Simple. Let them get government handouts, by being nationalized.
Make necessary infrastructure municipal utilities… Water, gas, electric, telephone, Internet… If you need it to participate in society, it shouldn’t have a profit motive attached, period.
In the early 2000s iirc they were given billions to build out rural broadband. They kept it. Rural broadband still doesn’t exist to speak of.
We did the same for urban fiber. It’s never materialized, either. And, the USDA has been providing funding and loans for rural broadband for quite awhile.
It’s almost like the foxes are running the hen house, as the old saying goes.
I’ve read there’s lots of “dark” fiber in cities, but I don’t know if it’s true. I do know that AT&T has a fiber line that runs through my neighborhood, yet I can’t get fiber internet. Really stupid.
I do know that AT&T has a fiber line that runs through my neighborhood, yet I can’t get fiber internet
The local exchange carriers (LECs) typically change from plain olds telephone system (POTS) to fiber at the neighborhood level. Coax carriers also.
Fiber to the neighborhood is already there. It’s not hard to run a line across a neighborhood to connect whatever on either side.
The difficult part is getting from a neighborhood connection to each individual home. It’s a flower pot install on each property, all connected together underground, and it can’t fuck with gas, water, sewer, etc.
It’s also not hard to use that fibre connection to the neighbourhood to provide DSL. That’s precisely what it’s made for: Use that copper last mile and have whatever on the upstream side. And there’s plenty of DSL hardware that doubles as POTS and/or ISDN hardware, you can upgrade the whole neighbourhood to “DSL available” by installing such a thing, connecting all the lines to it, and then remotely activating DSL when people sign up.
Over here they’re actually moving away from that, opting for voip instead and using DSL over the whole frequency spectrum.
As soon as those decades old and severely degraded copper lines are replaced in all of those old neighborhoods where fiber is slowest to roll out, DSL can provide a higher cost and subpar service on a deprecated standard. That’s exactly what we need with a surplus of capacity on modern hardware already deployed in the field.
We’ll all have broadband in no time if they’d just listen to you.
American taxpayer is always paying for major CapEx for most industries then turn around and price gouge us.
Most amercians see to be fine with it since they live in a free market economy where private sector funds investment.
And in the late 2000’s. And again a few years later. And as of last year they, the FCC is once again throwing money at them without any real oversight. I worked for a ISP in 2010 and we couldn’t get any of the money because a bank had first lean on the company USDA demanded that before any money could be approved. AT&T got money for our area and their footprint shrank the next year when they cut off dial-up customers in the area.
Kill your ISPs. They are more trouble than they are worth.
We need to stop giving money to ISPs. Give the money to municipalities so they can offer municipal broadband.
But municipals don’t have lobbyists to write laws and buy politicians.
Can confirm, my ISP is fiber out in a rural area, run by the rural electric company from a couple counties over and it’s pretty decent. Not top of the line stuff, offers either 100 megabit or 1 gigabit symmetrical for a home plan, but it’s much better than the fixed point wireless that was the best previous option and maxed out at 100 down/20 up for the highest tier plan, and that was only if you could get clear line of sight to the transmitter (Would sometimes go down if it was raining hard or it was windy or something as something could block line of sight or misalign the transmitter/receiver on one end of the connection or the other)
not top of the line
1 gig symmetrical
Mf I’m over here with 100/10 dsl in a suburban market, and you’re like ‘meh could be better’ to what I am like ‘I would literally kill for that’
A competing company offers faster speeds but last time I checked, it was around $300 a month for better speeds while retaining ‘small business’ service (to sidestep data caps). My isp has gig fiber… 4 miles away… and isn’t expanding it. Kill me.
Meanwhile, in an affluent suburb of Pittsburgh, two companies are pulling new fiber, where there is already a provider and fiber lines. Why? Because of this. No one chooses Comcast unless they are the only game.
I’m surprised they’re allowed to do with with Comcast being headquartered in Philly.
Pittsburgh is like 5 hours from Philly.
I’d assume they have the whole state locked down via the state legislature.
Despite that, ISPs claim that prices for the low-cost option should be calculated based on “the economic realities of deploying and operating networks in the highest cost, hardest-to-reach areas.”
Frankly, in the hardest-to-reach areas, I’m not sure that it makes sense to subsidize terrestrial ISPs at all. Hard-to-reach rural areas are Starlink’s bread-and-butter.
