About a Quarter of Rural Americans Say Access To High-Speed Internet Is a Major Problem (pewresearch.org) 157
According to a Pew Research Center survey, 24% of rural adults say access to high-speed internet is a major problem in their local community. "An additional 34% of rural residents see this as a minor problem, meaning that roughly six-in-ten rural Americans (58%) believe access to high speed internet is a problem in their area," the report says. From the report: By contrast, smaller shares of Americans who live in urban areas (13%) or the suburbs (9%) view access to high-speed internet service as a major problem in their area. And a majority of both urban and suburban residents report that this is not an issue in their local community, according to the survey, conducted Feb. 26-March 11. Concerns about access to high-speed internet are shared by rural residents from various economic backgrounds. For example, 20% of rural adults whose household income is less than $30,000 a year say access to high speed internet is a major problem, but so do 23% of rural residents living in households earning $75,000 or more annually. These sentiments are also similar between rural adults who have a bachelor's or advanced degree and those with lower levels of educational attainment. There are, however, some differences by age and by race and ethnicity. Rural adults ages 50 to 64 are more likely than those in other groups to see access to high-speed internet as a problem where they live. Nonwhites who live in a rural area are more likely than their white counterparts to say this is a major problem (31% vs. 21%).
It's not just rural (Score:2)
I think most of my coworkers are still using dial-up or ISDN at home here in Seattle. Even my boss that lives in a nice neighborhood can only get 1.5 Mbps DSL. Well, that's what CenturyLink claims. They haven't been able to make it stable so he still has a T1 that work pays for since we have a couple of back-up servers in his house.
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Ok I do not know where in Seattle you are but I have lived here for years and had broadband all that time. I am not calling you a liar I am just wondering where you and your coworkers live such that you cannot get better than T1.
Obviously I can't answer your question living a couple thousand miles away, but it has been my experience that what greenwow was saying is very similar to where I live near Lansing, and wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
Here, you can get 1Gb fiber. Or maybe not, and the best you can get is 100Mb cable, unless it's 40Mb cable. Or maybe not, and 1.5Mb DSL is all you can get.
It's totally fucking random depending on what provider "owns" what area. All within a few miles around the same city.
Lucky? (Score:2)
I don't think it's as big of a "problem" as the story suggests
Living in the country has its advantages and disadvantages. The people there know this and the ones who don't like it, leave. Conversely, many people are moving TO the country where they know broadband is not readily available.
The fact that the study shows only a minority of people think it's an issue means that it's not really an issue.
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1.5MB DSL *is* broadband...
Which broadband definition still includes 1.5 Mb? (Score:2)
Last I checked (February 2018 [broadbandnow.com]), the U.S. FCC defined "broadband" as 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. This was true since 2015. In 2010, the definition was 4 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. Are you using the FCC's pre-2010 definition of 0.2 Mbps symmetric? If not, whose definition of "broadband" are you using that includes 1.5 Mbps down?
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I'm using my definition from memory when I left the USA, which was 2005 :)
That was a reformatted memory from the Microsoft MCSE study materials, which said broadband was a signal split over multiple frequencies (frequency domain multiplexing).
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I live in the city and have fast Internet but lack of a ten acre back yard is a major problem for me.
Can I have somebody lobbying to fix my problems, too?
Re:It's not just rural (Score:5, Funny)
FiOS is Bullshit (Score:2)
I live in a city. I have FiOS. My service level is 1GB.
I still cannot reliably stream video without interruptions, disconnections, etc. from Amazon, Apple and YouTube.
Simply having the ability to PAY for a fast connection is hardly a panacea.
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And here's an address down the street from me that you can check with centurylink.com to back-up your post:
" 6200 53RD AVE NE, SEATTLE, WA, 98115"
CenturyLink shows "Speeds up to 3 Mbps are available in your area!" but they can't get DSL to work at all. The cable wiring on my street is so bad analog used to work poorly, but they disabled that so you have to have a cable box which of course doesn't work at all. Getting cable Internet to work is just hopeless.
Wait a second? Isn't seattle supposed to be one of your big tech cities? Why is the internet so shockingly bad?
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. I live in Seattle
Says the guy who claimed to live in SV on $50,000 a year.
