The One-Traffic-Light Town With Some of the Fastest Internet in the US (newyorker.com) 95
Connecting rural America to broadband is a popular talking point on the campaign trail. In one Kentucky community, it's already a way of life. From a report: McKee, an Appalachian town of about twelve hundred tucked into the Pigeon Roost Creek valley, is the seat of Jackson County, one of the poorest counties in the country. There's a sit-down restaurant, Opal's, that serves the weekday breakfast-and-lunch crowd, one traffic light, a library, a few health clinics, eight churches, a Dairy Queen, a pair of dollar stores, and some of the fastest Internet in the United States. Subscribers to Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative (P.R.T.C.), which covers all of Jackson County and the adjacent Owsley County, can get speeds of up to one gigabit per second, and the cooperative is planning to upgrade the system to ten gigabits. (By contrast, where I live, in the mountains above Lake Champlain, we are lucky to get three megabytes.) For nearly fifteen million Americans living in sparsely populated communities, there is no broadband Internet service at all. "The cost of infrastructure simply doesn't change," Shirley Bloomfield, the C.E.O. of the Rural Broadband Association, told me. "It's no different in a rural area than in Washington, D.C. But we've got thousands of people in a square mile to spread the cost among. You just don't in rural areas."
Keith Gabbard, the C.E.O. of P.R.T.C., had the audacious idea of wiring every home and business in Jackson and Owsley Counties with high-speed fibre-optic cable. Gabbard, who is in his sixties, is deceptively easygoing, with a honeyed drawl and a geographically misplaced affection for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He grew up in McKee and attended Eastern Kentucky University, thirty-five miles down Route 421; he lives with his wife, a retired social worker, in a house next door to the one in which he grew up. "I've spent my whole life here," he said. "I'm used to people leaving for college and never coming back. The ones who didn't go to college stayed. But the best and the brightest have often left because they felt like they didn't have a choice." When Gabbard returned to his home town after college, in 1976, he took an entry-level job at the telephone cooperative. "I had this degree in business management that I thought was really cool, but I got a job answering the phones," he said. "At the time, we were all on party lines, and everybody was calling and complaining about somebody on their line and they couldn't get the phone. I was taking those complaints. And I remember thinking that, once we got everyone their own lines, we won't have any more problems. I didn't have a clue what was coming."
Keith Gabbard, the C.E.O. of P.R.T.C., had the audacious idea of wiring every home and business in Jackson and Owsley Counties with high-speed fibre-optic cable. Gabbard, who is in his sixties, is deceptively easygoing, with a honeyed drawl and a geographically misplaced affection for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He grew up in McKee and attended Eastern Kentucky University, thirty-five miles down Route 421; he lives with his wife, a retired social worker, in a house next door to the one in which he grew up. "I've spent my whole life here," he said. "I'm used to people leaving for college and never coming back. The ones who didn't go to college stayed. But the best and the brightest have often left because they felt like they didn't have a choice." When Gabbard returned to his home town after college, in 1976, he took an entry-level job at the telephone cooperative. "I had this degree in business management that I thought was really cool, but I got a job answering the phones," he said. "At the time, we were all on party lines, and everybody was calling and complaining about somebody on their line and they couldn't get the phone. I was taking those complaints. And I remember thinking that, once we got everyone their own lines, we won't have any more problems. I didn't have a clue what was coming."
Damn commies (Score:5, Interesting)
Somebody shut them down before people get the idea that communal control of the means of production beats greed driven, unregulated capitalism.
The Internet isn't our only form of communication (Score:1)
The word "access" was elided.
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There is no such thing as "fast internet" or "some internet." The Internet is not a liquid. It is not a measurable quantity. It is a system that spans the earth. It is an abstract concept. Imbecile chimp. This is what happens when the sweaty crowds of proles take over.
This reminds me of teaching "new to the business" people, aka newbies. I tell newbies I'm teaching network concepts to think of data like water. You can direct how the ones and zeros flow around your network, just like you can control in house water pipes. There are different sized "pipes" for data, just like different sized pipes in a home for water. When you get to businesses, it gets even more complex. Your Internet "mains" are purchased at a specific throughput, which may necessitate QoS to ensure smoot
Re:Damn commies (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't believe me you can look at the articles of incorporation [ky.gov] for the entity. Surprise, surprise, it's a run of the mill utility company. The Midwest is full of tiny rural telephone cooperatives just like it.
