19 Million Americans Cannot Get Broadband Access 279
First time accepted submitter paullopez writes "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced during its eighth annual broadband progress report on the state of broadband/Internet access in America, that 19 million Americans still do not have access to high-speed broadband above the 3Mbps threshold. However, the report also detailed the advances the progress that is being made, including 'LTE deployment by mobile networks.'" Also at SlashCloud.
LTE (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:LTE (Score:5, Insightful)
But it is a relatively cheap way to 'fulfill' any rural telco obligations you happened to pick up from the FCC in exchange for lucrative spectrum concessions or whatever else it is you actually wanted...
Re:LTE (Score:5, Insightful)
19 million w/o broadband. That's fewer than the "50 million without healthcare" the Democrats were quoting during the Obamacare debates. Do we really think that broadband is more important initiative than people having health insurance/coverage?
ALSO: I find it odd the FCC defines broadband as 3 Mbit/s. That means I don't have broadband in my home even though what I do have (1 Mbit/s) is enough to watch videos on the internet. Hmmm. I consider it broadband (100 megahertz wide)..... certainly better than the narrowband (3 megahertz-wide) dialup I used to have.
And finally a lot of those 19 million live in remote areas like Wyoming, Idaho, Dakota, Arizona. They *choose* to live far away from conveniences. Not only do these 19 million lack broadband but also public water & sewer. Many can't even get TV reception since they are so far out. This is a LIFESTYLE CHOICE and we should respect it, rather than demand conformity. (And if these people don't like living in isolation, they can move closer to the nearest city.)
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I wish I could get LTE. The best I can do is 3G, even though I am 200 yards from houses with cable.
Even so, 3G is a great improvement over dialup.
Re:LTE (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not just run cable the 200 yards?
You can rent a ditchwitch and have it done in short order.
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Two issues spring to mind
1: he probablly doesn't own all the land between his property and the nearest property
2: if the cableco won't serve his property over something as minor as 200 yards do you think they will really hook up his own cable to theirs and provide him with service? I very much doubt it.
So the only way I could see this working is if he knows the owners of a property who can get cable well enough to have them buy service on his behalf and either can persude the owners of the intervening land
Re:LTE (Score:4, Informative)
Lol, how can you suck that bad in America? Here in Iceland we're approaching 80% of the population with 50-100mb *fiber*, despite having 1/10th the population density as the US. Even the capitol region's population density is only about the average population density of America, and that's only about 70% of the population; the largest city outside the capitol region is six hours drive away and has only 17k people. They're currently stringing connections in Vestfirðir, a large, sparsely populated, mountainous region where the largest "city" is just over 3k people. This here is all just counting fiber connections, let alone DSL. And people generally get excellent net service through their cell phones as well (2g map [siminn.is], 3g map [siminn.is] for one provider). I've used Facebook on hikes, from the top of mountains before. And it's all cheap, too.
What's up with that, America? Why do you neglect your infrastructure like that? Here we've got multi-kilometer mountain tunnels leading to towns of around 1000 people, and you can't even make it possible for 6% of your population to have 3Mbps *dsl*? Over your existing phone lines?
Re:LTE (Score:4, Informative)
The USAs population density is highly misleading on one hand.
I have lived in places with my nearest neighbor sharing a wall at one extreme, and in another location where the nearest neighbor was 3 miles away.
On the other the USAs phone lines are also crap. Very few here want to pay the taxes or any other of that "evil socialist" stuff like that required to have modern infrastructure.
Re:LTE (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not only the density issue, but the lack of competition. The government is fully to blame here. They gave monopolies to a single provider for various counties, and now those same companies have little reason to improve service. I've lived in a major metropolitan area for 20+ years. Initially I had a simple modem connection, did a small stint with an ISDN line, and then went to cable right around 2000. At that time, it was a 7Mb/s line. 12 years later, it is still the basic offering with incremental improvement on uplink speed and down speed (10 mb/s down and 128 up), or a hefty price increase to get the 'new' 20 Mb/s speed.
The US has fallen so far behind other developed countries due to the lack of competition it's just not funny anymore. Even the density problem would be resolved with more competition. By it's very nature, more competition brings advances far faster, cheaper production of the necessary materials, and a general lowering trend in price. We see this in almost every electronics industry, but in telecom, the price remains static, or has exploded instead with little actual improvement offered.
