56k.
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This is even becoming a problem for those on faster connections.

I feel todays websites are getting lazy and fat. Lets not even mention the "cameras" everywhere.

Reminds me of the episode of South Park with the creepy dude watching everyones toilets on cameras.
 
Private_Ops said:
This is even becoming a problem for those on faster connections.

I feel todays websites are getting lazy and fat. Lets not even mention the "cameras" everywhere.

Reminds me of the episode of South Park with the creepy dude watching everyones toilets on cameras.
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Websites are way way too fat.

Running noscript and adblockerplus at least brings them down to overloaded.

Most of the se websites could be cut in half and no one would notice (from a display point of view)
 
Part of the problem is redefining broadband. The ISPs near my cabin stopped expanding DSL because 1.5-3mbs no longer met the definition of broadband leaving us with essentially no choices. Sure I couldn't support my hulu and netflix habit with it, but I would have been able to live and work there.

Now the only options are god awful Satellite packages with stingy data caps or dial up speeds. Or ridiculously expensive hotspots with stingy data caps. Neither of which are consistent enough to work remotely.

I hope the SpaceX system lives up to the hype, I would move in a heartbeat if I could get a decent connection.
 
In a new Pew Research Center survey, 24% of Mid-Western Americans complained of not having access to Oceanside beaches and scenery and consider it to be a major issue in their area. Another 34% think that not having access to Oceans in their area is only a minor problem; which means that 58% of Mid-Western Americans seek some form of Ocean related recreation in their area. These citizens also tend to buy less Ocean worthy pleasure-craft, but the survey doesn't say if Beach activity is available on the Lakes in those Mid-Western areas.
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jedijeb13 said:
and we might be closer to what other countries have, like South Korea where almost everyone has had access to gigabit service for years now.
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You got to be kidding. I understand, wishful thinking that you could have comparable service to South Korea, but that is what it is, wishful thinking. A country of 50 million, over 10 million of which live in one city, another 10 million commute into the same city every day, so 2/3rds of the population of the entire country is in Seoul at least 5 days a week. A single city that sits on a river with mountains all around it perfectly suited to a dense tower network and the towers don't have to be in anyone's back yard.

And the rest of the country is like the size of Rhode Island so how expensive is it to run infrastructure in a country so small and has the 10th largest economy in the world.

It's just not even remotely the same situation.
 
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gamerk2 said:
You're repeating the same arguments from nearly a century ago against expanding electricity to rural areas. You want to know how it eventually happened? The Federal Government did it, on their own dime.

A century later, the way to solve the problem is exactly the same.
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It's not the same argument because it's not the same problem. The Fed "raising" tax dollars to expand basic electrical service into remote and sparsely populated areas doesn't equate to this situation where anyone can get satellite internet service which is perfectly capable of supporting information and education needs. No it's not the best, and Netflix won't be so great, but it get's the job done for what people need. And if anyone thinks the answer is to "raise" more tax dollars to push infrastructure to these areas I'd offer a much cheaper alternative, just subsidize their satellite internet bill instead, much cheaper.
 
I am lucky that my town of 5K people (extreme NW coast of Oregon and 4 miles from a city of ~10k) and we have 3 wired providers and of course the 4 big cell networks...I have 100/10 from Charter for $44.99 a month with no other costs. I get 125/13 consistently. I am kinda mad they haven't enabled Gigabit speeds here, despite the network being ready for the last 2 years, according to a network engineer I have spoken with a few times.

My parent's live in a community with the highest median income in the Eastern shore of Virginia. There is a local town 1.5 miles away that has gigabit fiber from the Easter shore Broadband Authority (which sells wholesale access for any local ISP that needs it to stimulate growth)...

My parents "development" does not have anything worth noting. At the gates, VErizon/ATT will give you 60~100Mbps down/25-50 up, but if you go the half mile to my parents, Verizon has 2 bars on any phone, and will get 3 Mbps/.1Mbps up, with latency so high it just chokes most speed tests. ATT doesn't work at all.

Charter provides cable tv, but refuses to provide cable internet of any sort (despite serving the "town" in which they live). There are 2 wireless providers. One offers 10/2 with a data cap of like 50GB for $69 a month plus the equipment. The other is 5/5 with no cap for $49, but their service is so bad it has less then a 40% uptime yet the customers pay anyway since many cannot get the 10/2 service due to line of sight issues.

