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The US Rural Broadband Crisis
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Aug 28, 2007 09:44 AM
from the last-ten-miles dept.
from the last-ten-miles dept.
Ian Lamont writes "Rural US residents don't have the same kind of access to broadband services as those who live in urban or suburban areas. According to the federal government, just 17% of rural U.S. households subscribe to broadband service. But the problem is more than a conflict between Wall Street and small-town residents wanting to surf the 'Net or play Warcraft — the lack of broadband access prevents many businesses from growing and diversifying rural economies, as it's expensive or impossible to get broadband. From the article: 'Soon after moving to Gilsum, N.H. (population 811), [Kim] Rossey learned that he couldn't get broadband to support his Web programming business, TooCoolWebs. DSL wasn't available, and the local cable service provider wasn't interested in extending the cabling for its broadband service the three-tenths of a mile required to reach Rossey's house — even if he paid the full $7,000 cost. Rossey ended up signing a two-year, $450-per-month contract for a T1 line that delivers 1.44Mbit/sec. of bandwidth. He pays 10 times more than the cable provider would have charged and receives one quarter of the bandwidth.' The author also notes that larger businesses are being crimped, from a national call center to a national retailer which claims 17% of its store locations can't get broadband."
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Japanese Online Connectivity Ahead of EU/US 259 comments
An anonymous reader writes "The experience of getting online in North America and Europe is years behind the internet connectivity options in Japan, the New York Times reports. While here in the US cable and DSL options are still struggling to reach rural areas, eight million Japanese consumers are now enjoying fiber optic speeds at home for comparable prices. The article explores the fiber-to-the-doorstep approach the country's telecoms are taking, with examination of both the ups and downs of such an ambitious project. 'The heavy spending on fiber networks, analysts say, is typical in Japan, where big companies disregard short-term profit and plow billions into projects in the belief that something good will necessarily follow. Matteo Bortesi, a technology consultant at Accenture in Tokyo, compared the fiber efforts to the push for the Shinkansen bullet-train network in the 1960s, when profit was secondary to the need for faster travel. "They want to be the first country to have a full national fiber network, not unlike the Shinkansen years ago, even though the return on investment is unclear."'"
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Ounce of Prevention (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ounce of Prevention (Score:5, Insightful)
1) the guy has solved the problem by shelling some money.
2) the money he is paying is only 100$ more than my commute costs. And I guess his house is much bigger and cheaper than anything I could find in NY. So he probably was wise to pay that price.
3) he offered to pay all the connnection costs for the cable company and they refused.
So, I really can relate to this guy and think he really is the good guy here.
Re:Ounce of Prevention (Score:5, Informative)
Now he has a T1 so he can get plenty of static IP's without massive surcharges, he has upstream bandwidth that is better than most people can get outside of FIOS, He won't run into the "we will cut you off for exceeding our unpublished and secret cap" problem, and he has an SLA on the circuit. He uses the internet for his business, and the internet IS his business. A T1 is quite reasonable. Unless he is underpricing himself, he is probably making at LEAST $10K / month off that $500 T1.
Just to keep things in perspective...
Re:Ounce of Prevention (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ounce of Prevention (Score:4, Informative)
What I'm surprised by here is that it seems like everybody thinks that broadband = cable or DSL (or, God help you, a Point To Point T1). From reading the comments, nobody is even looking at rural wireless satellite broadband. Disclaimer: I used to work for a satellite ISP so I'm biased. Satellite especially is available anywhere you can see the southern sky (specifically, a satellite hovering 22,300 miles above the equator in geosynchronous orbit) and offers OK speeds for $200 - $600 upfront and anywhere between $50 and $200 per month. The latency sucks (600 ms) but if you aren't using it for gaming, then you certainly don't need a private line circuit with PTP or Frame Relay...
I was always amazed that so few people knew about or considered satellite broadband despite the millions of bucks a year that HughesNet throws at advertising, especially on DirecTV. WildBlue now also has big co-marketing programs with DirecTV, DISH Network and AT&T. So I'm curious - do people not know about satellite or do they know and just don't want it?