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Sorry, but the articles of incorporation mean nothing, every corporate charter, profit or non-profit, created in the last 100 years says the same thing. We would need to look at the corporate bylaws to determine the corporate structure. If they say they are a cooperative, I believe them. But hey, it's not that hard to look up the actual bylaws. https://www.prtcnet.com/about/... [prtcnet.com]
Oh hey, look! You are totally wrong.
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In looking at their site f
Re:Damn commies (Score:5, Informative)
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Yes, I see that now. Unfortunately, this PRTC does not publish their bylaws online, I looked after my mistake was pointed out. Thanks for the civil correction!
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I'm not sure what you're on about. It's a pretty standard organizational framework. I grew up with a rural water cooperative that worked the same way. It's "communal" only in that the people who use it buy into it, pay dues, and elect officers who have the authority to approach banks for loans.
Co-ops aren't much different from a country club.
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Right, those who use it elect the board, that is exactly what I mean by control of the means of production, what do you think that phrase means?
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You brought communism into the discussion, not me. "Control of the means of production" outside of a communist context doesn't mean much. A Co-op isn't communism. It isn't anything like communism. Under your seemingly lax definitions, an S-corp with an employee profit sharing plan is a Marxist-Leninist utopia.
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Control over the means of production is better than private control of the means of production. Unlike some, my love of democracy does not end at the ballot box.
Call it whatever you like, for me, the results are what count. And here, we see once again that when you remove the profit motive and give people control over the goods, services, and institutions they use, the outcomes are far superior to when you let unaccountable rent-seekers control those things.
An s-corp with a profit sharing plan, or even most
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I think what you are talking about is more in line with 'Distributism' then communism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Communism is a 'political' system where all means of production are taken under the control of a central bureaucracy.
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Huh, I thought communism was "a social program that benefits people I don't like." At least, that's how it is used here in the good old USA.
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Actual communism includes not having a government. What we have here is a form of socialism.
Socialism takes many forms, from libertarian and anarchist to totalitarianism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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They could be similar or they may not.. We won't know until you can find the correct bylaws of the Cooperative in Kentucky.
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Damn it, you are correct. The Kentucky PRTC does not have their bylaws online. Well, I stand by the statement that I believe them when they say they are a cooperative. I just don't have any proof. However, most states do have laws preventing non cooperatives from calling themselves that.
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I moderated you up for owning up to your mistake.
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I moderated you up for owning up to your mistake.
How do you do that, once you've commented?
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Well... Except "You cannot moderate a thread that you've commented in ". Sorry about that.
I had moderate up and commented before I saw the error message below his comment.
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Sorry about that.
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Well, I stand by the statement that I believe them when they say they are a cooperative. I just don't have any proof.
If you actually bothered to read the articles of incorporation that I linked to, it spells out that they're a cooperative in that document. That still doesn't change the fact that they're a private entity. A cooperative isn't the same thing as some kind of nationalized public system. No one is required to join the cooperative if they don't wish to and the cooperative is not required to provide service to non-members.
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You are right, it's not communist. It's socialist.
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Socialism does not necessarily mean government or nationalized. It just means owned by the people or community or workers and socialism of this type works quite well as long as no authoritarians get involved.
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Incorporation is used to make surer the liability of the organization doesn't fall directly on one or a few people.
I own a second house, I am not incorporated. Say I rent my house to someone then they got injured in my property I personally is legally responsible for their safety. So the lawsuit could mean I loose my house, my car, the home I may be living in as well.
If I incorporated this house, and someone gets injured. I personally wouldn't get sued, but my incorporation and the incorporation may have
Re:Damn commies (Score:5, Insightful)
communal control of the means of production beats greed driven, unregulated capitalism.
It's a good thing you don't need communism to have cooperative ownership in a business.
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Cooperative ownership of the means of production is communism, or close enough for me and most people who want an alternative to private ownership by absentee owners who have no interest in the business except profit.
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Cooperative ownership of the means of production is communism
No, communism is where you forcibly exclude any other means of production.
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No it isn't, communism is when people voluntarily work together and pool their resources, something that can work quite well on a small scale (about a hundred people seems to be the maximum size). Don't mistake totalitarian dictatorships that call themselves communist as being the same thing.
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Buy your logic, the stock market is communism. As each share is a part of a cooperative ownership in a company.