The only real "option" is Hughesnet 25/25 for $100 a month. It has a whopping 50GB cap, at which point they throttle you to 5Mbps both ways (but is really about 3 with speed tests). It is just insane. My parents have hit their cap 4 days into a billing cycle, despite not using any streaming service or any downloads. This is a very common issue according to their forums, but their tech support is basically useless and just blames the customers. I would go insane if I had to live there.
 
And those rural communities by extension lack access to modern well paying hightech jobs - barring places like Chattanooga TN that have municipal 1gps fiber for example.

No good net, no good jobs, coincidence?

Solution: Move, get better paying job on the coasts and such. Come back later for cheap retirement homes. Unlike high population centers the rural areas are not gonna grow in estate value as fast as you're making money elsewhere, so win win.

Or they can fix their infrastructure and bring good modern jobs locally, but odds are not good considering the political climate and the local mindset lol.
 
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Considering rural America isn't going away, they should just roll out fibre and invest in their next 50 to 100 years already...
 
BloodyIron said:
Considering rural America isn't going away, they should just roll out fibre and invest in their next 50 to 100 years already...
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It would be smarter to take that money the subsidize Elon Musk's Starlink program.
 
Shaten said:
Websites are way way too fat.

Running noscript and adblockerplus at least brings them down to overloaded.

Most of the se websites could be cut in half and no one would notice (from a display point of view)
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This. Even more than that. You know it's a problem when a single website is eating up 1GB or more of memory, and when it gets cut down to under 100MB with µBlock Origin and NoScript the experience doesn't suffer (actually improves).
 
I ended up with the opposite problem. When I lived in Forney TX, I could get Gigabit internet from AT&T for $110 a month. Its become cheaper since then. Now that I'm in Rowlett, I'm paying about the same for 300Mbps. I can only go up to 500Mbps here but its $300 a month. I fucking hate Frontier FIOS.
 
zkostik said:
It's been kind of the same here in DC area where for a long time Comcast was the only broadband and even that took a long time to come and replace dialup. I think well until 2004 or 2005 there was no broadband at all. Then it was a same issue with slow FIOS expansion and higher tiers had exorbitant cost. FIOS 300 tier was pretty much around $300. Last year it finally came into affordable rate when Verizon began offering gigabit all over the place. I do like having symmetrical gigabit so my connection is pretty much never is a bottleneck. However I find that very few services can take advantage of it, pretty much only Steam is often able to go all the way and max it out. It sure was nice preloading Shadow of Tomb Raider at 120 megabytes per second. I wish expansion was better though so more people sub and prices further come down. However as always there's no competition around (well, competitor Comcast charges about the same) so prices are still too high and only new subscribers get good deals and everyone already subbed gets a shaft.
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Agreed on all points.

Competition has really been the driver for all positive change in the markets I have lived. Comcast was OK and all for years when I had 25/5 service, but it was pretty amazing when Verizon came to town, and all of a sudden my bill got much cheaper, and my bandwidth went way up. I still switched to Verizon, but yeah, competition is key, and most markets lack it. :(

Also agreed on the gigabit thing. Its great to have because you know no matter what you will always have enough bandwidth for a house full of activities. You'll never have a download causing another persons gaming ping to go up, or Netflix stream to buffer or drop quality.

Same here when it comes to utilization. Pretty much only Steam has the ability to max it out. (Well, that and my torrents for, uh, Linux Distributions.)

It's best for many concurrent connections, either from one client on something like a torrent, or a houseful of independent users.

Steam is pretty much the only thing I've seen that can push it with a single connection, which is pretty impressive:

23659342_10105050411546662_9139451912800138535_n.jpg


I took this screen shot the first time downloading from steam when it hit over 100MB/s. I have since seen it max out at about 115MB/s
 
cageymaru said:
In my area they run broadband to the houses on the main road that eventually connects to an interstate 50 miles away. Since the main road; and only the main road has broadband, this means that the entire area is covered according to the government. So if you live on a road that connects to the main road then you're still screwed. On the Federal map our area is 100% broadband covered even though only those on that one road are covered.
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yup- that was pretty much the jackassery that i was referring to :)
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
This shouldn't be a surprise. This story has remained pretty much unchanged since broadband first became a thing. Rural dwellers have had a tough time with it forever.
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Half of the people that live on my street (suburb of the "DMV" area (DC, VA, MD)) where the average property value is 400k (for a townhouse) cant get broadband. The best they can get is sub 1MB DSL which one of them told me that they were told is being discontinued. Comcast wont run new lines they had some but they were cut about five years ago when an idiot hit a pole on the main road. Fios runs right by them but wont service them. Yet on the federal map? 100% coverage.

