It’s not just rural areas. Millions of people aren’t wired because their homes are a couple of hundred feet from the nearest cable main, and the cable companies have a sweetheart deal which allows them to ignore those residents… I am limited to 5-6mb DSL for just that reason, although I live less than 15 miles from the center of town as the crow flies.
…and multiplied by a factor of 30,000
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Too right. I’m working in the middle of the telecom corridor in Dallas but I’m at the border between two telephone company service areas. AT&T services to the south of us and we are at the ass end of the Verizon zone. The best Verizon can offer us is 1.2Mbps DSL so we are forced to go with Time Warner Cable for a business connection. Our neighbors on all sides of us have FiOS but Verizon will not install it in our building since we are not a multi tenant building. AT&T can’t service us due to exclusive rights granted Verizon by local municipalities so they can get their free service to government buildings.
So, we are stuck with Time Warner who goes down about once a month for a few hours and don’t have the technical expertise to give us a root cause or resolution.
We were stuck with wireless until last year. A regional WISP with 1.0mb for $100 a month, or Verizon with 10mb and a 20gb cap for $90 a month.
When the telco finally showed up with no-cap 5mb DSL for $20 a month, it was like we’d just discovered stone tools and fire.
I really doubt that you could build the infrastructure to get wired 20+ mb to every house in the USA for the cost of a couple of F-35’s.
Maybe 25 million locations at $1500 each?? - $35-40 billion, which would buy about 300 of those lame birds.
Didn’t we buy hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cable back in the 80’s and subsidised Bell Telephone to lay it all throughout the country? You know, when all the AT&T pin drop ads started…
Why can’t we use that?
There’s no connection from the nearest cable line to my house, 400 feet away.
Even if that line is fiber, capable of terabyte speeds (which it isn’t), there’s no connection to my house.
Multiply that by tens of millions of houses.
The FCC would do better to emulate Europe, where Internet, TV and phone are not only faster, but cheaper… It’s called ‘competition’ or ‘capitalism’… Something our government talks a lot about, but doesn’t pursue…Just look at our absurd Cellular system, or better yet, our drug protectionism, which means that Canadians (for example) pay 1/3 or less what we do in the US for the same drug. At any rate, a generally cheaper Internet would benefit everyone, not just those that can’t afford it now.
Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/why-is-european-broadband-faster-and-cheaper-blame-the-governme/
Are you suggesting that a market based system is failing you and a public utility one might work better?
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Privately owned solution that is paid for by the government is the best of both worlds!
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Don’t confuse the cable monopoly with any sort of “market”.
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What a bunch of commies… oh… wait.
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Yes. And that’s likely the most reasonable way to resolve that particular problem in many rural areas. It’s the Tennessee Valley Authority but with internet access instead of electricity.
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