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The Internet Communications United States

Faster Internet Is Coming To America - as Soon as the Government Knows Where To Build It (wsj.com) 48

Posted by msmash from the oops dept.
The government's $42.5 billion plan to expand internet service to underserved communities is stuck in a holding pattern nearly nine months after approval, largely because authorities still don't know where gaps need to be filled. From a report: The broadband plan, part of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed by President Biden last November, stipulates that money to improve service can't be doled out until the Federal Communications Commission completes new maps showing where homes and businesses lack fast service. Lawmakers demanded new maps after flawed data in past subsidy programs caused construction projects across the country to bypass many of the Americans that they were supposed to serve. Officials warn, however, that getting the mapping right will take time.

"We understand the urgency of getting broadband out there to everyone quickly," said Alan Davidson, chief of the Department of Commerce office in charge of allocating the broadband funding. "We also know that we get one shot at this and we want to make sure we do it right." That could mean a delay in the expansion of service to people who have long struggled with slow internet. Internet providers including AT&T, Charter Communications, Comcast and Verizon have yet to include any of the 2021 infrastructure law's broadband funding in their public financial projections for the coming years. "The maps are not going to be issued from the FCC until a little bit later this year, and until that happens, the money really can't start to flow at the state level," AT&T Chief Executive John Stankey told analysts on a July conference call.
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Faster Internet Is Coming To America - as Soon as the Government Knows Where To Build It More

Faster Internet Is Coming To America - as Soon as the Government Knows Where To Build It

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  • Can they at least put the money for this into an interest bearing account of some type.

    If it is going to be sitting unused, they might as well make some interest off it, you know?

    • Government funding is like money in a crypto account. It doesn't really exist until you spend it, and even then, its existence is hypothetical.

      There's nothing to keep in an account.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      No but they're currently not paying interest on the money that the fed will borrow to fund this so there's that at least.

  • Plan of Attack (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Monday August 15, 2022 @12:35PM (#62791594)

    Step 1: Allocate money
    Step 2: Figure out how to spend the money

    Sounds like a recipe for success to me.

    • I think they've got the "how" part. They're just stuck on the "where" part.

    • Step 1: Allocate money Step 2: Figure out how to spend the money

      My knee jerk reaction was "wait, I thought we knew in our heart of hearts that there were zillions of salt-of-the-Earth Americans who didn't have fast enough network access. How do we know this without having maps already?

      • How do we know this ...

        Feedback: This is why good colonels have 'no judgement' discussions with the corporals, before meeting their general.

        The corporations tell government "we've got this" and customers tell the government "no, they haven't". It's necessary to separate the whingers from those suffering genuine hardship before reacting.

        This is why it's important to look for negative feedback on discussion sites: How do corporations respond to complaints about low-priority problems, or the situations exceeding the ability o

        • Feedback: This is why good colonels have 'no judgement' discussions with the corporals, before meeting their general.

          Sure, that's fine. But it's anecdotal, self-selected, and subject to confirmation bias. That doesn't seem like a great way to set government policy involving billions of dollars. If I were going about this, I'd want something much more systematic and quantitative first.

  • Build it here. I am poor and underserved.

  • Seems to me the internet in general is becoming more of a sales and marketing medium. There are sites I regularly visit but if I were to search a subject where I can learn something it seems most if not all sites return are sites that sell something. Or if they have some useful tutorial content it is either very brief or very general with a quick lead-in to the main purpose of that website is mainly to get me to spend money, far cry from usenet and Geocities. Laugh all you want but in those days is where in

    • Get off my lawn!!!!

    • You are witnessing the glory of capitalism! Everyone can capitalize on the internet!

      And what is with this becoming bit? it became this way over a decade ago.

    • On the bright side, the more intrinsically interwoven the concept of "Internet" and "ad service" the better the chances are the big ad companies start pushing the government to get us all faster internet. Hey, look at that! Both ads and lobbying get a win!

      That's OK. I'll kick my own ass later. Thanks.

    • I can't read through an article on the web without some bullshit popping up right over the text I am trying to read, usually an autoplaying ad video, and just pissing me off. They don't even care how much it pisses people off or how ineffective it is. On my laptop I can block this shit through various extentions, but on mobile I resort to using textise.net to get a text only version so I can actually read the article I'm trying to read. I expect this loophole to be closed soon.

      Left as is, I might as

  • Build it to my house! (Score:3)

    by kdekorte ( 8768 ) on Monday August 15, 2022 @01:34PM (#62791754)
    I have fiber 1000 feet from my house.. can you bring it down my street and serve everyone. Right now StarLink is the best I can get, but would shut it down immediately if I could get 1GB fiber in the ground.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mpercy ( 1085347 )

      Similar here. Fiber got run right up to about 1/2 mile from my house. I think a small creek stopped them from going further. We've had to build a microwave tower on our property that bounces off antennas on the water tower in town about 10 miles away. Happy to get 10MB on a good day.