Look to any overseas country to see what true competition produces.
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And really .. WTF?? Anyone can search google and do most web browsing just fine with a 3Mb/s line. OK . .they can't get video. Tough shit. I'm not willing to subsidize their internet access so they can watch Jersey Shore on their PC. YouTube videos are mostly crap. TED is elitist/visionary crap.
Frankly, I don't think you have any idea of what 3 Mb/s is capable of, and what it is not capable of. If you want to volunteer a opinion about bandwidth requirements, I suggest you stick to what you have installed. How fast is your line? Is it fast enough for what you want to do? Do you videoconference, or play games online? If you degrade yourself enough to watch online video, what's the maximum resolution you can stream? What's stopping you from upgrading your line?
Re:LTE (Score:5, Informative)
Frankly, I don't think you have any idea of what 3 Mb/s is capable of, and what it is not capable of. If you want to volunteer a opinion about bandwidth requirements, I suggest you stick to what you have installed. How fast is your line? Is it fast enough for what you want to do? Do you videoconference, or play games online? If you degrade yourself enough to watch online video, what's the maximum resolution you can stream? What's stopping you from upgrading your line?
As someone who's lived with 56kbps dialup, 1/1.5Mbps DSL, and 10+ Mbps cable, there's nothing wrong with what he said.
You get the majority of the benefits of "high speed internet" at 768 kbps. Now you can browse text pages and google quickly. Watching video at that speed does suck, but you can still watch it either by waiting or by degrading quality (or both). It's generally enough for online gaming, though you definitely don't want to share it with a roommate/family member streaming video at the same time.
Yes, it's nice to have "instant" downloads, high def video, and so on - just like it's nice to have a gaming rig with cutting edge CPU/GPU and 3 monitors. We call that a "luxury".
Re:LTE (Score:5, Insightful)
We were also early adopters and one of the first to really connect people in our country with electricity and phone lines. Also we weren't bombed out twice last century and as such we have a lot of legacy infrastructure at this point. My grandmother didn't have a private line until the early 1990's. It was still party lines and rotary phones in that part of the country.
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Re:LTE (Score:4, Insightful)
The tired "population density" argument always comes up, and can be easily invalidated. If it was just population density, New Jersey would be a Mecca of ultra-high-speed Internet.
The USA's lack of broadband penetration compared to Europe and east Asia has very little to do with population density.
Re:LTE (Score:5, Insightful)
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Land area does not matter one bit. Population density is it. You could have a country like Canada 9m km^2 and since the people are all basically in a 20 mile strip along the US border providing them with internet service is not as much of an issue.
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100 mile strip I mean. Either way it means the vast majority of the population is in a small area.
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Well, then the US is covered.
19M people is less than 10% of the nation.
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Way to miss the point.
I did not say that did it, I said that meant it was feasible. The fact that we failed to do so only speaks to our own failures.
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There IS a basic concept that people who intentionally live in remote areas also ACCEPT the lack of services that living in a more populated area would provide. If you WANT to live deep in the woods, then you have to be willing to spend the money to install and maintain your own fiber optic lines from an area that has a connection, or not complain because YOU willingly are living that far away from where services are offered. In the same way that people in rural areas do not want their tax money going
Re:LTE (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to say that the US couldn't do better on this front but the idea that Iceland is wonderful and the US "Suck(s) that bad" is hyperbole and ignores the facts.
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You need to fly into Kansas City, rent a car and then drive to Denver sometime. It would give you a clearer perspective on just how much bigger things can be over here.
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You need to fly to Keflavík, rent a car, and drive to Borgarfjörður Eystri some time (almost as far). It's not size, its' population density. More people = more resources to allocate to something. In fact, generally the benefit is *more* than linear; doing projects on a large scale is generally easier per-capita than on the small scale. And you really want to compare "ease of construction" across flat farmland to construction going past Eyjafjallajökull, Katla, and Vatnajökull,
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Have you looked at the size difference between Iceland and the USA? Averages are very misleading as well, because if 99 percent of the population lives in a city but that city only covers 1 percent of the size of the country, and broadband coverage is limited to the city, then you can say that while 99 percent of the population gets broadband, you can also say that 99 percent of the COUNTRY does not.