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Should have been more clear I meant collective control over the means of production through some sort of one natural person, one vote system. Ownership is itself a capitalist concept.
Re:Damn commies (Score:5, Insightful)
VOLUNTARY co-ops work well, and are a valuable and important part of a vibrant capitalist economy.
Other types of co-ops centralize power so heavily they disadvantage (specifically the impingement on personal freedom) outweigh the advantages, partially because there is nothing to keep the power of the leaders in check. If co-ops are voluntary and crappy, people just stop being involved.
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Any large organization needs to keep the power of leaders in check. With huge multinationals, the average person has no means of exercising control whatsoever. And it is very hard to just leave, oh, say Comcast or your local for profit utility company. All multi-national corporations consolidate power to an insane degree and impinge on the personal freedom of citizens world wide.
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Agreed, which is a good argument for breaking up large corporation and changing corporate laws to better avoid monopolies. It is not a argument for eliminating the right to personal property ( aka communism).
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What's wrong with people voluntarily eliminating the right to personal property?
The problem isn't socialism or capitalism, the problem is authoritarianism.
Re:Damn commies (Score:4)
Now the job is convincing people that just because you take something that works out of the communist/socialist playbook doesn't mean you support every last thing the CCCP ever did.
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Thank you for this reasoned and nuanced reply. For anyone interested in such hybrid economies, take a look at the Mondragon Corporation in Spain and how this network of independent cooperatives took the Basque region from rural hinterland to industrial powerhouse in less than a generation. It's voluntary, and embedded in a capitalist economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.mondragon-corporat... [mondragon-...ration.com]
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There's similar successes in Northern Italy. On the other hand, there is what happened during the Spanish civil war where the Stalinist's showed up and fucked things up.
As usual, the real problem is authoritarians who want to control others.
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It isn't Communist Socialism if you are directly benefiting from it, then it is a public works project, or a shared ownership co-op.
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Right, I forgot, it's only commie socialism if it benefits the poors, or the minorities, or women, or some other group that God and nature intended for a life of service to their betters. /s
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Might be, if you bite, but "bait" implies I don't believe what I'm saying. I do, and am currently defending my position. Got anything to add, or just trying to poison the well?
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This is not fair to the private businesses. They have millions of dollars invested in buying politicians, sponsoring legislation and preventing anyone else from building in their territory (even though they won't serve it). And now someone with public funds steps in and actually builds something! There oughta be a law!
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There is a law, and Comcast wrote it.
https://broadbandnow.com/repor... [broadbandnow.com]
https://www.vice.com/en_us/art... [vice.com]
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]
I have fiber internet and no traffic lights (Score:5, Interesting)
We do have several stop signs and a school zone, but no traffic lights.
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Welcome to the U S of A.
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I think they have their priorities wrong.
I think they have dueling priorities... Fast Porn and Religion..
Who knew (Score:2)
That providing infrastructure for a small town is different than entire country with areas of sparse population? I'm all for these smaller self serving companies but Comcast is paying off the feds to make it illegal.
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Great....well, unless you're a taxpayer (Score:1, Informative)
"With twenty million dollars borrowed from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and twenty-five million dollars in Obama-era stimulusâ"some of it a grant and some of it a loanâ"P.R.T.C. pulled a thousand miles of cable, to all seven thousand structures in the county. "
As a US taxpayer, that's fucking bullshit.
Let's remember that "government money" comes from other people's pockets.
$45 million to put gigabit broadband in Nowheresville KY? So - speaking roughly - every one of the 50 states each pitc
Re:Great....well, unless you're a taxpayer (Score:5, Informative)
And "loans"...yeah, those are going to get paid back, I'm sure. Why would the AGRICULTURE dept be loaning money for broadband anyway? How does this have anything (meaningful) to do with Agriculture?
Congress decided the USDA has a regional development role and wrote that into the CFR and telephone infrastructure falls under that. They do things that have very little to do with agriculture, including providing software services such as payroll/hr, for a fee, to other agencies.
Re:Great....well, unless you're a taxpayer (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm fine with spending our collective resources on something that is a net benefit to society. Be it economic benefit or social benefit. If the choice was between no YouTube and really fast Internet. That little town could benefit from better access to mainstream society, and reasonable arguments could be made to give children and the elderly sufficient broadband access.