Re:Ounce of Prevention (Score:4, Insightful)
People in America (I've seen myself fitting into this mold) are used to "sign this contract, we'll considerably reduce/eliminate the upfront cost". For the most part, you don't get this with satellite. I know you didn't when I had Starband living in Yarrow, MO (population, about a dozen or so). I had to pay something like $400 up front (or so, it was quite expensive for what little I was making at the time).
People are spoiled by the phone/cable companies "giving" the modem to you. The satellite equipment is just too expensive. Add to that the *required* non-free (most of the time, 'less there is a promotion) installation.
For stores (like TWE, that was linked from the main article), satellite would work, if the Mall they are located in will allow them to have it installed on the roof. I have a feeling many malls won't, and some just aren't built for it (multi-story, etc -- the cables would probably just be too long, adding MORE cost for amplifiers, or whatever is used for long runs..)
Re:Ounce of Prevention (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ounce of Prevention (Score:5, Informative)
No, the key is should HAVE.</pedantic>
Re:Ounce of Prevention (Score:5, Funny)
It's a class marker, like the distinction in American speakers between "drapes" (déclassé) and "curtains". When people use these expressions, they reveal themselves. It isn't a judgmental thing: our world needs working class and lower-middle class people. But it helps sort out who gets invited to which events.
Trying to get everyone on the same page for language usage reveals a delusional faith in egalitarianism.
Re:Ounce of Prevention (Score:5, Funny)
Or maybe a dash of creativity... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know, some cable plans don't like that... but on the other hand, it's not like they were planning to sell it to those folks anyway. Also, in my area, you can pay for "enterprise cable" service which is very reasonable, and they won't complain about what you run on it.
Re:Or maybe a dash of creativity... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ounce of Prevention (Score:4, Insightful)
Well... a couple of things. First, most ISPs won't actually give you a real map of where there coverage is. It's really sketchy. Sometimes you can't even tell until you go to order the service. I remember doing a check a few years ago where I entered my address into Verizon's online thing, and it said I could get DSL. Then I tried ordering it, and they said that the website was wrong.
Second, if you RTFA (or even the summary), the guy bought a house three-tenths of a mile outside the broadband coverage. So basically that means that they guy down the street could get broadband and he couldn't. It's pretty understandable why he wouldn't catch this ahead of time.
Not seeing the forest for the trees (Score:5, Insightful)
The basic problem here, and throughout the U.S., is that the so-called "last mile" lines are tightly controlled by the local monopoly, and closed off almost completely to any competition. When you don't have competition, you have no incentive to offer better service.
The only way we'll ever see either wider deployment, or 100 Mbs to the house in the next 10 years, is if the Telephone companies are divested of the Central Offices. That is, these are spun off into businesses which sell the lines to competing companies. Only then will you have motivation to upgrade the last mile with better services and speeds.
What I find amusing is that there's always someone who will say "but there won't be any interest in upgrading the rural areas". They always fail to realize that there is no interest right now, and isn't any on the horizon.
If you make this market truly competitive, then there will be interest. Now, granted the price will necessarily be higher, and that's where the main objection from people living out in the rural area comes from. But at least there will be service for a price. And that's what is needed to get the infrastructure ball rolling to deploy better solutions than just a T1 (which really looks rather pathetic these days).
It's also amusing that America is facing internation pressure on this front (while doing nothing about it). Other countries are deploying high-speed internet (100+ Mbs), while the best we've got being rolled out is a pathetic 6 Mbps.
Silicon Valley in particular is extremely lacking here.
Unless this is changed, and soon, there will be a lot of other countries which are in a better position to compete than the U.S.. The next 10 years will be interesting.
Bigger ISSUE!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ounce of Prevention (Score:4, Interesting)
Fortunately, I can get a 3 meg DSL connection that seems to do a little better at times so I wasn't too disappointed outside not having the Internet for almost 2 months after being told it would be hooked up a week after my move. My neighbor on one (about 200 yards away) side can get road runner and on the other side (about 6-700 yards away) uses satellite but there is a $1500 installation fee in my area that needs to be paid before you get the service.