In the USA, there are large areas of low population density, where it would cost more to provide the servi
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It's not that big. About the size of Kentucky. But - key distinction - about 7-8 % of the population of Kentucky, with a crazy twisty unstable volcanic glaciated landscape, located in the middle of the North Atlantic.
The larger the project is, the easier it is per-capita. And unlike us, you don't have to ship in all your hardware and cabling and fund the laying of trans-atlantic data cables with the resources of a population smaller than the city of Santa Ana, California.
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Iceland: 39,770 square miles
Illinois: 57,914 square miles
USA: 3,794,101 square miles
Iceland: population 320,060
Illinois: 12,869,257
USA: population 314,215,000
A single one of the fifty states (a middle sized state) has more land mass than Iceland, but far fewer people. It's a hell of a lot easier to get broadband in a high density population than out in the boondocks. When you see the scale of the size of the US you can see why it's not as easy here as it is there.
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>>>Lol, how can you suck that bad in America? Here in Iceland we're approaching 80% of the population with 50-100mb *fiber*, despite having 1/10th the population density as the US.
How can you suck so bad in EUROPE? Over in Greece my relatives can't get anything faster than ISDN (128k). I hear it's just as bad in rural parts of Portugal, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Ireland, etc. I have fiber in my American neighborhood, but these poor europeans can't get better than a few kilobits.
Sad. (I'm making a
Re:LTE (Score:5, Informative)
... and isn't your country even more bankrupt than ours?
I suppose you aren't to be blamed for the fact that the media has blacked out stories about Iceland for several years now. So it isn't your fault that you don't know that Icelanders threw out their government and decided that the people didn't owe the bad bank debt. So the banks in Iceland went bankrupt not the Icelandic people. In fact they are emerging from the financial turmoil better than the rest of us. I believe they are also prosecuting some of the CEO's responsible for the debacle in Iceland.
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Only in Alaska, where huge chunks of the state are just a couple counties, including one that's like half of the state. The largest county in the continental US is half the size of Iceland. Iceland is about the size of Kentucky.
Key difference: while Iceland has 1/100th the area of the US, it has 1/1000th the population to fund such construction projects, which furthermore mean importing everything across the North Atlantic, laying transatlantic data cables, and running domestic cables across what's predom
Re:LTE (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. They should (also) be reporting on the number of Americans without access to affordable high speed access. And breaking down what all of the caps are both wireless caps and also caps that have been imposed on previously uncapped "land line" services. It is absurd how, while other countries continue to move forward, the US grants monopolies or near monopolies to Internet providers yet lets them chip away at the "service" imposing restrictions designed only to aid their business model and keep them from building out their equipment.
I was also surprised to see the standard stated as above 3Mbs. By that standard I don't even have the Internet, nor do some of my friends who live in very well served cities (although we might both be considered to have access to LTE). Actually AT&T does offer me a higher priced 6Mbs service where I live, but I stopped buying that when it was determined that they were not really providing more than I am getting with the 3Mbs service and they just laughed and said the service never promised 6Mps, only "up to" 6Mbs.
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LTE is not a high speed internet connection. not in any way that truly matters. Not while the standard cap is 1-2GB/month. yes you can buy more, have you seen the price on that? 5GB/month (which is still an absurdly low cap) contracts end up about the same as my CAR payment, several times higher than my landline internet.
LTE is a top fuel dragster. it's really impressive for a quarter mile. then you have to take it apart and rebuild it for a month.
"look how fast I can download over my phone!"
"yeah. that's g
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1. T-mobile is again offering unlimited, not sure how far there LTE rollout is.
2. same as car payment is very vague. Mine is 0, and has never been higher. So all my internet service bills exceed that. I know that a car payment on some cars exceeds $1000/month.
3. Some of us still have unlimited plans, and it looks like they might be coming back based on what sprint and tmobile are doing.
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there's always a bottom 5% (Score:4, Insightful)
Especially the rural area are a bit difficult to service (yes I read part of the article). On the other hand: people that choose to live there, do they nééd fixed-line access?