Our infrastructure sucks blue donkey balls.
 
BloodyIron said:
Considering rural America isn't going away, they should just roll out fibre and invest in their next 50 to 100 years already...
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Actually, rural America is going away. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-wave...fting-regional-patterns-of-population-change/

Wierdo said:
And those rural communities by extension lack access to modern well paying hightech jobs - barring places like Chattanooga TN that have municipal 1gps fiber for example.

No good net, no good jobs, coincidence?
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Modern information-based economies need modern information infrastructure.

When rural areas were being electrified a century ago, we created massive programs like the TVA and regulated these utilities tightly. Now, we install corporate stooges like Ajit Pai to let ISPs have their way with the country.
 
When my wife and I were shopping for our first house, she asked me how far out of town I was willing to live and drive (she grew up outside of town, I've always lived in town). I told her to call up Cox and see if they had broadband at that address; if they didn't, it was too far to drive.

I think at the time she was slightly annoyed with it. Nowadays with two kids, both of us being teachers, and a million and one IoT/video streaming/gaming things going on at once on our gigabit connection, she probably sees the light. ;p
 
kju1 said:
Half of the people that live on my street (suburb of the "DMV" area (DC, VA, MD)) where the average property value is 400k (for a townhouse) cant get broadband. The best they can get is sub 1MB DSL which one of them told me that they were told is being discontinued. Comcast wont run new lines they had some but they were cut about five years ago when an idiot hit a pole on the main road. Fios runs right by them but wont service them. Yet on the federal map? 100% coverage.

Our infrastructure sucks blue donkey balls.
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I'd be tempted to get together with the neighbors and share connections from the houses that have it to the houses that don't, and split costs
 
Nobu said:
So if I just payed $80 a month for their 60mbps internet package they would upgrade their service in the area and offer gb for $200 a month? And then would they expect me to upgrade because that's now available? No, the reason is because median income in the area is low and most can't afford $200 a month for internet, nevermind $60. Dialup was free or less than $10 a month. Yes, 10mbps is overpriced at $40 a month, and so is 20mbps broadband dsl.

Edit: here's a map showing median income near where I live...$20-40k a year. That's not just low, that's poverty level.
View attachment 103164
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I agree that it is overpriced. But the sad truth is that the companies don't feel that they could make a return on their investment in the area in what they consider a reasonable amount of time. Without knowing the projected subscription rate, that could totally be true. Most people have cell phones which they feel are impossible to live without. If they already have that, it makes complete sense to market the cell phone data/mobile hot spot philosophy to them. At the same time, I do not consider cell phone internet access to be worthy of being called broadband. I still believe in designing to the 5 nines rule for telecommunications and cell networks fail horribly in that regard.

Infrastructure costs are sometimes reasonable and sometimes crazy. All of the rural areas would need to be services by stringing cable up on the poles as many of the communications companies already have the right of ways secured and the necessary easements on the pole. Even with that advantage, I would guess cost would be in the $10,000+ per mile once you factor in all of the supporting costs. If you need to go underground and access right of ways and obtain easements, it becomes crazy. I was involved with LUS when they were getting their fiber to the home project designed back in 2005. There was a study to see what it would take to bury the power and communication lines along a stretch of West Congress, and it was over $1 million for about a 2000 ft stretch.


PS. It's a small world. I lived the first 22 or so years of my life in that zip code in Indian Bayou. Parents and brother are still there. I still think Acadiana is one of the best places on Earth with some of the best people.
 
