I live in one of those unserved rural areas. Both AT&T and Comcast refuse to run a wire another mile down the road, and since they are the duopoly, tough luck. Fortunately we have a local wireless ISP and I get 12Mbps via a 2.4GHz radio link. It's nowhere near as good as wired, but I'm grateful. Another local ISP is working on laying fiber with federal grants but it will take many years.
The best analysis I've ever read on why US broadband sucks comes from the CEO of Sonic, a Bay Area independent ISP which is awesome. tl;dr: Michael Powell sold Americans out on false promises of 5 different media for broadband. Turns out only 2 really work.
With a couple of notable exceptions (Sweden, South Korea), the US has as good or better average connection speeds & penetration of high-bandwidth service than its peer developed nations. Italy, France, Germany, Australia all lag the US, some substantially.
Personally, my cable-based service has seen regular step-ups in bandwidth with a much lower rate of increase in price.
If Powell had insisted on "open access" to last-mile ISP networks 15 years ago, would the capital investments in wired networks have played out as they did? Or would the market have looked like DSL in the US, nominally "competitive" by regulatory fiat, but stagnant?
If you have line of site you AND you can cut some deal with a person within line of site you can easily do a nice wireless connection with high bandwidth with 5Ghz. Ubiquiti products are nice and can do very high bandwidth. The key is line of site.
My WISP sells 5GHz links too, and now that I'm typing this I'm not positive which I have. IIRC the physical link speed maxes out at 25Mbps or so but the WISP throttles me to 12Mbps, I think to reserve bandwidth for multiple users. I'm 2 or 3 wireless hops from a wired connection.
(Second the thumbs' up for Ubiquiti though; the last hop in my rural network is a Ubiquiti link because it was simpler than running a wire 300' from the tree where my WISP's antenna is. Works pretty well.)
Doubt it. This is one of the more common Internet spelling errors (after your/you're). I'd let it slide if the greater body of text indicated the writer wasn't a native English speakr.
Weather doesn't seem to be a problem. There's some signal attenuation in heavy rain / snow but all I've seen is a 20% bandwidth reduction, not a failure. The one time I had failure was with a heavy buildup of snow on the antenna.
How does the radio work? Do you need line of site to the tower? Mind sharing your experience, or name of such companies? My father uses satellite, it's the only option I was aware of, but it's painful. I would love to learn about other possibilities. I've searched for wireless ISPs but it's a bit difficult to tell which ones are any good.
You need a sender at the Internet connection and a receiver at the end user. The radio link can be either dedicated to you (point-to-point) or shared (point-to-multipoint).
> Do you need line of site to the tower?
Preferably yes. It may work without line of sight, but at reduced performance.
> Mind sharing your experience, or name of such companies?
Good bandwidth requires clear line of sight. (You can get ~2Mbps through tree cover at 900Mhz). A lot of rural areas, at least in America, also have local ISPs providing service this way. You can also make own wireless link ~5 miles with gear from Ubiquiti or the like. It works basically like 802.11 WiFi but projected in one direction, and some protocol details are different.
Can you foot the bill for bringing it another mile down the road? I know you can do that for electric utilities and water to rural land, not sure about phone/cable.
If he can they'll quote him a figure in the 10's of thousands, and of course expect him to pay normal prices even after paying to build out their network for them.
Hmm...are you sure? Think about the price of a mile of fiber. Then the cost to have it hung on existing poles (which will need specialized trucks and workers certified to work on live power poles) then the cost to have it spliced. Finally the cost to turn up the connection, terminate the fiber. I'm not sure about 10's of K, but I'd be surprised if this will cost less than $10k total even if done on the cheap (cable from eBay etc).
I wish there where a high-speed coop in the bay area. Comcast is ass. They managed to knock my 25 Mbits down to about 0.5Mbits yesterday, and when I complained, were like what? Did this bug you? You still have internet access! Works just fine! All for the low price of $70/mo with $5/mo annual increases. Unfortunately, my only alternative is AT&T and they're even slower.
It's ridiculous my first broadband connection 15 years ago in the midwest was faster than my $70/mo comcast connection. Plus it was symmetric!
Looxury! At this very moment I'm tethered to my phone for the 4th day in as many weeks because British Telecom is incapable of supplying DSL to the country for which they're the monopoly provider.
I'd be all about a fibre-optic cable on telephone poles, since they don't seem to be able to keep the existing copper ones under the ground connected to anything.
In Sweden back when DSL was new, local cooperatives were instrumental in raising the funds and proving the market to get the POTS copper monopoly[0] to upgrade phone exchanges to install DSLAMs.
