Comment Re:Slow speeds (Score 2) 94
I'm in a rural area, density 31/sq.mi. (12/km2).
* Viasat $70/mo lowest tier (40GB traffic then some degradation). Same old sat pricing model rural people are familiar with: 2 year commitment, service call to install equipment, $75+. Monthly discount for low income ($30), tribal lands ($75), paid for BY THE FCC. Story time, a lightning strike on one of these rigs, HughesNet, burned through its modem, and later fried my laptop because I thought ethernet was more secure than WiFi for a job I was doing. The rural franchise installers are not always the best, and back then sat was the only game available, and everybody wants internet. Lots of roadside flappy signs. If you listen to the news out of the recent Eastern Kentucky floods, they list internet, cellular and electricity as the utility losses (water is usually via an electric well).
* Starlink $110/mo. Equipment self-install, $683.
* DSL $75/mo, speed 512Kbps. The bottleneck here is distance to the station, about 3 miles. The phone company, not one of the big ones, has put the squeeze on in the last few years in its doom: offshore service, higher charges for equipment, very high late fees.
* Cellular, only Verizon works, 2 bars, about the speed of the DSL above.
* Broadband over Powerline, defunct. The electric co-op offered this through a 3rd party vendor, but it never worked well. It was subsidized by the successor to FDR's Rural Electrification Administration (REA), housed in the Agriculture Dept.
* Fiber, $50/mo, by the end of the year. Also from the electric co-op. Subsidized by the REA successor, or in some nearby areas not on the co-op, by a fairly wealthy and denser county.