PCMusicGuy said:
I agree that it is overpriced. But the sad truth is that the companies don't feel that they could make a return on their investment in the area in what they consider a reasonable amount of time. Without knowing the projected subscription rate, that could totally be true. Most people have cell phones which they feel are impossible to live without. If they already have that, it makes complete sense to market the cell phone data/mobile hot spot philosophy to them. At the same time, I do not consider cell phone internet access to be worthy of being called broadband. I still believe in designing to the 5 nines rule for telecommunications and cell networks fail horribly in that regard.

Infrastructure costs are sometimes reasonable and sometimes crazy. All of the rural areas would need to be services by stringing cable up on the poles as many of the communications companies already have the right of ways secured and the necessary easements on the pole. Even with that advantage, I would guess cost would be in the $10,000+ per mile once you factor in all of the supporting costs. If you need to go underground and access right of ways and obtain easements, it becomes crazy. I was involved with LUS when they were getting their fiber to the home project designed back in 2005. There was a study to see what it would take to bury the power and communication lines along a stretch of West Congress, and it was over $1 million for about a 2000 ft stretch.


PS. It's a small world. I lived the first 22 or so years of my life in that zip code in Indian Bayou. Parents and brother are still there. I still think Acadiana is one of the best places on Earth with some of the best people.
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Yeah, unfortunately a cell plan is about the same or more in my area, and not unlimited unless you get the $60+ plan (and then, still not really unlimited). I can bundle home and mobile internet, but it'd end up costing even more (though not as much as if I got them separate). Cox probably has the best deal in the area (unless you can get lus), but only for the first 12 months, and I refuse to get on a contract that I plan to cancel or have to renegotiate as soon as it ends.

And I agree, the people are really nice.
 
Anyone who offers current tech satellite internet as a solution to this has never once used satellite internet. It's just flat out not a viable alternative. It's modern day dial-up with low caps, insane prices, and constant outages. Hell, there's a lot of sites now that wont even serve traffic to connections with those ping times.
 
Kardonxt said:
Part of the problem is redefining broadband. The ISPs near my cabin stopped expanding DSL because 1.5-3mbs no longer met the definition of broadband leaving us with essentially no choices. Sure I couldn't support my hulu and netflix habit with it, but I would have been able to live and work there.

Now the only options are god awful Satellite packages with stingy data caps or dial up speeds. Or ridiculously expensive hotspots with stingy data caps. Neither of which are consistent enough to work remotely.

I hope the SpaceX system lives up to the hype, I would move in a heartbeat if I could get a decent connection.
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Because my DSL will remain at 1mbps due to 0 competition, I pay for a 10GB (per month) plan for Satellite. I use about 500GB of data in reality. When within the 10GB cap, I get 50/3. When throttled I get 3/2. The upload rate is barely throttled so I can still use it. My DSL is 1mbps/96kbps so I cannot really use it for what I want.

I can pay 4x more a month for a 50GB data cap, but that would be useless. At 2am-8am they give all users a separate 50GB data cap.

Satellite is worth it for me since there will never be any competition here. There simply isn't enough people to entice Comcast; or make my DSL provider (went bankrupt 3 times since it launched) to even think about upgrading the lines unless the home owner pays out of pocket.

Comcast quoted me $20,000 to install at my house. I am seriously considering this vs the 12k to get 2mbps for my current ISP.
 
Shadowed said:
Because my DSL will remain at 1mbps due to 0 competition, I pay for a 10GB (per month) plan for Satellite. I use about 500GB of data in reality. When within the 10GB cap, I get 50/3. When throttled I get 3/2.
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Unfortunately Satellite varies a lot by region. In my area you are promised similar speeds \ caps, but are lucky to get several megs down. During peak times or after hitting your cap you are relegated to dial up speeds.

If you currently have a dsl option, and Comcast even gives you the option to have a line run, I suspect your zones are much less congested.
 
I live in a rural area. The only terrestrial ISP is Frontier - I'm sure most of you know how much that company sucks.

I get 3mbps down (if it's not raining) for $60 a month. Congestion is horrendous! Lucky if I can stream a movie without interruption.

Satellite is not an option (data caps, weather kills the bandwidth and latency is literally sky high), cellular hotspot is expensive + data caps + bandwidth problems most of the time, wireless ISPs over promise and under deliver.

