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United States Internet Infrastructure - Any reason why it sucks?
Henroid
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
Anyone that knows me fairly well knows that I live in rural east Texas, three or so miles outside the "city" of Tyler. I've battled for several years trying to find an internet solution because all we have is dial-up, satellite, and mobile broadband.
Mobile broadband is fairly new. It's a net solution provided by cellphone companies where you pay for data as you would minutes. When I first looked it up in 2008, every company was offering an unlimited data package, though it was $60 / $70 a month depending on who you were looking at.
This past fall I started looking into an internet solution since I crawled up out of debt, and when I tried to return to mobile broadband I discovered something heinous was happening - the unlimited plans were disappearing. Companies have been adopting a 200mb or 5GB data cap a month business model, which is goddamn HORRENDOUS for internet use. Some companies have tried to not fit the normal mold though. For example, T-Mobile's solution doesn't involve overage charges. They instead dock your data rate to dialup capacity. Virgin Mobile was also being a maverick, offering an unlimited plan. More than that, VM was even contract-free, and the devices for internet access are affording.
But when I got home from work today I found something sitting in my email that made me flip my shit. My provider (Virgin Mobile) is going to drop their unlimited plan mid-next month, and instead follow T-Mobile's path of throttling rather than making you pay up. The email noted that, if I should wish, I could pay another $40 for five more GB of data if I go over my monthly cap.
Meanwhile, local cable and phone companies are doing shit-all to expand service, despite my technically-rural area being well-housed.
So.
This whole situation reeks of regression, rather than progression. I thought internet access was suppose to become more available, easier to do. I don't understand why any of this has been happening aside from people being greedy fucks. There's a bunch of flavor talk about how 5GB is "ZOMG A LOT OF DATA" in these companies' pitches about their plans, but it's horse-shit. In a 30-day month, you'd have to limit yourself to 166mb a day to not go over the cap. In a world where video streams are getting higher quality, 166mb a day isn't nearly enough to make it reasonable.
Although I doubt it, are there -any- politicians at any level in this country trying to voice about this issue? Because our internet infrastructure is pretty shitty. I realize the land-mass of the USA is big and all, but there's varying solutions and methods to make it as cheap as possible.
Also allowed; people not in the USA comparing their internet shit to the US'.
Mobile broadband is fairly new. It's a net solution provided by cellphone companies where you pay for data as you would minutes. When I first looked it up in 2008, every company was offering an unlimited data package, though it was $60 / $70 a month depending on who you were looking at.
This past fall I started looking into an internet solution since I crawled up out of debt, and when I tried to return to mobile broadband I discovered something heinous was happening - the unlimited plans were disappearing. Companies have been adopting a 200mb or 5GB data cap a month business model, which is goddamn HORRENDOUS for internet use. Some companies have tried to not fit the normal mold though. For example, T-Mobile's solution doesn't involve overage charges. They instead dock your data rate to dialup capacity. Virgin Mobile was also being a maverick, offering an unlimited plan. More than that, VM was even contract-free, and the devices for internet access are affording.
But when I got home from work today I found something sitting in my email that made me flip my shit. My provider (Virgin Mobile) is going to drop their unlimited plan mid-next month, and instead follow T-Mobile's path of throttling rather than making you pay up. The email noted that, if I should wish, I could pay another $40 for five more GB of data if I go over my monthly cap.
Meanwhile, local cable and phone companies are doing shit-all to expand service, despite my technically-rural area being well-housed.
So.
This whole situation reeks of regression, rather than progression. I thought internet access was suppose to become more available, easier to do. I don't understand why any of this has been happening aside from people being greedy fucks. There's a bunch of flavor talk about how 5GB is "ZOMG A LOT OF DATA" in these companies' pitches about their plans, but it's horse-shit. In a 30-day month, you'd have to limit yourself to 166mb a day to not go over the cap. In a world where video streams are getting higher quality, 166mb a day isn't nearly enough to make it reasonable.
Although I doubt it, are there -any- politicians at any level in this country trying to voice about this issue? Because our internet infrastructure is pretty shitty. I realize the land-mass of the USA is big and all, but there's varying solutions and methods to make it as cheap as possible.
Also allowed; people not in the USA comparing their internet shit to the US'.
Henroid on
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This is a question that impacts all infrastructure spending as you're describing it.
Except that, until recently, we've always grown our subsidies for rural infrastructure. In part because of the outsized influence that rural areas have in government (why hello thar Senate) and in part because of cosmopolitan liberalism cycling into a populist spell and while we are an overwhelmingly urban nation there's still a lot of politically important people in the hinterlands. Plus the whole public image of progress that comes with having national accomplishments rather than just New York or Chicago being the bees knees.
Starting with the deregulation push from the 70's onward --and especially with the rise of modern conservatism in the 80's making anything with the word tax in it dead on arrival-- that's broken up some of the various monopolies that could be leaned on in order to force better services in rural locales as well as eliminated the mechanism by which the Federal government could just sort of pay for rural electrification or what have you since it would be benefiting one player among a market. With the new net neutrality rules and common carrier regulations this might start to shift so that infrastructure improvements that would benefit everybody even though the fiber is only owned by Comcast or AT&T can be kind of done without people bitching similar to how we help freight rail lines even though its owned by BNSF or what have you. It'd certainly be nice, because our telecomm's suck pretty hard right now.
Eh, the backbone is pretty good. Hell, there's more bandwidth in transoceanic cables than is being utilized thanks to a huge building boom back before the dot-com blowup. It's really just the persistent last mile problem that'll never really go away without gobs of money or major new wireless breakthroughs. Maybe if we just told CBS, ABC, and NBC to go fuck themselves and take the spectrum back. But that ain't gonna happen.