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I cannot get the speeds now defined as broadband where I live. The fastest thing I can buy is 2Mbps for over $100/mo. For $50/mo I get 768k bursting to 1.5Mbps delivered from the top of my local volcano and bounced in from four mountaintops away. AT&T owns literally every fiber link into my county. It's cheaper for them to do this than to buy it from the one AT&T reseller who operates here, or god forbid, directly from AT&T. And the line going up the volcano used to fail all the time, in spite o
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and add to the fact that the small towns hate big companies and make them fund yarn museums for the privilege of running their lines
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On the other hand: people that choose to live there, do they nééd fixed-line access?
Except we didn't have this attitude toward electricity and telephone. We made sure that everyone was brought up to par with everyone else in rural areas.
I'm sorry to see that we have this attitude toward Internet connections now. What has happened since the Rural Electrification Act that we find it acceptable to say "they chose to live there, therefore should go without"?
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A massive political shift to the right is what happened.
Just 20 some years ago conservatives were the ones who were pushing for everyone to be required to be insured for their health as they were for their cars. Today that is seen as almost socialism.
Re:there's always a bottom 5% (Score:4, Interesting)
If I still lived there I would want a house out there. It's a really good life, quiet, peaceful plenty of room for the kids and dogs to play. But in reality I would have to buy a house in town because of lack of broadband. My brother that still lives back home is currently in the same situation
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Good life?
If you like having no cultural events, no museums, nothing to do at all. I grew up in that environment and I much rather drive 4 hours to hunt than every time I need groceries.
My current home is 10 minutes to the grocery store, in a quite neighborhood, with a pool and lots of place to play for kids and animals.
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I disagree on the last point. I bought a house recently and would not even consider one without FIOS anymore than I would consider one without running water and electricity.
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FFS (Score:3)
Can we stop fretting about the fact that there isn't a hard link run to every last spot in the boonies and start fretting about why access is so damn slow, and so damn expensive, even in the parts of the US where the economics of deployment are most favorable?
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You either need a government backed incentive to roll out high speed internet country wide (meaning to everyone not just people in cities) or you need some foreign companies to start moving into the US market to introduce some competition that will force the existing companies to become more competitive in the price
Sounds good. (Score:2)
Sounds good, since until 3 years ago when I lived in NYC, you could not get over 3Mbps almost anywhere in the city (I had asked for a house in Queens, a house in Brooklyn and two office locations in Manhattan one in Chelsea and one in Upper West side).
Unless nothing has changed and they consider TWC's 5Mbit to be "over 3Mbps". I had tried that service and due to the fact that the upstream was 384Kbps it was actually slower than Verizon's 3/768 even when downloading. Also a bit before I left, Speakeasy was o
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Small WISP do more (Score:3)
Small WISPs do more to service rural areas than all the big cellular carriers combined. If the FCC wants these folks to have access to high speed Internet then quit selling all the spectrum to the highest bidder and make some of that "white Space" spectrum free and un-licensed.
Thee Megabit? (Score:3)
Are we seriously calling anything under three megabit unacceptable?
The 19 million people mentioned in the above write-up are not without any means of Internet access, they are without Internet access in excess of 3 megabits - they could have 2 or 2.5 megabit access and fall into the 19 million Americans the article discusses.
What would the number be if we ratcheted back the cutoff from the three megabits in the report to say one megabit? How about if we made it 768K?
There are honestly tens of millions of Americans that care very little about either Internet access generally or high-speed Internet access specifically.
Re:Thee Megabit? (Score:4, Informative)
Not too long ago, there was talk about providing high speed internet to every household through the power grid. Even several test cities tried it with very good results. However, the major telecommunication companies lobbied to kill it. Go figure.
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I would NOT consider 768K, high speed. I wouldn't even consider 3mbit fast. Maybe, if you are going from dial-up to 3Mbit that would be a jump, but if I dropped from my 50Mbit down to even 10Mbit, I would die.
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Are we seriously calling anything under three megabit unacceptable?
Yes.
The Internet is increasingly becoming the transport of choice for video, not just text and occasional static images.
I think a bigger problem with the study is that it only sets a minimum bar for downstream bandwidth. They really need to consider upstream bandwidth, latency and maximum usage as well. I think a good minimum standard would be 3 Mbps down, 500 Kbps up, maximum round trip time to major Internet sites of 200 ms and a total usage cap (up and/or down) of no less than 100 GB per month.
