Okay, whatever about ADSL2+, why on earth would anyone still be doing ADSL1? Are they buying the DSLAMs off eBay? Like, I'm legitimately surprised that they can still get the equipment; you'd think it'd be cheaper just to go to ADSL2+.
10 years ago I had ADSL2+ at home (basically due to planning issues; traditionally, urban phone stuff had been hidden underground, and the telecom was having trouble getting planning for VDSL street cabs), and that felt like living in the past back then. ADSL1, today, is absurd.
With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. That said, I've always felt satellite internet to be yucky but I'm used to "satellite internet" adding 1000ms to your latency and uploads that actually run over your telephone line.
I am curious if good satellite internet will lead to an exodus of people from cities and subdivisions. I actually live in my current house because the place I wanted to build on didn't have any form of internet access.
Also, I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago.
> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money. That said, I've always felt satellite internet to be yucky but I'm used to "satellite internet" adding 1000ms to your latency and uploads that actually run over your telephone line.
Depends on what you declare a "good expenditure of money".
The thing about running fiber is that it's not particularly expensive to do. dig trench, install infrastructure, rebury it. Hell, if you have a utility pole, you can omit steps 1 and 3, so long as you're okay with the line being exposed to the elements.
Launching satellites is very expensive to do. There are very high barriers to entry that prevent meaningful competition from occurring for satellite internet providers, which is why HughesNet was crap for all of those years. It took NASA funding a commercial crew program to get a rocket built that could put payload in LEO for "cheap", and there's only two or three options that can reasonably be expected to operate that way.
I'd rather have a lot of competition for installing and operating fiber infrastructure than having an effective duopoly for running performant satellite internet.
I'm under no delusions that will occur in rural areas under the present regime in DC.
As for an exodus from cities and suburbs, no. There's no amount of internet speed that would make me move to a place where there's reduced services and infrastructure in every other category, like schools, hospitals (this is a big one), water, sewer, transit, etc. and there are millions more like me.
Satellite internet has its place but it's never going to be dominant. Any area with high density is better served by wires, and any area with medium density is better served by a combination of wires and cellular internet. Satellite only make economic sense for the truly remote; the astronomical and recurring infrastructure costs are just killer (Starlink satellites last for 5 years, buried fiber lasts for 50 at least (while providing better latency and throughput)).
> Also, I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago.
I mean, this is basically it. For paying bills, doing school work, messaging, getting news, etc the options these days are affordable and very convenient. Even video calling and streaming videos doesn't really affect my data plan too much.
The only advantage of a hardline to your house is if you are going to do copious amounts of high-def streaming or you need a very stable connection. More of a luxury/hobby resource.
> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money.
That was the same excuse used when nobody wanted to wire rural America for electricity. It was a bad take then and a worse take now.
Wiring those homes with single-mode fiber once will provide modern broadband for at least the next 50 years, if not longer.
Satellite is not and will never be a replacement for fiber.
Is internet access really the main determining factor for where people want to live? I know some people really dislike cities, but there are plenty of reasons to live in one if noise and crowds aren't dealbreakers.
> cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago
That doesn't work well in mountainous areas, which are often rural. There are three towers within a couple of miles of my house, but nothing close to line of sight to any of them. ~1/4 mile away I can get full service, but I have none at all at home.
Luckily Comcast / Xfinity rewired our little town a few years ago so we don't have to rely on satellite (not great during the heavy snowstorms and thunderstorms we get). I'd love to use cellular as a backup as we have 3~20 full days of blackouts per year (most of us have generators and/or batteries) and Xfinity goes down 80-90 minutes after a blackout starts.
> Also, I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago
Unfortunately very much not true. The US is a very large and sparsely populated place. As far as cell and broadband service goes, much of West Virginia, huge chunks of PA, upstate NY, and Maine all have limited or no cell service. In the Midwest the communication infrastructure is often delivered by community co-ops, not corporations, that also deliver electric power. And dont get me started on the vast Western states.
The US has, frankly, an absolutely ludicrous patchwork of providers and infrastructure for telephone, power, and broadband. It looks reasonably peachy when you drive on the Interstate but get off there and youll see how limited it is.
Sat internet would really help people get from zero to 1, but that said, its still kinda crappy compared to fiber. Having the bird in range for 15 minutes until you have to handover to the next bird is not conducive to smooth, glitch free Internet.
> I am curious if good satellite internet will lead to an exodus of people from cities and subdivisions
You seem to be imprinting wireline capacity onto satellite. This will always be an error. A core facet of satellite is it's inherent limited capacity. This has always been the case and no tech is on the horizon that will change this.
Cell phones general do not work in rural areas unless you are very lucky or go climb the highest peak that happens to be in direct line of sight of a tower.
> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money.
A number of replies here explain how deploying wireline is absolutely a good expenditure of money.
Once you have read them, will you then understand?
Contrarian opinion: What exactly is the point of "fast" internet?
Most people use the internet for entertainment, people can survive watching Netflix at 1080p/720p, it isn't debilitating.