What are the big cables connected to?
Lack of regulations
Oligopolistic market
Size of the country
No government support or desire to develop the infrastructure
Bigger cables.
Cables, all the way down.
I'm perfectly okay with rural areas having to pay more for services historically subsidized by urban areas. I don't think subsidies should be reduced to nothing, but on some level there are costs associated with rural living, and some of those must be born by those that choose to live in those areas. It's not really fair to say "I want the low housing costs and peace and quiet that come from living rurally.. but I want the cities to subsidize the cost of my roads, my water, my electricity, my phone service, etc. so I have the same level of service, but don't have to pay a premium."
I think this is a reasonable position to take.
The problem here is I don't get access to thing. I don't even have pizza delivery for Christ's sake, and I'm 7 minutes from the nearest pizza place.
Edit - So to reiterate: The problem isn't the cost, the problem is things simply not being there to begin with. How can I pay for something if it's not offered or there?
The white lines you see in the sky.
Here in Denmark we have one company that controls all the cables and have to give equal access to the other isp's, with guidelines on when they have to lay cable to remote locations.
I have never understood the US tendency to fight against big monopolies, and then grant local monopolies with few restrictions under the guise of cost considerations.
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Island. Being on fire.
The cost to provide fast internet to your house is probably in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and labor.
So I don't think you're really prepared to pay for it.
Letter writing. Getting people to do the same.
This is why I noted in the OP we're fairly well-housed here. There's also a municipal airport across the street from me (the actual field for it is, that is). We're "rural" in that we're outside of the city limits. It's arbitrary stupid semantics that are keeping us from being up to speed with the city itself (not that it's much better there).
It is, but I still disagree with it rather strongly due to both the fact that some people do have to live in the rural areas otherwise we can no longer eat and also for the reasons that undergird cosmopolitan liberalism more generally. You never know where the next brilliant mind may come from. Because of that we should foster good levels of basic services universally. Internet connectivity has become a basic service not all that different from electricity.
I'm not saying that Billings, Montana should have better download speeds than Boston, Massachusetts, and on the Bostonians' dime to boot, but it should have something better than 90's tech. Since that's not going to happen in the free market that means we need subsidies or direct federal involvement to boost it, and I kind of wish we'd actually just raise the money and do it already instead of making local municipal bond investments tax free and hope.
No it's not arbitrary, and if it's that big of a deal you should try to get annexed by the city.
Except you'll (probably) have to pay much higher taxes which is frequently why communities resist being annexed, and why cities frequently try to annex surrounding communities. But, if you are annexed, you'll probably have access to better services!
I would agree with this hypothesis. Look at South Korea. Their government poured in a ton of capital to provide cheap internet to their entire dang country.
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
I'm not a property owner so I don't give a fuck, annex away.
In short, the U.S. has relied on private industry to build its infrastructure (generalizing.) This works fine in a lot of cases, but less so for areas that are hard to reach for some reason or just don't have that many people.
The problem with things not being there is cost (or, low expected ROI.)
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Texas is bigger than South Korea.
A T1 line would cost 400 a month, not including installation. And that installation would be a lot of money.
If you have business around you anywhere, you should be talking to them to see what they do for internet.
Then Quid had it right; start a letter-writing campaign. If you're dense and well-populated, I bet the city would be happy to add you to their tax base.
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Actually its statistical models and economics. If enough people are pissed off about it, though, you could probably have your local government enter into a deal with comcast or whomever and pay for part of the cost to lay fiber in exchange for such and such exclusive rights/access and a guaranteed minimum number of subscribers over that period of time.
Well, that or wait for RUS to get fully funded.
I think we're basically on the same page.
Size is a problem. But generally US cities have lower broadband coverage then rural Scandinavia. Some infrastructure needs to be supported from the government at the national level to reach the widest possible population.
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Island. Being on fire.
South Korea is about the size of Indiana and more densely populated than every State other than New Jersey, Massachusetts and Providence Plantations.
Rural Utility Service. It and FDR are the reason why you can turn your lights on.
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Next time someone out here badmouths FDR, I'm going to punch them in the face.
Rural electrification was part of the New Deal. The thing is that we don't treat telecomms the same now as we treated electric utilities then. Hell, everything in the TVA is still literally owned by the government and their customers aren't about to let anyone change that.
Yeah, size and population density would explain the shitty internet options in, say, North Dakota, but they don't explain why high density population areas like the bay area also suffer from shitty internet options.
The answer comes down to lack of competition; in a lot of places any company can get access to the pipes and sell you access. Competition drives the cost down and access fees to the pipes drive the speeds up.
In the US you're lucky if you have a choice between the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The Duopoly provides insufficient competition even in densely populated, contained areas that would be well-served by a competitive environment.
Yeah, I just want to actually put up the money to make the initial investment that'll later need to be subsidized rather than the current half steps and half measures.
Also, eliminate ag subsidies. Because what the fuck rural areas?
Federal jobs programs are not doing so well these days, though.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I don't want to derail the thread too much on this, so in keeping with the theme of this thread, why is this so?
Here we go: Louisiana fiber network running—despite cable, telco lawsuits
Yeah, but it really doesn't take that many people to run a DitchWitch and lay cable behind it. How much of the money would really go to creating jobs in America, and how much of it would go to whichever third world shithole Cisco uses to assemble their Korean/Taiwanese made parts?