Why Isn't Good Cheap Internet Available Everywhere?

[Calico]

Pricing models that try to get more out of those who have more, but still try to get every possible customer, combined with little to no competition.

I have found that the more time you're willing to spend playing chicken with them, the better the deal. But I've been fortunate in that I often had an alternative, and that I didn't/don't need/want the fastest speeds.

Right now Google Fiber is $55 and Speculum Cable is begging me with a rate of "$40" with no increases for 3 years. But it's TimeWarner by any other name, and they don't change their stripes. The $40 doesn't include $15 or more in junk fees. Even if the total was less, I still feel better enriching the supposed 'do no evil' company, since they made the fiber investment that forced AT&T to also put in fiber. There's actually 3 choices now...a first in the history of the neighborhood.

Thanks for the Monday laugh!!

 

[Rustic23]

Facebook is working on a robot that spins fiber over power lines

https://www.lightreading.com/optica...n-spin-fiber-across-power-lines/d/d-id/762392

 

[bobie]

About 5 years ago a group of homeowners got together and got a company to hang fiber on our road.
We all had to sing a long contract and it's been sold a few different times due to the dark fiber lines in the bundle. Right now I'm paying $4,126 a year for 2.5 Gbps.

I think I have an option for a wireless internet service where I'm at. I'm told it's cheaper than cable internet where were at, but never looked into it.

 

[REWahoo]

Right now I'm paying $4,126 for 2.5 Gbps.

Yikes!

 

[bobie]

Sorry that's a year.

 

[MRG]

The first couple of years I had Centurylink DSL it was fine. As more and more people moved to our rural area the DSL got slower and slower. Finally in the evenings it just got so slow you could not even get your email. We and the neighbors made many calls to Centurylink and nothing was ever done. They just had too many customers on the line. It was so bad I finally moved into town and got Spectrum cable which is not great (goes out alot) but so much better than Centurylink DSL.

I can tell when tourists start coming back to town from how slow Century Link is.

 

[travelover]

Sorry that's a year.

Yea but - $350 a month - wow.

 

[John Galt III]

Yeah DSL is very susceptible to oversubscribing within neighborhood (as well a distance). Cable (DOCSIS) can be too but less of an issue now as most have upgraded to gigabit because most don't subscribe to it or use it all. However if you have a choice of Cable and DSL and you're fine with a slower tier for a lower price, DSL might not be oversubscribed in your area given most neighbors are probably using cable. So DSL can be worth a shot if looking to save and fine with a lower tiered speed. Can always go back to cable if it doesn't work out. And don't tell your neighbors if DSL works well because if everyone jumps then you may slow down.

It would be nice if these fancy websites that are loaded up with useless nice-looking fluff that uses 90% of their bytes, would have an option you could specify to just 'give me the facts, man' and not send me that useless 90% that I don't need. Then the slow connection would be much faster, no? But I guess that would reduce profits, so that's out, right, if all these people with slow, *less expensive* connections were allowed to use the internet in a functional manner? On the DSL thing, my parents had DSL for a while, and yes, it froze up temporarily sometimes playing youtube.

 

[JustVisitingThisPlanet]

^Using a browser like Brave will help cut out most of the junk.

 

[FLD3C]

I think that it would be a good thing for the government to help bring high-speed internet to rural America - perhaps a modern successor to the Rural Electrification Administration and rural electric co-ops that brought electricity to the farms and mountains of this country. It is just not economically viable for the current commercial providers to do it.

An excellent idea for fiscal stimulus

 

[bobie]

Yea but - $350 a month - wow.

My only other choice is 10 Gbps for $980 a month to be able to stream games like I need to. No thanks.

 

[Global Wizzo]

Most power companies have been rolling out fiber optic lines to manage their grid. The don’t offer fiber internet connections to many, but the local hospitals have it in place for redundancy.

It is time to consider internet access at a 100 MB’s level as a necessary utility and not a rip off opportunity.

 

[2cheap2eat]

I’m with Spectrum too, $70 month for 200 MB. No other choices, so their prices stay high.