In the US I see the biggest threat are communities where companies like Comcast have been granted exclusive rights to high speed communications infrastructure, and legislation that prohibits municipal efforts
[0] Which the government telecoms regular convinced the former phone monopoly to spin off into an independent company to encourage competition
Since the reclassification of broadband internet as a utility, "electric cooperatives" are able to use federal funds to get broadband out to rural and remote locations big companies won't go to because the setup costs outweigh their potential profits (in theory).
Early 1900s was more like the 1930s, when part of "The New Deal" allowed for electric cooperatives to exist.
I work in gov't as a contractor, where the USDA does large scale loans for of course the well known providers as well as smaller ones who apply. We're talking huge loans, great interest rates and their main requirements are, is it rural, is it unserved, census projections of populations to show there that will in fact be paying customers so the provider can earn money and pay back the loan.
So when the companies give the run around to unserved areas, it may be smoke and mirrors, it may be that they have applications in the hopper and are waiting, or were rejected.
And I'm just speculating (I'm thinking out loud here that's all) but I would NOT be surprised if a bigger company has as service area on lock down with their loan applications, who knows that might be a prohibitive measure that a smaller company couldn't jump in and get that area served with a similar loan.
If that were the case, that would annoy me because I like to hear when the smaller companies are providing fantastic service and being good competition for the conglomerates. It's getting to the point where a small number of companies own the pipes and now even content networks. Now I'm going to have to go research this and find out if that strategy is there to benefit the big Telcos.
Media and utility consolidation is nearly always a bad sign to me.
I live in a rural area and have fiber to the home from our electric co-op. It's amazing: $99 symmetric gigabit and rock solid service.
On the other hand AT&T is the phone provider here and selling DSL is the least of their worries. One of my clients (a block from the phone switch office) needed DSL as a backup to their fiber connection and AT&T can't provide it because their "equipment is already full". As I see it that's the damage of a monopoly; luckily for us we have proactive co-ops that can compete on projects of that size or we'd have no wired internet.
A monopoly must necessarily limit supply to increase profit. That means that turning away potential customers--even customers that spontaneously appear without advertising or recruitment--is an essential part of the business model.
Refusing to install another DSLAM means they can sell space on the existing ones at a higher price.
I don't get this argument. Why would a monopoly turn away customers? More customers mean more fat margins.
I do get why a monopoly would not want to invest more in capacity (for example DSLAMs). A dollar may have higher returns for the monopoly somewhere else, especially if the monopoly can't (immediately) sell all ports on the new DSLAM.
However, if there is free capacity (for example DSLAM ports), why would a monopoly turn away paying customers?
A perfectly competitive business operates such that price equals marginal cost.
A monopoly operates such that marginal revenue equals marginal cost.
This usually works out such that the quantity supplied is lower and price is higher than the market-clearing quantity and price under perfect competition.
This is an unstable point, because a competitor could enter, and capture some of the unrealized benefit of trade in the triangular area between the monopoly quantity and the competitive equilibrium quantity. If the business is a natural monopoly, and the incumbent does not act quickly to drive the competitor out, they could flip the market and drive out the incumbent instead. A natural monopoly under normal circumstances should occasionally see brief bouts of competition that are essentially deathmatches between businesses. Customers get greater supply and lower prices during these bouts.
So many businesses that are the incumbent in a natural monopoly market try to solidify their position with an enforced monopoly, making competition illegal. This is usually sold as protecting consumers from market disruptions, but that is always a lie. It only protects the incumbent and their guaranteed economic profits from an intentionally underserved market.
I get the economic theory, but I don't get how it would result in the actions prescribed in your example.
> Refusing to install another DSLAM means they can sell space on the existing ones at a higher price.
As customers as either on fixed term contracts or grandfathered in on existing plans, I don't quite get how ports on the DSLAM could be sold for a higher price.
I suppose prices could be raised as contracts run out and old plans are sunset, or when an existing user cancels and a new one seeks service. Is this what you mean?
> A monopoly must necessarily limit supply to increase profit. That means that turning away potential customers--even customers that spontaneously appear without advertising or recruitment--is an essential part of the business model
I get that the monopoly would limit supply by not installing new DSLAMs, but turning away customers? Why would a monopoly do that if there were free ports on the DSLAM?
My dad worked for the phone company for his entire career (late 1950's to early 1990's). He had some interesting stories about going into rural areas in the early 1960's and seeing how "universal service" was implemented in the 1940's and 1950's. The most common way when there were only a few service users down a side road was to hook the phone wire up to a barbed wire fence heading that way and use the earth for neutral. It worked but it meant if a farmer closer to the road picked up the phone the line past their house went dead.