I think
s/SV/mom's basement/
s/$50,000/50000 cheetos bags/
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The US government still spends 1 billion$/year on rural electrification. It goes to pad profits of utilities that serve rich people (farmers and out suburbs that were rural in 1930). Pure rent seeking.
That program is not an argument in favor of government intervention, rather the opposite.
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Why did the Clinton administration do that and not hold them to the promises they made?
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Because the rollout was scheduled to take more than 2 years. It's hard to hold people accountable when the next guy's in office.
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It's not that hard when you require the work to be done before cutting the check to pay for it. You know....like sane people do.
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That only happens when the cost of the work is small. If it's large, you're going to be cutting a check before the job is done.
And again, Clinton only started the ball rolling. 2000 would be about when planning was wrapping up if they were actually doing the roll-out. So accountability was up to the Bush administration.
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Just gotta change the rules. Make payment on milestones an interest-free LOAN to float your operations. Loan comes due if you fail to complete the entire job.
Alternatively, require vendor to post a performance bond. They lose the bond if they don't complete the work. This actually goes on right now in the construction industry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_bond). No reason AT ALL this should not have been done for rural IT infrastructure build-out projects.
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Or, since this is the government, you prosecute the company for fraud. But again, that was up to the Bush administration.
They were probably performant during the Clinton administration - I haven't seen any reporting that they were not, and since it was early they could easily type up some "this is what we're gonna do" plans that they fail to follow through on.
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Not disagreeing - but to be fair, how often do urban areas say "thank you" for food and chemicals and shit that come from rural areas?
Didn't think so.
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No NN rules to say what the internet is federally.
No state laws allowing a monopoly telco as the only NN approved provider.
Every nice neighborhood in the USA making their own new way onto the internet.
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Local politicians gave away monopoly rights to the community in exchange for a free local cable access channel and some discounted/free internet access for the city (libraries, city hall, schools, fire/police departments, etc.).
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Well, there's a lot to unpack here:
Even my boss that lives in a nice neighborhood can only get 1.5 Mbps DSL.
OK
so he still has a T1 that work pays for since we have a couple of back-up servers in his house.
So your corporate backup plan involves servers in your bosses house, hanging off residential broadband, but those bastards at CenturyLink won't give your boss any faster home internet service so your fall back to a T1?
The T1 your company pays for is only a 1.5Mb connection, the only difference is dedicated bandwidth with the T1 versus "best effort" for residential service.
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FWIW, I'm in Chicago and I can get high-speed internet from AT&T, Comcast XFinity, and RCN at both of my buildings. Comcast and RCN offer 1 Gbps service that is actually fairly close to the
Satellite service works (Score:3)
It's not going to work for games that need super low latency but satellite delivers decently high speed for everything else.
You really can't fault the cable/DSL service providers for not investing tons of money expanding their wired networks out to the sticks if the number of additional subscribers they will get will not pay for said network expansion.
Sounds like if we feel the lack of high speed internet for rural folks is a big societal problem, then it would have to be the government that makes the investment. But most rural folks also hate the government so that might not go over well.
Re:Satellite service works (Score:5, Interesting)
You really can't fault the cable/DSL service providers for not investing tons of money expanding their wired networks out to the sticks if the number of additional subscribers they will get will not pay for said network expansion.
We've paid them to do it. They promised to deliver high-speed internet to all wired subscribers and didn't. The people (like me) on satellite would still be screwed, unless we could establish a private wi-fi link to a neighbor who's got service, but the vast majority of people would at least have something useful.
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We've paid them to do it. They promised to deliver high-speed internet to all wired subscribers and didn't.
There are really multiple sides to this issue. From the perspective of the principle of the matter, I agree with you 100% (it actually felt weird to write that). The monopoly carriers made a deal, took the money, but then didn't live up to their end of the bargain. It is sad that the government has permitted that to happen. The utter lack of competition and in some cases even a single viable option for service is a clear indicator that the marketplace will not solve this problem (and I say that as someo
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However, if you have moved into a rural area in the last 5 or 10 years, then you knew what you were getting.
The compaines were still paid to deliver it. Lots of tax money was flat-out stolen. Nothing absolves that or makes it better.
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70%+ of respondents said high-speed internet access is either a minor or no problem at all.
The answer is they aren't complaining, no more than people with high-speed internet access complain about their provider.