Checking this stuff out first might not always work. AS for the article, I'm sure there would be something available cheaper then $450 a month but there is a need to service these areas. Time Warner and the Telco's offering DSL or Internet are doing so because they had all the competition blocked while they were setting up their networks and running the infrastructure. They have an unrepairable advantage over any startup that might want to service the area and would likely use this advantage to undercut pricing models and run the other companies out of business if there ever did turn out to be a market worth having (profitable).
Re:Ounce of Prevention (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally believe that the greed of the phone companies with respect to T1 pricing is at the very core of why the US is losing (and losing badly) on the bandwidth front with respect to the rest of the world. We are getting worse broadband, at higher prices than EVERYONE else in the WORLD. Sometime in the next decade this is going to technologically cripple the US and we will lose the rest (we've lost a lot already) of the leadership we have in the internet. The next google, youtube, myspace, etc. may well have incredible multimedia potential and come from another country, and be unusable by most of the people in the US. Eventually, the world will make use of their expanded bandwidth, and will leave us behind.
And its all because the telcos were addicted to their premium prices they've always charged for T1 lines....
They don't have hookers on every corner (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with density, after all he proposed to pay the entire cost of expanding the cable by himself. They just can't be bothered.
The problem is that to get good service for anything, you either need real competition between several commerc
Re:They don't have hookers on every corner (Score:4, Insightful)
1. I called the cable company and asked if I could get cable at the house. They responded yes.
2. I bought the house and requested that they hook it up for cable.
3. A technition arrived the next month (yes month) and informed me that he didn't have enough wire. He would reschedule and come back. But it might take another month.
4. I wait a month, no notice of a new appointment. I call again, explain the situation and they send another tech out. He reports that he never got the message that he would need longer lengths of cable and had to reschedule. I made him call IMMEDIATELY from my house on the cell (This was the second day of work I had to miss)
5. The third technition arrives and informs me that they have to do an extension. It requires a survey. He schedules the survey.
6. The cable company does the survey, never informs me. I call back 1 month later and tell them that "Yes, proceed with the work" They tell me that it may take up to 2 years to get the permits... (WTF?)
In the meantime, I investigate every option. Satellite (will not work with what I need). ISDN (the phone company no longer deals in this area) DSL, I'm 16000' just too far. Wireless, I'm on the wrong side of the hill. EVDO: not broadband in my area, pretty much dialup.
7. 8 months pass and I have to call again "Umm, where the hell are you?" 3 weeks later they finally hook it up.
So thats what I went through with a company that WANTED to hook up my cable. I paid them to do it. I think it is more that some schmuck didn't want to be bothered with filling out the form to send a truck out to his home.
Re:They don't have hookers on every corner (Score:5, Insightful)
While definitions of "broadband" may vary, you may find that availability of a DSL or cable connection is on par between Western Europe and Big City America, levels are different.
You can get 100 Mbps connection in Sweden and a few other European countries for what a 5 Mbps one costs in the U.S. Want it weighted by population density? Fine. Pick a big U.S. city -- any one. Just ignore the rural part and compare it to Europe on a country-by-country basis, including their suburban and rural parts.
I used to think like you do, that it was population density that curtailed U.S. broadband in comparison to places like Korea and Europe. Then someone pointed out that U.S. broadband is crappy-to-mediocre in the largest U.S. cities with high population densities. What is the excuse for New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta and Washington D.C.?
Is it a real 100mbps connection? (Score:5, Informative)
Now maybe that's changed, but if it has I certainly don't see it in my experience.
Also, for what it's worth as a given datapoint. Speedtest.net shows North America as having the fastest aggregate connections, above Europe. Of course there's problems with the way a test like that works, but it does indicate that perhaps the rest of the world isn't as blazing fast as people on Slashdot like ot make it out.
Re:For starts... (Score:5, Informative)
According to Wikipedia
Seoul http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul [wikipedia.org] has a population density of 17,108 people/sq km
New York City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_city [wikipedia.org] has a population density of 27,083 people/sq km
I would say you are wrong.