I wonder what kind of bitrate you could get nowadays with barbed wire?
A 99% Invisible podcast, The Devil's Rope, discusses this. As a result of already having barbed wire run all over the West to control Texas Longhorn cattle, it was far easier to provide phone service using it, than it was to run new cable. So farmers ended up being the most wired group of people in the late 19th, early 20th century.
Electrification of rural areas is well documented and was as painful to complete as broadband. Robert Caro writes on the topic in his biography of Lyndon Johnson. Note the extensive political wrangling and haggling that came down to individual land parcels
The thing I find interesting about the connection of rural homes was how much it set back the alternative energy field. Windmills had just started replacing gas generators (with the generators as backups) when rural electrification happened. 90 years later, and that same question has become relevant in a lot of developing areas.
Aspen and its upriver neighbors have proposed a $6M fiber to bring its broadband over a megabit. Aspen is 40 miles from I-70 which is a fiber corridor.
I a common fantasy to move to the mountains, become a freelancer and hiking & ski bum. But if you are still getting AOL dialup speeds, it doesnt quite work.
In Denver we are spoiled by 50+ mbs offered by multiple carriers.
Although I do know tech people who work from home in rural areas with just satellite. It's expensive and not ideal--and you give up things like Netflix--but it apparently can be done for a lot of circumstances.
Co-operatives are great for bringing services to the underserved, but they require the input of a particular kind and level of political engagement from the public that seems to be rare.
Other examples: http://b4rn.org.uk/ , various community buyouts of Scottish islands like Eigg.
We've been looking at house in rural Scotland and the situation with broadband is, in general, pretty bad - even with new houses it's not unusual for them to have poor (1Mbps) or non-existent broadband.
It's also completely unpredictable - one house we looked at gets 8Mbps and another 1km away (both in a rural area near to Auchterarder) gets 400Mbps! NB That latter one appears to be the one house in Scotland that can get BT Infinity 4.
> With high-speed internet, there are similar dynamics. Last year, the federal government declared that broadband should be treated like a utility, as essential as electricity or the phone.
That's incorrect. Net neutrality rules don't treat Internet like electrical or phone utility literally. There are many differences in practice. For instance utility rates can be regulated. Prices on Internet access aren't. It doesn't need to be regulated as much as other utilities, but some things certainly could be regulated, like for example when preventing anti-competitive abuse. If anything, FCC abysmally failed to outright ban data caps.
I've got a place in rural northern california and we don't get cell phone coverage, no where within a 20 miles, and of course there is no broadband. The forest service doesn't help put in towers, the rural telephony program only supports landlines, which don't reach out here. Easy process of putting up both cell phone towers and microwave repeaters would be huge. What's now is that the government makes it very hard to do, but it should subsidize it instead.
If you still have a copper land-line, there's a line-item on your bill for the Universal Service Fund. Originally, it paid for rural telecom (phones for farms), but there's been a lot of debate recently on whether the money should be used for bringing internet access to remote areas.
From a technology standpoint, fiber would be the only option. The distances involved are too long for DSL and coax cable.
Government granted monopolies lead to crappy service and you blame the free market?
When you get really rural where the main internet option is provided by microwave, you start seeing prices drop and bandwidth limits go up. I have a friend with faster speeds and no cap on microwave, while I'm stuck with a single choice by the government granted cable monopoly who's free to gouge me all they want.
But that's the difference between a free market and a heavily regulated one.
So, you want to punish them all because most of them happen to not agree with your personal political views... even the minority that do agree with you, just for having the gall to live similarly to the ones who don't.
Despite the generally stand-offish way parent made his point, there is some validity to wondering why we should provide broadband at such great distances.
I think these conversations tend to get dragged into "think of the farmers" because their work necessitates that they be spread out; accordingly we think of the beneficiaries of these programs as not needing to be held responsible for the hardships of living far away. The problem is, most people living so far apart are there by choice, because they see cheap space to build a big house and have a big yard. They're seeing low prices because we so often supply them with sewage lines, water pipes, paved roads, and other infrastructure, at costs which vastly exceed the receipts from their property taxes.
The people paying for these expensive infrastructure projects are the ones who live in places that pay for themselves, and then some. In many parts of the US, that's the poor people. They can't afford to own big houses outside of town, so instead they get stuck subsidizing those people.
This is particularly painful in transportation, where we take money away from cities who need that money to fund decent transit. Then we send it out to suburban areas to be spent by town leaders who just see easy money for building roads, rather than seeing that putting a 45mph, 5-lane road through downtown is suicide for the finances and vitality of a town.
