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Comment by Aaargh20318 | Hacker News Reader

Aaargh20318

> It's handy when the internet fails, or when you're nearing data caps, or just want to run it all day without interfering with download speeds

So basically it's useful if you have really shitty internet.

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I suppose. There's a long chain of things that can go wrong with the intertoobs. My switch could die (it has), the router could die (it has) the cable modem could die (it has), the comcast street equipment on my block could fail (it has) trees could fall on the wires (happens regularly).

I haven't had an outage in years. I've never had a switch or any network equipment die on me either. We also bury our cables here (everything except the high-voltage power distribution network) so there is no risk of trees falling on wires.

Seriously, why would you run cables on poles, that seems super fragile to me.

Well, lucky you. For the rest of the world though, Internet isn't a thing to be taken for granted. Sure it works 99% of the time, but it's not like electricity which work 99.999999% of the time, and then you have workarounds like batteries and gas tanks and stuff.

And by "rest of the world" I don't mean third world countries or something. AFAIK Internet infrastructure in the US sucks hard compared to Europe, and here in Europe the reliability of the Internet is still not good enough feel like it's electricity.

Trees cut the lines here about 1 to 4 times a year. The longest outage was 10 days, the shortest was about 3 hours. Most everyone in my neighborhood eventually buys a generator.

The power company told me it costs $15,000 per span to bury the wires. They find it cheaper to send a repair crew out to rebuild the wires regularly.

> Trees cut the lines here about 1 to 4 times a year.

It's that bad ? Why don't they just bury the cables like we do here ? Maybe the initial costs are a bit higher but it can't be cheap to have to send someone out to fix the cables that often.

> Why don't they just bury the cables like we do here ?

In rural areas it's just not economically feasible to bury cables. Sure, some cables are buried and follow the roads between population centres, but they also need to cross fields, go up hills and span the wilderness to get to many places that would take many miles of detours of twisty roads and tracks.

For the power companies and telcos to bury cables where we live they'd need to rip everything up and start again, and even then there's a fairly good chance that some piece of agricultural equipment would rip the cable out of the ground. Burying stuff is hugely expensive.

> Sure it works 99% of the time, but it's not like electricity which work 99.999999% of the time

I can't speak for others, but it certainly is for me.

> and then you have workarounds like batteries and gas tanks and stuff.

And if it fails there is 4G and stuff, it may not be as fast as fiber but it's more than fast enough for basically anything but downloading large files.

To give you a little perspective from a rural part of the US:

I lose power at least one or two times a year. Normally due to a construction/farming accident, but sometimes it's due to a temporary overload. Most of the time the outage isn't more than an hour or so.

Last week when a slew of severe storms came through, I had no satellite TV (water absorbs the signal). Switched to Netflix. Netflix signal went out (I'm guessing there's a microwave link somewhere between my house and the phone company Central Office in the nearest town 10 miles away). Could have been worse: some people were without power for days.

We live on top of a hill and I lose my cell signal just walking across my living room. Would be even worse if we lived at the bottom of the hill. So much for 4G!

But yeah, I still prefer living out here to being back in the city :-)

I have AT&T and to be honest I would rather listen to NPR on the radio rather than streaming/using my data. My data rolls over. So wasting it on something I could get for free anyway doesn't seem fair.

I mostly listen at home so data usage is not an issue. Even on mobile I hardly use the data I get with my plan (5.5GB month and I barely use 500MB) so it doesn't really matter what I use it for.

There's a certain retardedness to streaming a live radio station over the internet when you have an actual radio available and are in the broadcast area of the station.

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