Re:They don't have hookers on every corner (Score:5, Insightful)
New England (and this article refer to NH) does have a population density, including distribution of urban-vs-rural areas, comparable to Western Europe.
Face it, "We're number 17!". Broadband availability in the US sucks, and the mono/duopolist providers have no interest in improving coverage (quite the opposite, they've actively fought changes in the way they can report availability statistics that would paint a more accurate picture).
Re:They don't have hookers on every corner (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They don't have hookers on every corner (Score:5, Insightful)
But the result being that everyone has phone and electricity, and at a reasonable price.
And the internet providers have been given government backed monopolies, but AREN'T required to provide service to everyone...but this is somehow better?
Can you fill in the blanks please?
These services should either be totally open to competition with no government backed monopolies, or the services should be REQUIRED to be provided to all. One or the other. Anything else is just a license to skim the barrel...which is exactly what we have right now.
Re:They don't have hookers on every corner (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference with internet is that only the last mile is a natural monopoly. Many different companies could plug their backbones into the last mile going to your house, and in fact many different companies could share the same backbone lines, and your traffic would not be "mixed" or confused with your neighbor's traffic like it would if many water companies were plugged into an analogous hub. The internet is a very unique utility in this way. In fact, the phone system works the same way, but only recently (since digital telephone transmission), and of course telephone providers still maintain their "natural monopoly" status along the whole length of the line, left over from the analog days.
So the solution in this case is, I think, to separate the last mile providers from the connection providers. Allow the last mile providers to be a natural monopoly, either run by a city/town/village or heavily regulated, just like the rest of the utilities (but separate from the data providers). However, allow free market competition from companies providing Internet service to that last mile hub. This would be even further aided if the last mile providers created a universal standard for providers to plug into, which only requires a software change in order to change providers, instead of a truck changing a physical plug. All data (internet, phone, cable) would come into your home with the same type of cable, whether it comes from a telephone company, a cable company, or some other newcomer. When customers can switch Internet providers easily (as they could when the last mile is owned by the city and software switchable) there will be a real market at work, and all the wonderful pro-consumer effects of supply and demand would suddenly kick in.
Rural == Not A City!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
We do happen to have relatively good Internet via cable (1 mb) but you can't take anything for granted. Yes, the big, evil Telcos don't want to put stuff out here because it costs a lot. And yes, they should be soundly trashed because it was already "paid" for.
A crisis? Oh well. Caveat Emptor.
Good argument for municipal-owned networks (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, like electricity, people could for a Co-Op and get their own broadband.
Re:Good argument for municipal-owned networks (Score:5, Interesting)
There's options, but they suck... (Score:3, Insightful)
But it's expensive ($80 or more a month), slow (I had it for 2 years, best DL speed I ever got was only 5 times faster than a 28.8 modem), unstable (hard rain = No internet), unsupported (well...okay, they have people on the other end of the line, but they aren't very good, and they can't fix your problem), and high latency (1500 ms ping is quick. VPN doesn't work, and forget about gaming).
We need a Tennessee Valley Authority-like program to get Rural America on the net.
Geeks in Space (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't just rural economies affected (Score:5, Interesting)
We have a couple of clients in the exurbs who do logistics: mainly deliveries into cities. The warehouses are in the exurbs where land is cheap.
But they can't get broadband at the warehouses. Remote assistance means "bring the laptop to Panera so I can remote in."
why should broadband be a special case? (Score:3, Insightful)
rural areas have always suffered from having limited access to luxury items when compared to more densely populated areas. i just don't see the logic in this complaint. i'm not saying its fair...but its nothing new.
if internet is really more important than living someplace that is sparsely populated then you pay a premium to get what you need...or you move. my in-laws live on a dairy farm and they still drive 45 minutes just to buy groceries.
dude.
Re:why should broadband be a special case? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit, this is 2007, not 1997.
Re:why should broadband be a special case? (Score:5, Insightful)
Modern life / business / education / etc however has added many other things to the list of "basic needs".