If I'm wrong in my assessment, give me use cases where you require fast internet in a rural area.
If the question is cost, I don't see how laying fiber and equipment for hundreds, if not, thousands of miles is a solution to reducing cost (unless it's subsidized by the government).
Spending billions on mostly "entertainment" is a waste.
You mean the FCC was actually trying before? /sarcasm
In all seriousness, we’ve poured billions of dollars into broadband expansion efforts since the early 2000s. Every single time it’s been largely hoovered up by Big Telecoms, failed to expand broadband/improve speeds/lower prices, and basically just gone right to their bottom line as a subsidy.
The solution all along has been funding municipal broadband as the baseline for private enterprise to compete against and surpass, but lobbyists have all but killed that dead up until the past ten years or so. You can’t treat broadband as a utility in legal language but not in practice, yet the USA seems perfectly fine with their status quo leaving them a laughing stock of the developed world.
No, they didn’t. They decided not to raise the definition of broadband from 100×20 Mbps up to 1Gps.
And that’s simply because 100Mbps is actually a lot of bandwidth. We just don’t have any killer applications that need more than 20Mbps. 4K streaming on Netflix, to pick one salient example, only requires 16Mbps. At 100Mbps you can download a 50GB game in just 80 minutes. Sure, it would be nice to have 1Gbps and download the game in 8 minutes, but the definition is about _minimum requirements_, not things that are _nice to have_.
As such the definition we have is actually a good one! If every American had broadband according to this definition we will have actually made real progress. Nobody would be stuck on DSL any more, let alone dialup.
The FCC is still giving grants to anyone who is installing actual broadband in unserved areas, which means anyone installing cable or fiber in areas that don’t have them. It’s just not requiring that every customer have 1Gbps service in order to qualify.
With everything that has been happening maybe that is a good thing. We don't need even more people becoming radicalized, becoming flat earthers or pushing raw milk in public schools.
It seems like an increased executive mandate on the telcos is an odd thing to cheer for, and im not convinced a mandate from FCC is really necessary any more. The fiber installation (networking, boring, marketing) industry has dramatically expanded, and I would expect telcos to continue installation of fiber to new markets since it's so much cheaper to manage than copper. with the ubiquity of 5g cell networks, the amount of fiber extended in the last decade, and the vast improvements of sat-net... is there a need for every property in the US to receive a fiber connection?
FCC isnt giving on up broadband, its cancelling its mandate for expansion, and likely going to delete the cash payouts to telcos as well? The FCC never delivered on AFFORDABLE... telcos have raked it in on that front.
I have family in very rural east texas. They have 1Gps bidirectional at the hands of EasTex Co-Op spending federal dollars to actually lay fiber across their service area.
Lots of them took the money and ran, some jammed it into real infrastructure.
There's finally competition in the US home broadband market...
*Fixed Wireless players*
T-Mobile, Verizon and ATT (tho later two isn't widely available)
*Low Orbit Satellite Internet*
Starlink
*Home Wired Connections*
Comcast, Charter, etc
I've been bouncing my cell phone service and home broadband around every year per the all the good promotions. Recently on a $40 a month Comcast home broadband (300Mbps) with one free line of unlimited data cell/data service promo. Previously was paying $100 to T-Mobile for Unlimited cell/data service and their fixed wireless service.
We are much better nowadays for affordability then a few years ago!
46 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 60.1 ms ] thread10 years ago I had ADSL2+ at home (basically due to planning issues; traditionally, urban phone stuff had been hidden underground, and the telecom was having trouble getting planning for VDSL street cabs), and that felt like living in the past back then. ADSL1, today, is absurd.
I am curious if good satellite internet will lead to an exodus of people from cities and subdivisions. I actually live in my current house because the place I wanted to build on didn't have any form of internet access.
Also, I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago.
Depends on what you declare a "good expenditure of money".
The thing about running fiber is that it's not particularly expensive to do. dig trench, install infrastructure, rebury it. Hell, if you have a utility pole, you can omit steps 1 and 3, so long as you're okay with the line being exposed to the elements.
Launching satellites is very expensive to do. There are very high barriers to entry that prevent meaningful competition from occurring for satellite internet providers, which is why HughesNet was crap for all of those years. It took NASA funding a commercial crew program to get a rocket built that could put payload in LEO for "cheap", and there's only two or three options that can reasonably be expected to operate that way.
I'd rather have a lot of competition for installing and operating fiber infrastructure than having an effective duopoly for running performant satellite internet.
I'm under no delusions that will occur in rural areas under the present regime in DC.
As for an exodus from cities and suburbs, no. There's no amount of internet speed that would make me move to a place where there's reduced services and infrastructure in every other category, like schools, hospitals (this is a big one), water, sewer, transit, etc. and there are millions more like me.
I mean, this is basically it. For paying bills, doing school work, messaging, getting news, etc the options these days are affordable and very convenient. Even video calling and streaming videos doesn't really affect my data plan too much.