90% of Cities Lack Access to Wilderness (Score:2)
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I grew up in northwest Arkansas, around mostly conservative religious anti-government hard working self-sufficient type (moved to the East Coast for Univ). Maybe the USA needs to just stop subsidizing post offices and forcing airlines to fly to small cities, and stop letting septic tanks make suburban homes cheaper than people paying for city sewer because water treatment is too expensive, etc.. There should be advantages to the people who live in / near cities (just as there are advantages to rural living we cannot guarantee city folk). Trying to bring every city advantage to every corner of the country isn't wanted by the original inhabitants, at least not at the cost demanded (or the free market would have done it). Maybe they will discover that broadband doesn't belong in every single niche. Or maybe someone will figure out a cheaper way to bring broadband to the country.
I agree 100%! Since most power plants are built out in the country instead of the city, the city folk shouldn't get the benefit of that electricity. Same with natural gas. Last time I was in a major city, I didn't see one natural gas well or nuclear plant. Then, too, let the city folk grow their own food. So yes, let the country folk quit subsidizing the city folk.
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Gas wells exist in cities they cover them with fake houses and such. Sometimes they don't even do that.
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/list-power-reactor-units.html [nrc.gov]
This shows just how close many are to cities. In some cases this puts them right in the suburbs.
The reality is rural areas are poorer. They are subsidized by cities. Farming subsidies are some of the biggest subsidies in our country. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT!
We should subsidize farmers to prevent another dustbowl. We should provide
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That's not all (Score:2)
19 million don't have access to broadband and another 26 million can't afford it.
Blocked by the competition. (Score:5, Informative)
This IS the problem (Score:2)
The Feds come in and pay you to offer "broadband" in an area. So you install T1's, put in some DSL cards, etc...
Then the feds are gone. Never to return.
Meanwhile you have about 12 people fed by a single remote that has 3 T1s
All 12 of them turn on netflix on Friday night and... now you have problems
It's not profitable or cost effective to give those 12 people service that fast for the price the feds want you to charge. The only answer is capping th
The FCC is wrong (Score:2)
Lots of rural access is served by small ISPs as the big guys won't touch those markets with a 10ft pole. None of these outfits have full time legal/process teams. Most have never even heard of FCC form 477 or simply incapable or unwilling to fill it out. The FCC for the most part lacks the will to enforce/care. Virtually all of the FCC data is coming from mid-sized to large providers only.
The FCCs definitions and inconsistancies still crack me up.
On pg 7 "In this report, we assess our nationâ(TM)s p
not my fault... (Score:2)
Dang... 3Mbps isn't broadband anymore? (Score:2)
I was gonna be all like, "haha suckers, that's what you get for living in middle-of-nowheresville! Move to a proper city!" I live right in the middle of a city that might not be in the top 10 biggest in the US by population, but is definitely in the top 50, and I have a choice between 1Mbps and 3. No wonder there are 19m. (Yes, it is annoying. I'm assuming it's a last mile issue.)
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Agreed. I am willing to pay more in taxes to subsidise equivalent infastructure services to those who choose to live in rural areas, once those in rural areas pay to subsidise us in urban areas with similar air quality, space, crime rates, etc.
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I'd argue that it is in society's interests to have well-educated, content farmers - even if that means we pay a little extra for things.
Those stuck with a farmer head of household (Score:4, Insightful)
There are those who are stuck on a reservation, and those who chose to live where they do. The first group has a legitimate beef. Why should I have to pay to support the second group's lifestyle choice.
For one thing, not everybody who lives in a rural area chooses to live in a rural area. Some of them might be members of a household whose head has chosen to live in a rural area. Why must, for example, the daughter of a farmer miss out on being able to participate in online communication with her peers?
For another, why must someone's participation in mainstream culture be incompatible with growing the food that you will end up eating?
Re:Those stuck with a farmer head of household (Score:5, Insightful)
Because for some strange reason Americans no longer see any value in enriching the lives of anyone but themselves. We no longer value having an educated society, nor a a well connected one.
Enlightened self interest is dead. The "I got mine, fuck you" mentality killed it.
This is what happens when you have the kind of political shift to the right we had over the last 20 years.