Re:Satellite service works (Score:5, Insightful)
"You really can't fault the cable/DSL service providers for not investing tons of money expanding their wired networks out to the sticks if the number of additional subscribers they will get will not pay for said network expansion." - Uh yeah, actually we can. It was part of the deal they signed with the government in exchange for exclusive territories. The TelCo's haven't held up their end of the bargain.
"But most rural folks also hate the government so that might not go over well." - Is it any wonder? See above. As with a lot of these kinds of issues, if you dig deep enough you will find that the folks charged with looking out for us (i.e.government) is often to blame. The TelCo's, being the greedy opportunists that they are, are simply taking advantage of the situation. They are banking on little to no enforcement and if push comes to shove, it's nothing that a few campaign contributions won't fix.
Re:Satellite service works (Score:5, Interesting)
But most rural folks also hate the government so that might not go over well.
Baseless assertion much?
To begin with, while there are certainly rural residents who hate the government, there are also suburban and urban residents who also hate the government. In fact, I will make my own baseless assertion here and say that the percentage of rural "government haters" is not meaningfully different from the percentages of suburban and urban "government haters." Boy, that was fun and easy.
Furthermore, there is a world difference between wanting smaller, less intrusive government and hating the government. You can find plenty of people who are one but not the other, the same as you can find those who are both and those who are neither.
Further-furthermore, you must not be familiar with things like farm subsidies, ethanol subsidies, and BLM (Bureau of Land Management, not the other one). There are plenty of rural people who like and support their various subsidies, as well as those who like that they can graze their livestock on BLM land and effectively multiply the amount of available pastureland that they have with no direct personal cost. I suspect that very few of those rural residents "hate the government."
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Satellite service is absolute shit. I've got family that has it and whenever we go to visit it amounts to a few days of being digitally disconnected. First, the latency is reminiscent of dialup days of yore, which is frustrating to use for any purpose and makes any game that isn't a slow paced turn based thing impossible. Second, watching 15 minutes of streaming video is enough to hit a soft cap where the connection gets throttled back to something measured in 10's of KB's. I pay half the cost for the botto
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It's not going to work for games that need super low latency but satellite delivers decently high speed for everything else.
But only if you don't use that speed very much. Satellite services all have rather tight data caps. They're more generous than mobile data services, but low enough that even moderate laptop/desktop Internet users will have problems with them. Forget cord-cutting; streaming video will destroy your data limit in a hurry if you're on satellite.
I know, because I've looked into it. At my (rural) home, there are three options[*]: DSL, at 5 mbps down 768 kbps up; WiMax which is nominally 10 mpbs down, 2 mbps up
Shouldn't the title be Lack of Access be a Problem (Score:5, Informative)
I have in laws living on Iowa farms only a three or four miles from a town that has very good high speed Internet but their only wired connection is dial up. Lack of HS Internet is a real problem considering all the high tech graphical agricultural information available to them from a wide variety of sources.
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If rural folks have access to high speed Internet, I don't see how that's a problem.
Well, they generally don't.
I have in laws living on Iowa farms only a three or four miles from a town that has very good high speed Internet but their only wired connection is dial up.
It's like that across the entire country. Step outside of any city and suddenly, no internet. Go much further, and you won't even have cell phone service, at least not with any sort of data connection.
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I'm in the heart of Silicon Valley and I only have two choices that are more then 1.5mbps DSL, and that's Xfinity and AT&T. Meaning a cable company is your supplier, and you overpay for what you get and in return get bad service.
My mother lives in a rural town, not that tiny, maybe 20K population. She doesn't have cable so her only choice is 1mbps. It's great compared to her previous dialup or the spotty wifi connection to her neighbors (who have cable), but it's not broadband.
Even in the big city, th
Re: Shouldn't the title be Lack of Access be a Pro (Score:2)
My mother lives in a rural town, not that tiny, maybe 20K population. She doesn't have cable so her only choice is 1mbps. It's great compared to her previous dialup or the spotty wifi connection to her neighbors (who have cable), but it's not broadband.
If her neighbours have cable then she also has the option of a cable connection; it's just a matter of running some coax in from the road. If the cable company wants to charge her an arm and a leg you could even run the cable yourself and just pay them to connect it. This is not remotely the same as not actually having access to high speed internet.