Hopefully 5G brings competition to bring prices down!

 

[Lron58]

Service provider saying it's going to cost you an arm and a let to get it to your hou

In many cases, providing internet is not as simple as running wires. We have high speed internet through Comcast. Friends 2 blocks away do not. They asked Comcast to connect them to high speed internet. They were told that it would cost more than $100k to provide them with internet. Apparently we are at the end of the line where something more robust needs to be done than just run a cable.

In 2003 I moved into a house in Frisco, TX. Comcast had service literally on the other side of the railroad tracks from my neighborhood (less than 300 yards.) I went to the City of Frisco and asked for the agreement between Comcast and the City of Frisco. It stated that if Comcast was already delivering within 1/2 mile of al location without service and the neighborhood had more then 20 homes, Comcast was bound by law to turn new service up within 6 months. I called up the Regional Comcast Installation Manager and provided him with that contract and we were up within 5 months. Point to the story is that you may have some agreement in place that you're not aware of. Pays to do a little digging.

 

[FIREarly]

FYSA, I have not read previous posts. My wife and I have Verizon FiOS and it's great, not cheapest, and only have 100 up/100 down (fast enough for streaming Netflix and such), 1st year $39.99/month and $54.99/month after that.

Amazing internet and would buy cable again if we had RCN available here. Costs less, provides more, and great customer service.

 

[Old Microbiologist]

Americans have become complacent and fully indoctrinated into the belief that government can't and shouldn't do things that provide benefit to all its citizens. This is despite the corporate welfare that exists. We retired to Hungary which is not a rich country yet it manages to provide all services to everyone using only taxes. The taxes here are nowhere near as high as in the US yet they still have enough to get everything accomplished and still keep the corrupt politicians rich.

But, the defense budget is the glaring elephant in the room. Hungary has a military of roughly 10,000 and has zero tanks 5 jets, 1 transport plane and zero helicopters (although something like 20 Europcopters are budgeted). So, the defense budget is tiny while in the US it is roughly 60% of the Federal Budget and from my perspective of 40 years i the military has done nothing except destabilize the world. I used to wonder where all my tax dollars went as the FDA doesn't actually do their jobs anymore and shifted it to private entities, the same for the USDA, and the list goes on. Even NASA is now shifting everything to private enterprise. Sometimes it works out well but often the responsibilities are shifted to profit oriented who do not have an interest to provide good service at the expense of the few corporate elites. This has nothing to do with political parties as it is equal to both. Despite shifting all these responsibilities the budgets go up not down.

In government empire building is the rule of the day. I'll give a tiny example. Back before 1999 in the Army I was working on vaccines for biothreat agents. We were adequately funded and that funding was through our higher headquarters the Military Medical Research and Material Command (MRMC) which had 6 areas of research Directorates (RAD). Each Directorate was managed by a Major, a Captain, and 1 sergeant plus a secretary and was housed in crappy old World War II temporary building a located at Fort Detrich. My funding came out of RAD-IV. These RADs managed all the research budgets for all three services and did it well.

In 1999 they decided to shift all this to the new Defense Threat Reduction Agency and those RADs shot up to over 400 contractor scientist managers. Prior to the shift to DTRA we were told what to research and given a budget and manpower to do the work and this included infrastructure. After DTRA took over we became entrepreneurial and had to look for funding and then had to pay for services out of any budget we managed to find and none of this included money for things like new computers, office furniture, new lab equipment etc. If you put it into your proposals they were rejected. I had to then pay rent in my own building to cover infrastructure and the tax was 47% of our budget. The MRMC itself had a tax of 6%. On top of all of this the research budget was not increased so the money to pay for these management personnel and their new $400 million dollar building came out of the research budget. Since 1999 nothing has been accomplished. But a lot of contractor management companies like McDonnel Douglas, Lockheed, etc. got rich.

 

[harllee]

Old Microbiologist, since you are in Hungry can you tell us what kind of internet you have, how much it costs, etc? Thanks!

 

[JoeWras]

We keep comparing small footprint countries with vast footprint countries. You can't make that comparison with expensive infrastructure.