If we could have saved some money with slightly slower Internet access for that town, then sure why not? But when you install the last mile there isn't much cost difference between burying some copper wire and burying some fiber, as the trenching and equipment tends to dominate costs. Hopefully someone made the cost-benefit analysis and went with the technology that would not need to be replaced for a long time, in order to be a net savings. If we live in a democracy both the accounting information and decision making record should be readily available as part of transparent governance.
irredeemable (Score:1)
Good to know that it's time to give up on them. I'll write Trump to let him know to use that county above ground nuclear weapons testing.
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I would agree with you, but improving the access for these 4500 people isn't a benefit to "society".
It helps them, sure, absolutely. If they had collectively decided that they would pitch in and drop $45 million for their community, I'd be the first one to say "hooray! democracy.
Taking from 330 million to give 4500 people a boutique thing that 250 million don't have either? Why?
Not a good allocation of resources (Score:2)
P.R.T.C. was initially five million dollars short of what it cost to wire the last, most remote residences with fibre-optic broadband; profits from Appalachian Wireless supplied the remaining capital that it needed to finish the job. "Our board and staff, we really wanted to do it all," Gabbard said. "We wanted everyone to have the same thing."
I'm sure they had a solid sense of completeness when the job was done. But it doesn't always make sense to provide remote locations with the same level of service as densely-populated locations.
I've been to remote, tiny communities in Canada that are not reachable by road. If it makes economic sense to build a road to those communities at all, you start with an unpaved road, not a broad, beautiful concrete thoroughfare with all the amenities. Later, if the amount of traffic warrants, you upgrade to a pav
Re:Great....well, unless you're a taxpayer (Score:5, Insightful)
Well that sounds familiar somehow.
Rural electrification act? Spending millions of federal dollars just so rural hicks don't need to use kerosene lanterns? How on EARTH does that make any economic sense whatsoever? What, are farmers going to power their tractors with electricity? ABSURD!
By the way, that 'gigabit' broadband refers to link speed, not data rates.
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I know you're trying to be clever, but the REA came from a recognition that what, 96%+ of the rest of the country was electrified and this was an effort to cover that last persistent 4% where economics couldn't justify coverage. In effect it was saying "we the 96% are willing to spend some $ to get you up to the rest of us".
That's a pretty huge difference to handing 10 gigabit connections to some tiny podunk town at a cost of $45 million when barely 25% of the rest of the US has access to fiber connections
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It's not about affordability. As many people have pointed out, fiber is no more expensive to install than phone and electric lines, and nobody complains about those being pulled to rural areas. At this point it should be considered basic grid infrastructure - it's certainly more relevant in this century than landline phones - and where it's not available it's by choice. Most developed countries are working toward full coverage. Even Russia and China have better FTTH coverage than the US: https://www.statist [statista.com]
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Then why did they need $45 million from the federal government to implement it?
Why not just pull fiber, etc in the course of normal maintenance and replacement operations?
Look, you may be perfectly willing to donate $100 or whatever so that random person from somewhere can have something you can't afford personally. That's great. But don't take tax dollars out of my pocket (effectively at the barrel of a gun) and then borrow $ from China that my kids have to pay back, for your act of charity.
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...every one of the 50 states each pitched in roughly $1 million so some podunk town can have a phat pipe? ... How on EARTH does that make any economic sense whatsoever?
My town, 20 miles west of the Washington D.C. beltway, has no internet service. A neighborhood got together, each homeowner pitching in $10,000, and ran the line to connect to Comcast.
So, yeah, free stuff would be nice. I'm guessing their representative sits on a powerful committee in congress.
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The loans are low interest. How much interest does the government pay? Zero point what percent?
Just because the likes of Comcast make money hand over fist doesn't mean that's the only way. The P.R.T.C. is a non-profit corporation.
Re:Great....well, unless you're a taxpayer (Score:4, Informative)
"With twenty million dollars borrowed from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and twenty-five million dollars in Obama-era stimulusâ"some of it a grant and some of it a loanâ"P.R.T.C. pulled a thousand miles of cable, to all seven thousand structures in the county. "
And 88.87% [wikipedia.org] of them voted for Trump. There was literally only one county in Kentucky that had a higher percentage of Trump voters in 2016. In 2012, 86.15% [wikipedia.org] of them voted for Romney. Again, literally only one county in Kentucky had a higher percentage of Romney voters. (It was the same county.) As an out-of-state taxpayer, I want my fucking money back.