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Ya, that's dumb though. Don't need or want cable but need to buy cable to get decent internet? Way outside of her budget, and the cable would have to be installed to the house first which is going to be a hefty one time fee. High speed internet is being treated like a luxury, the same way telephones used to be treated as a luxury, or electricity, etc.
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If access was "a real problem" your in-laws would figure out a way to get faster internet access (satellite, cellular, etc.). That the lack of high-speed internet hasn't forced them to shutdown the farm and move into the better-served city a few miles away.
Trade-offs (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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It's called Cincinnati. All the big city advantages with none of the big city drawbacks. [And other advantages.]
And it's got WKRP as a radio station!
Re:Trade-offs (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure the internet is shit compared to the big cities, but they probably don't have to spend several hours stuck in traffic every day. If there were a perfect place where you could truly have it all, everyone would try to move their and that would probably ruin it. So ask yourself what's really important to you and realize that you might have to give up some other things in pursuit of that.
You are looking at this all wrong. If they had good broadband out in the sticks you could move there and enjoy your Internet based lifestyle, work remote, and live where it is cheap and the land and skies are beautiful. And if a fair number of people such as yourself would make this relocation, blue people moving to the red prairies, they would turn purple and maybe even blue breaking the back of the right-wing in America.
It might even stimulate the rural economy, leading to higher incomes and less dependence on the blue states for Federal tax transfers.
You should be supporting efforts to bring broadband to rural America. I sure as heck do.
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It might even stimulate the rural economy, leading to higher incomes
And higher housing costs would drive lower-income locals away. Yay, government money helping solve rich people's problems, kinda like how government money makes teslas more affordable for the 3%ers.
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You should be supporting efforts to bring broadband to rural America. I sure as heck do.
Even without the political angle, having a country functioning everywhere you go seems like a really good idea for a variety of reasons.
My dad lived in the boon docks (Score:2)
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Sure the internet is shit compared to the big cities, but they probably don't have to spend several hours stuck in traffic every day. If there were a perfect place where you could truly have it all, everyone would try to move their and that would probably ruin it. So ask yourself what's really important to you and realize that you might have to give up some other things in pursuit of that.
There are more trade offs than just "Less traffic for slower internet" in small towns. I know that a ton of people in small towns in the USA love to act like everything there is fantastic beyond belief, but one of the things that they have to trade is often quality of health care. True recent story - I have an acquaintance whose father had a stroke recently. He and her mother live in a small town in the boondocks in a southeastern state. If I understand correctly, she was at home visiting when in the
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I don't know about that. I've heard it's not fun to get stuck behind a big herd of slow-moving cattle.
Escape federal NN rules (Score:2)
Community broadband. Build that community out with new fiber optics.
Let communities have a say in when, how and what they communicate with.
Find a telco, ISP able to work in difficult conditions.
Why should federal NN rules set a monopoly pace for communities ready to get their own great internet?
What can you say? ISP's paying to Abuse us. (Score:1)
https://twitter.com/StevWork/s... [twitter.com]
While major ISPs R jerking-off law-makers to keep monopolies,destroy NetNeutrality,pretend bits are huge/expensive/hard-to-move,U pay through nose while they Rape democracy/#FreeSpeach, countries like S.Korea have Fiber to every door.
Is that clear enough?
Business Internet (Score:3)
I work from home full time and tried to survive using basic home internet service.
I gave up and settled on full service business class cable. It's really fast and I get better customer service than the home guys.
If you do any service work at home, spring for business class. Even in the country, it's stupid fast.
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But it's expensive for small businesses. :(
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If you do any service work at home, spring for business class. Even in the country, it's stupid fast.
Sure, except that's not available in most of the country. It's available in dense sub/urban areas, but certainly not so in most of the country's acreage. Hence the word "rural" in the OP. People who live in rural areas don't get to choose business class over residential, because they don't get EITHER of those things.
Re: Business Internet (Score:2)
Business class is available where I live in middle of nowhere Oregon. Nearest town is 40 minutes away.
There's also satellite which is just as good minus the latency. I had that when I lived up in Alaska.
Costs come to $140 a month which is fine by me given its speed and reliability. I can even write it off on my taxes.
A basic DSL line is more than enough to do what you need. It's all you need to access banking, email, text news, etc.