The only advantage of a hardline to your house is if you are going to do copious amounts of high-def streaming or you need a very stable connection. More of a luxury/hobby resource.
That was the same excuse used when nobody wanted to wire rural America for electricity. It was a bad take then and a worse take now.
Wiring those homes with single-mode fiber once will provide modern broadband for at least the next 50 years, if not longer.
Satellite is not and will never be a replacement for fiber.
That doesn't work well in mountainous areas, which are often rural. There are three towers within a couple of miles of my house, but nothing close to line of sight to any of them. ~1/4 mile away I can get full service, but I have none at all at home.
Luckily Comcast / Xfinity rewired our little town a few years ago so we don't have to rely on satellite (not great during the heavy snowstorms and thunderstorms we get). I'd love to use cellular as a backup as we have 3~20 full days of blackouts per year (most of us have generators and/or batteries) and Xfinity goes down 80-90 minutes after a blackout starts.
Unfortunately very much not true. The US is a very large and sparsely populated place. As far as cell and broadband service goes, much of West Virginia, huge chunks of PA, upstate NY, and Maine all have limited or no cell service. In the Midwest the communication infrastructure is often delivered by community co-ops, not corporations, that also deliver electric power. And dont get me started on the vast Western states.
The US has, frankly, an absolutely ludicrous patchwork of providers and infrastructure for telephone, power, and broadband. It looks reasonably peachy when you drive on the Interstate but get off there and youll see how limited it is.
Sat internet would really help people get from zero to 1, but that said, its still kinda crappy compared to fiber. Having the bird in range for 15 minutes until you have to handover to the next bird is not conducive to smooth, glitch free Internet.
You seem to be imprinting wireline capacity onto satellite. This will always be an error. A core facet of satellite is it's inherent limited capacity. This has always been the case and no tech is on the horizon that will change this.
Restated otherwise: You are not aware of the millions of Americans whose cell signal is weak to non-existent in places they routinely spend time at.
A number of replies here explain how deploying wireline is absolutely a good expenditure of money.
Once you have read them, will you then understand?
Then you clearly don't know anyone who lives in a rural area, because much of the US still doesn't have good cell coverage.
Most people use the internet for entertainment, people can survive watching Netflix at 1080p/720p, it isn't debilitating. If I'm wrong in my assessment, give me use cases where you require fast internet in a rural area.
If the question is cost, I don't see how laying fiber and equipment for hundreds, if not, thousands of miles is a solution to reducing cost (unless it's subsidized by the government).
Spending billions on mostly "entertainment" is a waste.
900mbps symmetric, $25/month fiber. The fiber run was subsidized/possibly entirely funded by EU money.
> EU support to rural revitalisation through broadband roll-out and smart solutions
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/eu-support-rur...
In all seriousness, we’ve poured billions of dollars into broadband expansion efforts since the early 2000s. Every single time it’s been largely hoovered up by Big Telecoms, failed to expand broadband/improve speeds/lower prices, and basically just gone right to their bottom line as a subsidy.
The solution all along has been funding municipal broadband as the baseline for private enterprise to compete against and surpass, but lobbyists have all but killed that dead up until the past ten years or so. You can’t treat broadband as a utility in legal language but not in practice, yet the USA seems perfectly fine with their status quo leaving them a laughing stock of the developed world.
And that’s simply because 100Mbps is actually a lot of bandwidth. We just don’t have any killer applications that need more than 20Mbps. 4K streaming on Netflix, to pick one salient example, only requires 16Mbps. At 100Mbps you can download a 50GB game in just 80 minutes. Sure, it would be nice to have 1Gbps and download the game in 8 minutes, but the definition is about _minimum requirements_, not things that are _nice to have_.
As such the definition we have is actually a good one! If every American had broadband according to this definition we will have actually made real progress. Nobody would be stuck on DSL any more, let alone dialup.
The FCC is still giving grants to anyone who is installing actual broadband in unserved areas, which means anyone installing cable or fiber in areas that don’t have them. It’s just not requiring that every customer have 1Gbps service in order to qualify.
Instead it's rules for thee and not for shitty massive telecoms. Hypocrisy is too light a word.
FCC isnt giving on up broadband, its cancelling its mandate for expansion, and likely going to delete the cash payouts to telcos as well? The FCC never delivered on AFFORDABLE... telcos have raked it in on that front.
In other words, seems like a non-event?
We need to put down a law to force network infrastructure companies to compete, like European nations, if we truly want change.
It was just more corporate welfare.
Lots of them took the money and ran, some jammed it into real infrastructure.
*Fixed Wireless players*
T-Mobile, Verizon and ATT (tho later two isn't widely available)
*Low Orbit Satellite Internet*
Starlink
*Home Wired Connections*
Comcast, Charter, etc
I've been bouncing my cell phone service and home broadband around every year per the all the good promotions. Recently on a $40 a month Comcast home broadband (300Mbps) with one free line of unlimited data cell/data service promo. Previously was paying $100 to T-Mobile for Unlimited cell/data service and their fixed wireless service.
We are much better nowadays for affordability then a few years ago!