Re:Those stuck with a farmer head of household (Score:4, Insightful)
That's exactly right. Every argument that is in the news right now, whether it's related to right to life/right to choose, gay marriage, the 1%, whatever it is. It's all related to "Fuck you people." I don't know when, or where that attitude came from, but it is e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e.
I think, quite honestly, that what we're going through now is because heavy investors got a small taste of victory in privatizing Russia, South America, Poland, the various middle eastern countries that got shafted, and Greece and other parts of Europe starting in the 70's and 80's, and moving in steadily stronger steps to today. I think that these heavy investors are hungry for the next cash cow - they tried Asia, and the Asian tigers shut their asses down, so who's next? USA, USA, USA. We're fat and happy, so why not break us for a profit? Why not 'shock' our economy back to health so they can win some more? ('They' doesn't equal some tin-foil hat amorphous blob, it equals heavy hitters in the telecommunications, chemical, food and plastics industry, along with institutions like the IMF and World Bank)
I genuinely believe that in the next 10 years or so, this talk of 'austerity measures' are going to revert back to what they used to be called 'shocks to the government to stimulate private economic growth'. I also believe that in the next 10 years, we're going to see this attitude that was developed in the US turn its teeth inward and start taking bites out of our country. I firmly believe that we will have more rampant unemployment for young folks - fuck them, right? - and the money will funnel faster to a few people. I don't believe that we're headed for a collapse, because if we fall, so do most others (or at least it won't help), but I do believe that we're headed for a lost generation of workers.
WOW, that got off topic. Sorry.
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There are well-to-do persons living in some of these non-broadband areas. Here in Indiana here quite a number of people what WANT broadband but their only choice is extremely poor satellite connections. The problem is that this is still, to a corporation like AT&T, small demand.
If Internet access isn't on the level of utility now then it will be within five years. This is one of those problems the market can not solve... so it's something we need to push on the outside. I don't mean just government,
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My local "geek co-op" looked at the plausibility of running fiber and hooking into the local fiber channel. (Super-extra-megawatt highspeed fiber connecting two of the nearest massive metropolitan areas runs through our community). Total bill? Just this side of 1.5Mil. For a community of 50 people. And that's almost entirely the man-hours, equipment needed, and BASIC fees to the telco that owns it. We didn't even factor in any permits or any other pop-up, bullshit permissions that the company could come up
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Why run all fiber?
What distances are we dealing with here?
Is there a demarc, or does the fiber just go right on by?
What is the phone company using? What can they provide? Never underestimate the bandwidth of a shitload of twisted pair.
Re:Rural folk (Score:5, Insightful)
Errr...no.
Speaking as one who just moved away from a rural area, a decent broadband connection would have been highly desirable for both work and personal reasons, and I would have (and could've afforded to have) paid out the nose for it.
The lack of broadband access in rural areas has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the rural community wants / needs / can afford access; rather, it is a function of whether the telecoms can be bothered (they cannot.)
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Personally, I would place access to decent internet one of the #1 priorities if you want to get industry and business into a certain area. In those areas it is already a necessity. That's why comments like this one (as well as the belief in some circles that money put into broadband development is wasted) baffle me. If you want quality of life to improve in these areas you need to get them the basics. Decent internet access is now one of those basics.
Because we're a sub-species? (Score:2)
That is easily the most ignorant statement I've seen on this site in quite some time.
We're not all locals that fuck our sister and sit around swilling moonshine. We have jobs. We run businesses. We communicate with the outside world. Some of us hold advanced degrees. Some of us, and this may be hard for you to understand, live out here because we enjoy peace and quiet. The stereotype of the no-shirt, no-shoes, bib-overall wearing banjo playing tobacco chewing yocal has been dead since the 50's. Please trave
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I'm not sure if you're a troll, or just ignorant.
I'd have to go with hipster.
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20Mb internet is available, and offered. It just costs tens of thousands to setup and several hundreds to a few thousands a month.
Just like the cost to put in your own well, septic, and everything else you need when you live in the country that you don't in the city, it is expensive.
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I have a high school diploma, no college experience, make 14.65 an hour, a wife and two kids, one car, no cable TV service, one cell phone, no landline, 12mbps net connection. But I do elect for the insurance and we are covered. So find a way to do it, stop bitching about whats fair and what's not, and just do the best you can.