I suspect you're right that a lot of the people complaining the loudest about lack of rural broadband are people who have bought a 50 acre place out in the country because they want the space and the quiet. To be fair, they probably pay for a lot of infrastructure like septic but I agree with your basic point.
It's also true that there are some advantages to (near) universal service for many types of utilities, as we did historically with electricity and POTS. That said given existing alternatives to broadband fiber like satellite, I'm not convinced there's a pressing need to provide universal broadband even where it doesn't make financial sense.
On plots that large, water is usually provided by a well and a local septic tank with leach field handles the sewage - these are typically factored into the cost of constructing a new dwelling.
Bear in mind that many of these residences were built before consumer access to the internet was widespread.
You're better off with a terrestrial wireless, as satellite internet has severe latency and bandwidth limitations. Fortunately many rural households in the U.S. otherwise out of economic range of fiber are within rage of local WISPs, line-of-sight allowing.
While I agree with you, I can understand the OP's sense of frustration: it's annoying to have people rail against taxes, the government, and laud the free market, and simultaneously defend government subsidies for industries they're working in and demand public infrastructure because the free market doesn't magically provide.
When has broadband been a free market? Its a monopoly situation for fibre. In the areas where small companies can get in we have pretty fast broadband[1], but regulations limit their service area. Established providers are able to lock out expanding companies with little effort. We don't need the subsidies. We need the regulators to get off their butts and let in the competition.
1) BEK does 200M fibre connections with no data cap in rural North Dakota. Plenty of these companies exist and are profitable.
It's a little unfair to group all rural populations up as a bunch of conservatives who want to complain about taxes but reap benefits of subsidies, however. The little farming community my grandfather has lived in his whole life is a fairly blue district surrounded by the sea of red that is northern Idaho - there's still some "keep the gubmit out of my life" people up there, but everyone I talk to up there was a bunch of pro-Sanders liberals who wanted better lives for their children and grandchildren.
I'm not going to generalize the entire republican voter base, but they contain a disproportionate number of "I've got mine, sod off" types of people backing them (not that the current democratic party could be seen as much better). Point is though, not every person who lives in a rural area is some idiot that complains about paying taxes while raking in farming subsidies paid by said taxes.
This is why American politics is so poisonous. When people disagree with you, it's not because they have a different point of view, it's because they're "bad".
On that note, I found this talk on Moral Politics by George Lakoff[1] elsewhere on HN.
The basic idea is that people who have different political opinions to you aren't necessarily stupid or greedy or bad actors, they just have different morals and therefore a different set of rationales.
Honestly, I would estimate 95% of Americans all have the same goals for the country. A healthy environment, prosperous economy, healthy population, stability, etc.
The differences come about as to how to get there. If you have different foundational beliefs as to how things work, of course you'll disagree as to what needs to be done to fix things.
they contain a disproportionate number of "I've got mine, sod off" types of people backing them (not that the current democratic party could be seen as much better).
First you say you're not going to generalise, then you do. Then you negate your next point by saying that democrat voters are just as bad. What are you trying to say?
To your last point, people who complain about paying taxes while being the beneficiaries of government largess aren't idiots. I'd posit they're probably smarter than I am, at least financially because I only ever pay tax.
Whereas in contrast, Democrats will offer every comfort to your children, and make your grandchildren pay for it.
It is unclear to me as to why I should prefer one over the other, when the option to build the best and most durable infrastructure we can afford without indebting future generations beyond the benefit they will realize from it has not yet been explored.
Both of the major political parties in the US are actively hostile to both sound economic policy and universally beneficial infrastructure development. They have been captured by the private interests of the business-owning class (which includes to some extent the middle-class stockholders).
It's almost like they have a nuanced view on the role of government where it is involved with building infrastructure and not being heavy handed with regulation and not spending large amounts on welfare programs.
Or they have self-contradictory political views, or they're dishonest about what they really believe, or they say different things when it's in their self interest.
not voting for you =/= not supporting your new policy, Similarly, a vote for a candidate does not necessarily reflect agreement with the entire platform.
When the postal system started, localities had to prove the roads were good enough for postal delivery. Most of those rural roads were maintained by the locals.
It was unsubsidized and somewhat free market oriented? Not completely obviously, but people literally building their own roads, and then paying for mail delivery is definitely leaning that way.
The best analysis I've ever read on why US broadband sucks comes from the CEO of Sonic, a Bay Area independent ISP which is awesome. tl;dr: Michael Powell sold Americans out on false promises of 5 different media for broadband. Turns out only 2 really work.
https://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/09/02/americas-intentional-b...