 

[pjigar]

I hear lot of arguments from both sides but the biggest obstacles, IMHO, are:
1. The shear geographic size of our country. Rest of the world is very densely populated and hence the price per household goes way down for infrastructure. That is assuming that the providers are for-profit private companies.
2. Our pricing structure. Formula for rest of the world: price = cost + sensible profit. Formula for US: price = whatever a person can pay without breaking a bank regardless of the cost.

 

[Gigabit77]

My understanding is that the 5G rollout will (eventually) by way of its architecture blanket the entire earth with internet access. Satellite is probably the only feasible method of reaching remote areas.

 

[target2019]

I suppose country by country comparison as in this list is a point of departure. The U.S. does well (in average speed), and is bested by smaller countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds

As I mentioned earlier, what happens locally at the user level is dictated by politics and greed. There's no way around it, and that adds to the cost. There won't be a Federal or even a State response to internet infrastructure. Gov't collects its fees and corporations move users on a chess board of choices.

In a suburban location with old fibre and copper patchwork, the speeds are 90/6 Mbps. So it is under a buck per mbps. Many would be and should be happy with speeds like that. When I visit local establishments I can connect to their WiFi for free. But what I experience does not compare in any way to rural citizens. Hopefully each area will be able to access XG in the near future.

 

[JustVisitingThisPlanet]

My understanding is that the 5G rollout will (eventually) by way of its architecture blanket the entire earth with internet access. Satellite is probably the only feasible method of reaching remote areas.

The 5G rollout will have about same coverage as existing 4G today if every cellsite upgraded (unless adding more cellsites). If Starlink succeeds there's a pretty good chance that may cover rural areas and remote areas before 5G does in US. Will take a while for carriers to upgrade all their cellsites to 5G globally, maybe many years to get to lightly populated rural areas. Will be a race anyway but yes, Starlink will get extreme remote areas that have no cell coverage - and oceans/large bodies of water.

5G squeezes more bits per hertz than 4G allowing more capacity on the lower bands within same width of spectrum. In layman's terms, 5G doesn't really add more coverage, it allows for more capacity and speed within same frequencies that carriers have allocated. It also can improve latency some and adds more management features. On the lower mobile frequencies (bands), while you might get better performance at times, carriers will probably long term tune it to allow more users/devices in same spectrum. That is, can get about double users getting same speed as 4G on lower bands - and about same coverage as today. On higher bands, will be all about higher speeds (because of the wide spectrum more than because of 5G), though not as good coverage as lower bands.

The highest bands (mmWave) will be used mostly for fixed home internet access, large event spaces like stadiums (and if a mobile phone happens to be close to a site). The higher the frequency the lower the coverage/penetration and home internet users might need an external antenna on home. Verizon 5G is only using very high frequencies right now (mmWave) so not great for mobile. Tmobile and ATT are rolling out 5G on high and low bands now. VZW should be starting lower band rollout soon.

 

[RunningBum]

As I mentioned earlier, what happens locally at the user level is dictated by politics and greed. There's no way around it, and that adds to the cost. There won't be a Federal or even a State response to internet infrastructure. Gov't collects its fees and corporations move users on a chess board of choices.

Yes, you mentioned that before but you must've skipped over at least 2 posts from those of us in rural areas who have or are getting high speed internet with help from government funding.

 

[misanman]

I know someone who is testing Starlink. Equipment has arrived but was not yet installed last I knew. I'll be interested to see how well it works.

 

[JustVisitingThisPlanet]

I know someone who is testing Starlink. Equipment has arrived but was not yet installed last I knew. I'll be interested to see how well it works.

Have heard the download speed is fixed to 100M and upload 40M at least for now. If able to find out actual latency range, would be good to know. About 30ms is often mentioned. And how functional during storms will be interesting.

The beta dish also apparently moves with SATs in sky rather than fixed phased array that would allow no moving parts. Supposedly a Gen2 dish that will be released later will be phased array but just rumblings. And for now it sounds like you can't be moving while using service (like in an RV or boat). But it's a start.