      Much would change if we had even 30MB, or 100 or 300MB, let alone Gigabit fiber to the house.

    • There's high speed internet about 4 miles from my house but where I live, there is no DSL, no cable and no high speed internet. I'm stuck with satellite internet with a 10 GB data cap and a 3 megabit (not a typo) wireless canopy internet. We are known as being the area with some of the worst internet coverage in the state (and it's California).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      No, come to my rural area! :)

  • By far the most dynamic player in this space recently is Starlink, but the feds have ruled that they don't count as broadband, and so we have to continue to shovel money out to our oligopoly cable companies...

    • Re:Just Not Starlink (Score:4, Interesting)

      by belthize ( 990217 ) on Monday August 15, 2022 @01:51PM (#62791804)

      Starlink will never scale and was never intended to scale to a nation wide broadband service. They simply can't.

      I live in a rural area, I have Starlink, it replaced the ratty Centurylink DSL and then second I can get fiber I'm dumping starlink as it's already groaning under the weight.

      Starlink knows it's days are numbered, their real target are trucks, ships, trains, boats, RVs. Anything that's mobile. That's just around the corner with flat panel phased array dishes and agile satellite selection. It's the one market that is not at risk from wired connections.

      But sure, why pass up an opportunity to blame physics and market forces on the Man(tm) keeping Elon down.

      • Starlink will never beat fiber when both are available but it's not true that fiber will be available at every fixed location in the foreseeable future. Even in the US there are places where burying cable wouldn't pay off.

        I do wonder whether this bill will subsidize fiber exclusively, or Starlink, or 5G, (or a solar-powered 5G tower connected to Starlink!?) where those are the best options.

        • I've been working with the local county and the state in terms of broadband connectivity and all indications are they (Federal and state governments) really want to put in fiber with this money. Fiber is good for 40-50 years. Wireless is good for 5 to 10 before standard consumer bandwidth swamps it. So states are viewing this as a once in a generation kind of massive funding and they want to spend it on something that will be around for a generation.

          So it's true they won't put fiber everywhere but the l

      • Only 10% of Starlink is up in the sky, the service isn't bad given that. Plus are you going to pay millions of dollars per house to fiber the ultra-rural? How much do you think it would cost to wire up every cabin in the Pacific northwest?

  • It works.

    • It works.

      ...worked...
      (but at a pretty significant cost)

      RIP

      "We don't care. We don't have to. We're The Phone Company." -- Lily Tomlin as Ernestine

  • There should be a few obviously lagging areas they can start on now.

  • There's 3rd world countries with better internet infrastructure than we've got here. And don't tell me we couldn't make use of it.

  • No more analog coax, no more HFC. Fiber only. In conduit, and to each house.

    The telephone copper plant is dead, analog and HFC CATV are rapidly becoming obsolete. Fiber is the only way forward.

  • The cheaper alternative... (Score:3)

    by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Monday August 15, 2022 @02:22PM (#62791880)

    Just make illegal to create local monopolies by law.
    When not even freaking google can compete due those, it's pretty clear that there's something very painfully wrong.

  • Private companies would have already build it themselves if it were profitable.
    But we have decided the benefit to society as a whole outweighs the quite substantial $42billion cost.
    Remember that the next time you criticize something as socialist.

  • Only in America (Score:3)

    by sentiblue ( 3535839 ) on Monday August 15, 2022 @03:01PM (#62791978)
    When you get more than $40 billion dollars of budget and don't have a plucking clue what to do with it.

    • They know what to do with it, just not where.

      • Thanks of the clarification... but to me it still sounds like they don't know what to do with the money. Weren't they supposed to make the study and find out the "where" before even requesting for the budget? I mean if they don't know where, how do they do how much it's going to cost right?

  • They need faster ass-porn.

  • Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Frontier, et. al. are caught in the horns of a dilemma. They've been willfully lying about their broadband coverage for years, on government filings no less. They've been claiming an entire zip code has broadband when exactly one house in the entire zip code has it. The infrastructure money is bait. If they want it, they have to tell the government where they need to install it. Which is in places they've been telling the government it already is. The lying, thieving big IS

    • The granulatity of FCC Form 477 data is at the *census block* level, which is a _lot_ more granular than ZIP codes.

      That said, according to the Form 477 data, my census block (107 people in northern Elbonia^H^H^HFlorida) is "served" with 200Mbps broadband. Of course, that's to the folks living right next to the DSLAM. Meanwhile, where I live, about 1.5 miles away on the other end of said census block, the best the installed-in-2014 lines will handle is 18/1.5. ...And I'm on my third modem in two weeks due

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