Can you get by without transportation, electricity or phone? Sure. Can you participate in modern society without those items? Not effectively.
It's perfectly reasonable to come up with strong arguments that say that broadband Internet access will soon become a "basic need" in order for our society to effectively compete in the global market. In fact, our government (despite total incompetence) has identified this need as real.
One major problem is regulation... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wrote an earlier post [slashdot.org] on the subject about the same thing going on in my neck of the woods.
NO! Do NOT say "they should move to the city" (Score:5, Insightful)
If AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and ilk refuse to upgrade their rural networks then pull the subsidies and make them compete on their own merits. At the VERY least they would provide WiFi broadband at reasonable rates.
Customer owned fiber networks (Score:5, Informative)
I'd insist that ISPs peer all local traffic at full speed, or at least 100Mbps symmetric, but let competition sort everything else out.
Research, yes, but (Score:5, Insightful)
The crisis is that what's good for business and economic development on the whole is often not taken care of by the incumbent carriers, who have discovered ways to make more profits elsewhere without delivering particularly good or advanced services, just by squeezing customers they already have. It's not that they couldn't make real profits in rural areas, but that they'd have to do some actual work to earn them, rather than just live off the legacy of the networks they've already built.
The virtues of regulated monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly the same thing is true of the post office. It costs the postal service more to mail a letter to Alaska than to mail it across town, but the price of the stamp is 41 cents.
Universal service is only possible if the service provider is allowed to cross-subsidize the areas that are expensive to service with revenues from the areas that are cheap to service. Competition and the free market will always produce wildly varying prices and cream-skimming (in which the most profitable markets get service from multiple suppliers and the least profitable get no service at all).
If the Internet is now as fundamentally important as the telephone or the postal service, then--just as with the interstate highway system, or the system of air traffic control which enables airline service to be nationwide--there will need to be national policy to that effect. Otherwise it won't happen.
So What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Broadband is not "unavailable", it is merely more expensive. Wherever you live, some things will be more available and others will be less available. Get over it. The fees that were (stupidly, I believe) tacked on to all phone bills to fund rural access are still there - just a big pot of cash that the telco's squabble over even though routing phone service to rural areas is no longer a real issue.
Whenever I hear talk of rural access fees, I wonder why the same people aren't championing an urban affordibility fee. Tacking a huge additional fee onto transfer and property taxes in rural areas to help fund the ability to live in San Francisco or Silicon Valley makes about as much (non)sense.
Same situation for me (Score:4, Interesting)
No cable on our road; too far out for DSL. I had used dialup, but I'd rather choke myself to death with a hampster. Tried satellite, but interactive use over a satellite is like shooting yourself in the foot, day after day. Finally found a local business which had cable with line of sight. I pay him $20/month rent to host a cablemodem, router, and antenna on the roof. I pay the cableco for a 5MB/512KB business connection, and I'm all set.
what I think is interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm largely libertarian (I know, I know, I've surrendered my credentials with this post alone) but some things, like mail service, phone service, water service, and yes, internet, aren't profitable enough on the small scale for the greed factor to make it worth providing service to houses scattered across the prairie, or even in small towns. So we have to choose between no internet at all or cries of encroaching socialism. The question is whether the economic benefits of internet access are enough to warrant the problems caused by government involvement.
Were the benefits of phone or mail access enough to warrant government involvement? Anyone want to speculate on the economic life of a town with no phone or internet or public roads? The phone system may not have been government-supplied, but they did guarantee the monopoly that made it sufficiently profitable. The distinction isn't that important, in this context.
Taxes have already paid for this service (Score:4, Interesting)
Second, internet access in rural areas is a huge boon to job growth in those areas where land is cheap. It is a win for everyone involved. I'd rather "outsource" to rural America than to India.
Third, huge urban sprawl is an ecological nightmare. The government needs to provide incentives to redistribute populations on a wider geographic basis. Not having access to basic business infrastructure makes this very very hard.
Re:Taxes have already paid for this service (Score:4, Insightful)