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How is this insightful? The guy is lucky enough that he doesn't have a medical condition that qualified as "pre existing".
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He "elected" to take coverage. That means his employer is paying for most of it. Even a pre-existing condition would be covered by a group policy.
What he is ignoring or ignorant of is that the amount he is paying is very little compared to what his employer pays for coverage for 4 people.
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I sure hope your wife works.
The fact that your employer offers coverage is great, not everyone making under $15/hour has that option.
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So will the Americans collecting charity in the form of Medicare suddenly count as having "insurance"?
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I think you are conflating "broadband access" with "actually being online at broadband speeds." There are huge numbers of people, tens of millions, who live in an area where broadband is a readily available service, but who choose not to have it. The 19 million figure is the population who live in an area where broadband simply isn't available, owing largely to geography and sparse infrastructure
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Oh well, many of those same legislators are actively blocking efforts at universal broadband access, too. Ever hear the story of the small rural community that formed a co-op, installed fiber, then got stomped on by the regional telco that never offered broadband to that community, all with the full backing of the "private enterprise can never do wrong" politicians?
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(1) 19 million have no access to a broadband internet connection where they live at 3 Mbps or higher; that doesn't mean they actually paid to use that access yet
(2) This isn't about broadband, but broadband at 3 Mbps or higher. They had to put a limit to make it more dramatic. I would assume that only a couple million, if that, are still have non-broadband accessibility (dial-up only).
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(3) And I forgot about your health insurance comment. 100% of people are able to receive at least some health care. Again, it is where the threshold is set. We can all play with statistics all day.
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You mean in the ER?
Where they will not give you any healthcare of value if you have a chronic condition?
You know what a cancer patient gets in the ER? Told to go home to die.
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Less than 3Mbps might as well be dialup.
You can't really stream much video over it, video conferencing is probably right out and I doubt that slow a link is very reliable. They had to put a limit on it, or people would assume like you that even ISDN should be considered broadband.
Mind you much of what you are considering broadband is actually baseband. So they might as well keep redefining broadband over and over since they already destroyed the term.
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If you really get your full bandwidth of 3Mbps, Netflix only requires 0.6Mbps (~600kbps) for "Good" quality. Only HD requires more than 3Mbps. Yes, that's for one TV and nothing else going on.
Streaming video is quite comfortable as long as you have a guaranteed 1Mbps. Youtube, Netflix, Hulu - all will run just fine.
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1Mbit will not even do 1 HD netflix stream. Most homes have more than one tv and may well have user on a computer while others are watching more than one HD tv.
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The report is about access, not adoption rates. The point is they can't get service over 3 Mbs where they live, regardless of cost.
Poor people have cable TV, they likely have a big TV, and it makes economic sense, because that is a huge part of their entertainment. The profoundly poor will not have cable - in my mind poop is 1x to 2x the poverty level, profoundly poor is below the poverty line.
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I don't think that people without decent internet access (not talking broadband necessarily) have the same business opportunity as those with it. Small cities and areas without decent access are not going to get businesses to set up there and it's harder to create a business without it.
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poop or poor? Freudian slip on your part?
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Twice as many people live below the poverty line, and even more don't have access to affordable health care, and we're pitching a fit about having fast access to a global computer network.
In the last 3 years, the number of people on food stamps has more than doubled, and the number of people with health insurance has declined in spite of the new health care law.
Our education system is also falling apart at the seams as our young people become less and less competitive, and less and less able to earn a living as a result, due to that failure.
If we're going to treat the speed of our internet connections as a national crisis, in spite of all these other substantial problems, I would propose we stop right now and re-examine our priorities.
You don't think that maybe the worst recession in history outside the Great Depression has something to do with those numbers?
education system needs to drop college for all and (Score:2)
education system needs to drop college for all and we need more tech / trade / apprenticeships.
The tech / IT field can use a good trade / apprenticeships system not the old college system.
vote Mitt Romney for no pre-existing health care (Score:2)
vote Mitt Romney for no pre-existing health care and the only way to get under there plan is to be part of a high pool and under there plan you can get sick and get dropped and blacked listed from the non high cost pools.