If you want fast internet pay for it or move to a town with a fiber
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I've had great experience with Spectrum on both the TWC and Charter sides! 100 Mbps down, and solid. That said, it never rains where I live, maybe that is why it seems better than Comcast where I used to live with thunderstorms, etc.
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I gave up and settled on full service business class cable.
Cable isn't available where I live, only DSL and WiMax. There are no business class options on the DSL, because it's just laughably slow. The WiMax provider offers a business service, but it still shares backhaul with the residential users, so it gets really slow during late afternoon and evening hours.
I had to step up to enterprise-class service, from the WiMax provider, via a dedicated microwave point to point link. It works very well (100 mbps symmetric), but it's crazy expensive.
If you do any service work at home, spring for business class. Even in the country, it's stupid fast.
In some places. Not e
Not just rural (Score:2)
I'm in a suburban area right next to a large city, and still have flaky service. We pretty much have only 2 ISP choices, and we are using the least-evil choice right now. Others in the area report similar.
We had to pay extra for the "premium" service just to get normal service. It's as if you pay for a Chevy, but get a half-broken Chevy that stalls twice a day; and if you pay for a Cadillac, you get a mostly-working Chevy that stalls once a week, NOT a Cadillac. "Regular" service is really a Yugo sold as a
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Speed per se has not really been our big issue; it's the sporadic outright lack of response, and occasional lack of Internet connectivity altogether. I cannot use Youtube much when things are slow, but at least "regular" sites are usable with some patience under such circumstances. When everything freezes, there are zero usable sites to choose from. Slow makes me mumble, frozen makes me cuss.
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Sign-up for service with a committed delivery speed, your attempts to get service at the highest advertised possible speed on a "best effort" home connection is a fools errand. You are entitled to the speed promised, not advertised as "possible".
Possible Fix - LEO satellite internet (Score:2)
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You bet it's a problem! (Score:2)
Yup! You bet access to high-speed Internet is a problem.
There's a proven correlation between ready high-speed Internet access - particularly through mobile devices - and student grades.
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Poor student grades, of course.
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BS.
Unless this survey that "proves" this correlation factored in the socio-economic realities, levels of parental environment and other factors I don't believe it.
Citation?
This just in... (Score:2, Insightful)
42% of rural Americans surveyed have no issue with access to broadband internet, and the number increases to 76% of those surveyed that either consider broadband access a minor or no problem.
Wow.
Back in 2008 a similar number of Americans surveyed had similar feeling about their personal healthcare - then the government stepped in and "fixed things".
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42% of rural Americans surveyed have no issue with access to broadband internet, and the number increases to 76% of those surveyed that either consider broadband access a minor or no problem.
Wow.
Back in 2008 a similar number of Americans surveyed had similar feeling about their personal healthcare - then the government stepped in and "fixed things".
It is easy to dismiss things you don't have as unnecessary. I've seen farmers turn their financial situation around by investing in tourism, setting up a website and renting out renovated buildings to tourists that were otherwise just rotting away due to neglect and disuse. Doing that, however, is a lot easier if you can offer your guests some semblance of a proper internet connection. Once you look at it from that angle the lack of a proper internet connection alluvasudden seems more of a problem than it u
Unfortunately... (Score:2)
They sure have access to Fox News.
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Telco co-op is the answer. (Score:3)
In my rural area of North Dakota we have a regional co-op as our only option for wired service. For a while I was stuck with HVDL service that was a slow but consistent 756 Kbps down, had fair/OK latency for gaming.
The co-op was in the process of expanding their fiber network but they hadn't yet reached my area. I suppose that's understandable, I live 30 miles out. My nearest neighbors are about a half-mile down the gravel road in either direction. Even now the cell phone coverage (Verizon tower, I think) is spotty at best.
A few years went by but sure enough, they eventually came and trenched in fiber up to the house, for free! They also installed an indoor ONT with 802.11b/g/n wireless and a four port 1Gb Eth switch. I know it can go up to 1Gbps, but I currently have the 100Mbps service and it's fantastic.
I have to acknowledge how fortunate I am. Especially after reading about the trouble that others have, even in urban areas. IMHO, the larger broadband monopolies have no excuse for not doing better. Shame on them!
COST (Score:2)
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