This is one of the places where "KEEP GOVT OUT OF MY MEDICARE" signs come from.
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don't worry! once the hipsters realize there's a place with gigabit fiber and really, really cheap land, you'll have more hipsters and baristas than you can shake a stick at.
Building infrastructure tends to do things like that; be it roads, ports, or in this case: broadband access.
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They'll probably fit right in...
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It's socialism, it doesn't have to make economic sense.
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Let's remember that "government money" comes from other people's pockets.
$45 million to put gigabit broadband in Nowheresville KY? So - speaking roughly - every one of the 50 states each pitched in roughly $1 million so some podunk town can have a phat pipe?
Why? How on EARTH does that make any economic sense whatsoever?
We had this discussion a long time ago as well. With what? Rural Electrification. Oh and POTS lines had a charge so that rural customers could get phones.
I don't have a problem with this, in fact I'd like to see a whole program putting this in EVERY county, in every state. You don't think data services are useful to farmers? I have a cousin that installs PLC systems in various types of farms for both herd management and other agricultural purposes like crops/equipment management.
However, since the ru
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However, since the rurals tend to vote for Republicans it seems like they should practice what they preach.
And the city dwelling socialists should practice what they preach and not deride the rednecks when they dare to want internet access too. You see, country folk understand that when leftist politicians talk about equality, they don't mean equality for the people in flyover country. The thread starter called the town "Nowheresville KY". Tell me how you would vote if the left talked that way about you.
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Why would the AGRICULTURE dept be loaning money for broadband anyway? How does this have anything (meaningful) to do with Agriculture?
Even as a liberal city dweller, I can figure out lots of reasons why broadband is important to farming, but don't let that get in the way of your anti-government ranting.
I wish... (Score:2)
I own a house on a sheep farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they only thing keeping me from moving there is zero broadband. I can get Hughes Satellite, but that's complete shit and doesn't work when it's cloudy and there are very low data caps. They so badly oversold their bandwidth that the nearest neighbors who use Hughes get dial-up speeds at best. The WISPs don't make it over the tree line and of course there is no DSL. Even US Cellular won't make any promises, even though I get cell phone servic
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i'm in a very similar boat; (PNW, about 12 miles from the nearest 'town' of 7k people) We're using a sprint hotspot which is flaky, but semi-passable. Basically we'll get ~200KB/s, then for no apparent reason, it completely loses connectivity. And then a minute later it reconnects.. quite curious indeed.
Overall though living in the country is absolutely worth the lack of netflix, hulu, or amazon prime. Hopefully starlink works as well Musk hints at. He'd never exaggerate, right?
Have you priced out how muc
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I'd be happy to put up a mast, but the providers tell me there's no guarantee it would work even then. If you look on a coverage map, there is a tiny sliver of grey in Southwest Virginia just below the West Virginia border. If you weren't looking for it, you wouldn't notice it, that's how tiny it is. That grey is
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then for no apparent reason, it completely loses connectivity. And then a minute later it reconnects.. quite curious indeed.
You sure your not on comcast?
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Man... we dropped comcast the second we moved (oh i relished FINALLY having that conversation. I"m not even sure i finished loading the uhaul before calling). But as far as connectivity goes, they're way better than sprint.
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I wish there was some option. Who knows how long it'll take Elon Musk to ruin the night sky with low earth orbit satellites.
It will take less than 14 months before Starlink can provide service to the continental US. And you won't notice a single satellite in the sky. So quit whining.
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You may not notice it, but according to most reports, anyone who looks at the night sky will notice it, especially if you have any interest in astronomy or photography. One of the reasons I want to move out there is to get dark skies. Do you really think for a second that Elon cares whether or not he messes that up?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/1... [nytimes.com]
audacious??? Hardly (Score:3)
I live in Iowa, also a very rural state. We literally have tens of coops around the state that have done the exact same thing providing FTTP. These rural coops have access to government funding and low interest loans to build these networks.
This isn't new. This has been going on for many years now.
Rural guy on the other end of the state here. (Score:3, Interesting)
Here in Nebraska too (Score:1)
Yeah, well one state over.... (Score:2)
In Tennessee they've got Sen. Marsha Blackburn who is in the ISP's pockets. She's against Net Neutrality, and supported bills that restrict municipalities from creating their own broadband networks, and wrote a bill to prevent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from preempting state laws that blocked municipal broadband.
She's a real .