The solution is a Rural Internet Association much like the REA in olden times. With the lack of competition ISPs have no incentive to provide true broadband in rural area.
 
lcpiper said:
It's not the same argument because it's not the same problem. The Fed "raising" tax dollars to expand basic electrical service into remote and sparsely populated areas doesn't equate to this situation where anyone can get satellite internet service which is perfectly capable of supporting information and education needs. No it's not the best, and Netflix won't be so great, but it get's the job done for what people need. And if anyone thinks the answer is to "raise" more tax dollars to push infrastructure to these areas I'd offer a much cheaper alternative, just subsidize their satellite internet bill instead, much cheaper.
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Actually, no it isn't. Remember that every so often you need to launch new satellites into orbit; they don't stay up there forever. And I argue satellite doesn't even support todays bandwidth needs, let alone what they are going to be going forward.

So, you either subsidize FOREVER, or you just pay for the infrastructure once.
 
gamerk2 said:
Actually, no it isn't. Remember that every so often you need to launch new satellites into orbit; they don't stay up there forever. And I argue satellite doesn't even support todays bandwidth needs, let alone what they are going to be going forward.

So, you either subsidize FOREVER, or you just pay for the infrastructure once.
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You are going to argue that satellite bandwidth isn't future-proof while Elon Musk is planning on putting over 4,400 of them into orbit for a long term world wide internet solution?

As long as the target consumer / user is the 16 million we are talking about who live in the sticks, I think the bandwidth will suffice.
 
lcpiper said:
You are going to argue that satellite bandwidth isn't future-proof while Elon Musk is planning on putting over 4,400 of them into orbit for a long term world wide internet solution?

As long as the target consumer / user is the 16 million we are talking about who live in the sticks, I think the bandwidth will suffice.
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Satellite simply does not have acceptable bandwidth/latency. It's literally worse then 56k AOL. 5G is a better option (I said "better", not "good"). Hell, even 2G is a better option (again, comparatively).
 
I also live in a rural area about 30 minutes from the nearest small town which is pretty much a school and 1 store. They were installing a fiber line to connect between that small town and another so the service became available. I get 100 mb/s for $130/month and that also includes a lan line which is not optional. It is expensive but the service is good so I can't complain much especially when my parents who live about 5 miles away cannot get this because they live down a road that did not receive the new line. I would love to see some competition but I'm not sure how that could be done because the company owns the fiber line they ran which is the only line in the area. I have also heard they have to rent other parts of the line from another ISP to make the connection so that is also why the price is a bit high. All the comments really show the diversity of the connections that Americans utilize. It varies so much from area to area.
 
gamerk2 said:
Satellite simply does not have acceptable bandwidth/latency. It's literally worse then 56k AOL. 5G is a better option (I said "better", not "good"). Hell, even 2G is a better option (again, comparatively).
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Maybe for you it's no acceptable. For someone who has nothing, a little latency is not an issue as long as the data makes it there and we are not talking current satellite capability like what Hughes Net offers. Elon Musk's offering is a step up from that and was listed above;

How much will it cost per month?
Unknown. At this point everyone is guessing but one of SpaceX's goals is making Internet affordable. Expected to be under $50 a month.



What kind of speeds can be expected for the average user?
Unknown. Nothing has been announced at this early stage. It is still a long way off before they start listing prices, access and speeds. SpaceX mentioned gigabit speeds.
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Yes, these are very rough estimates, hopes, goals. I can't say that they will ever get there. But I would rather see support for this than support to push out existing tech to fixed areas that will just lead to more of the same bullshit from the same corporate actors.
 
lcpiper said:
Maybe for you it's no acceptable. For someone who has nothing, a little latency is not an issue as long as the data makes it there and we are not talking current satellite capability like what Hughes Net offers. Elon Musk's offering is a step up from that and was listed above;



Yes, these are very rough estimates, hopes, goals. I can't say that they will ever get there. But I would rather see support for this than support to push out existing tech to fixed areas that will just lead to more of the same bullshit from the same corporate actors.
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But what about the fact that a satellite only stays in orbit 24 hours before it falls out of the sky and has to be replaced. Until they can get one to say in the sky for weeks, or even over 10 years we can't be expecting people to use that for data. Do you know how hard it is to lock onto a satellite for anything with the constant plummet they are in. It is terrible. That is why we don't use them for anything yet. They just haven't proven to be a viable solution to transmit data for anything yet. ;)
 
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