Broadband in rural areas. A subject near and dear to my heart.
> Broadband in rural areas. A subject near and dear to my heart.
Me, too.
We get 1.5 Mb DSL, enough to watch youtube with stuttering.
Better than dialup by a factor of ten, but still very slow for 2016.
Ok so 39% of rural residents don’t have access to WIRED broadband.
Wireless broadband can be pretty fast.
And how many people fit into their definition of rural?
We live in rural (by most standards) north Georgia and have LTE, uverse and Xfinity service options. While we don’t live in the deep poplar woods, very few Georgians do. They could do HughesNet if they needed to.
This stinks of the gummint raising a lot of tax money to serve a small need.
They are a decade behind the curve in focusing on wired broadband. The economic landlords of broadband today are the cell phone data providers.
High speed Internet is a Human Right now.
Hold onto your wallets, the taxman is coming.
FCC likes being kingmaker with its auctions and ability to jerk companies around. Thankfully they never use their power to advance the political agenda of the President who appoints them. /s
Look up the story of rural electrification. That will give you a hint of the battles, back room deals, and corruption that this broadband fight will have.
When I got internet cable in late 2002, it was 1 Mbps.
Within a short time, they upped the speed to 4 Mbps.
A few years later, it was upped to 12 Mbps for the ‘preferred’ tier. They also added a couple of faster and slower tiers.
Next increase a few years later was to 18 Mbps for ‘preferred’. At this level, one had to upgrade the modem to benefit from the speed. The older DOCSIS 2 was too slow. I upgraded to the DOCSIS 3.0.
Then the speed increased to 20 Mpbs.
About 18 months ago now, they increased again to 50 Mpbs for the ‘preferred’ tier.
Of course, about 3-6 months prior to each speed increase, they also upped the tier price $3 to $5 dollars.
In 2003, the ‘preferred’ tier was about $37/month. Next month (new price increase), it will be about $70/month.
The problem for my small town (14k pop) is the only competitors are slow/expensive DSL (about 10 Mbps max) or 3g Mobile or satellite.
Cable, for the price vs service is still the best value.
My download/upload increased from 250 Gb/month to 350 Gb/month. I can stream 3 sports events and a Netflix/Amazon Prime movie without any buffering. All that barely moves the content meter. I occasionally reach 80 to 100 Gb downloads/uploads per month.
Yep. That's about the size of it. It is socialist politics.
Power grabs are what politicians and bureaucrats do.