The Worst Internet in America | Hacker News Reader

The Worst Internet in America

fivethirtyeight.com

129 pointsnafizh115 comments

I used to live in Saguache County as a kid. We left in 2000 but this article does not surprise me. it is hard to adequately get across how desolate it was up there but i'll try.

We had 40 acres of land and were considered city slickers because 40 acres was enough for 1-2 cows. We were friends with people with 25k acres.

The ground was sand. 10 foot down was sand. You could water plants 3 times a day and they would still run out of water. (My mom fixed this with lots of silca gel for her garden.)

We lived on a county road and the postal service would not deliver mail closer that 2 miles away. We never did put up a mailbox and instead just had a PO box in Moffat which was about 8 miles of gravel roads away.

Annual rainfall is less than the Sahara dessert and temps would hit -40F in the winter. Some days would see 70F difference between day and night.

Walmart was 40 miles away (Alamosa in one direction and Salida in the other.)

In parts there are no trees for miles. We had ~30 trees by our house. The next ones were at another house 1/4 mile away and I believe the next were 2 miles away.

Our phone system used an antenna that looked like the old tv arials and was solar with a battery on it. (96/97 era.) We had that for about a year before the phone company decided they needed the system more in alaska and would lay phone line for free rather than charging us $6k to run the lines half a mile. Then they waited a year to come get out system. The battery on it would routinely run out in the middle of a call.

Wow that sounds hard. Have you ever considered founding a utilities company yourself and lay those lines for you and your neighbors? I have no idea how easy or hard that would have been.

He was a kid when he lived there...

You need access to capital to do that, and if you have access to capital you probably aren't in a place that considers 2 cows as wealthy.

In this context, I don't believe "city slickers" implies wealth. In a rural community, having large amounts of land is wealth, because it can be used to support more livestock.

They were "city slickers" because they only had two cows (or, more likely, only had enough land for two) where as everybody else had many, many more.

City slicker isn't an insult that means "rich" by the way, it means from the city and hence not willing do a hard day's work, dresses too nice and is not trustworthy.

For us it was not really an insult. It was poking fun at us but it was not meant in a bad way. Not to say it could not be meant as one though.

I know what you mean, my family calls me a city slicker and that's how they intend it as well.

I hope ...

Utilities are really expensive in a place like that. It is fairly easy to run a utility when you average 100 feet between each customer, and when you can have one hub station that covers a 1-mile radius and serves 5,000 people. It's really hard when the line from one house to the next costs a year's subscription fees, and one hub covers 50 people.

This is why fiber is currently only common in the cities right now. Costs haven't come down enough for it to get to suburban locations, much less rural.

Translation for metric system users:

40 acres ≈ 16 ha

25K acres ≈ 100 km²

10 foot ≈ 3 m

mile ≈ 1.6 km

−40 °F = −40 °C

70 °F difference ≈ 39 °C difference

> −40 °F = −40 °C

This one is my favourite metric<->imperial conversion.

That's a pretty legit "off the grid" type situation. Is there some backstory to how the family got there? I was in Lake City a year ago, we were doing an off road adventure and it was amazing how isolated the place is. Beautiful too.

Big counties space wise, tiny populations, extremely rugged terrain. Then the flip side, I'd guess a fair number of folks there don't really want to be "connected" I mean everyone does if it's free or really cheap but a large number of the residents there aren't going to pay $100 a month for communication.

Not a ton of interesting backstory but some. We moved up there in 96. My parents drove truck so where we lived did not really matter. My mom was from Arkansas and my dad had a lot of family in Colorado and wanted to be closer.

We moved up there sometime in September. We had just came from a month of 100+f days in Arkansas. When it hit freezing the first week up there my parents got a bit of a wake up call.

We lived there till 2000 when my mom got pregnant with my youngest brother and she had to go to lower altitudes because her body was creating too many red blood cells.

We paid $12k for ~40 acres and a mobile home. https://goo.gl/maps/gN9UVEgNV652 should show where we lived. If you follow the road back to where it meets T road that is where the closest you could place a mailbox.

Feel free to ask any more questions and I'll try to answer them.

Perhaps a dumb question, but why not plant a bunch of trees?

It's over 7000' in elevation, they grow a bit more slowly at that elevation. Depending on the mountains near by it may be a "9 months of winter" kind of situation

Plus central Colorado is high-alpine desert so there's not a lot of precipitation to naturally encourage rapid tree growth.

That makes sense, it's inexpensive. Depending on where the rest of the family lives, it is closer but it's probably 4 hours to the front range, possibly a lot more in the winter. Was this before school age for you? I've heard interesting stories about some of the mountain schools, Saguache might even bus kids to a neighboring county, I don't know. did you live there for fairly long stretches or did you travel with your folks? Any stories about "the locals?" I assume it's mountain ranch country so the neighbors probably have a good dose of "I don't want anyone messing with me" mixed with the neighborly that ranchers tend to be and they'd help each other out.

I live in the Boulder/Denver area. Last summer we stayed in Cimmeron for half a week and then went to Lake City on our way home. I want to say the paved roads were about 100miles and 2 hours between the two, there was also a 50mile unpaved road that took about 10-12 hours and it was amazing. No cell coverage that I can recall, there were a few times where it hits you, if I broke my 4Runner, we are stuck here probably for days and it could be a real situation. If you love the outdoors and you look at it as an adventure, the place could be a fun place to have a cabin. If you live there all the time and want to be "normal" i can't imagine how it would be. Colorado is fascinating, the front range is like many small urban areas in the country, an hour away and it's like a different country in ways.

I was homeschooled so no stories about the school.

There were times where we lived there while my dad drove truck and other times my parents drove as a team and took us kids on the truck. When we were on the truck we usually we spent about 3 weeks on the road and a couple days at home. Managed to see all of the lower 48 except Maine by the time i was 12.

>We had ~30 trees by our house. The next ones were at another house 1/4 mile away and I believe the next were 2 miles away.

Were these wind breaks? My grandmother has a farm in South Dakota and I believe she got help from the government to cover the cost of planting (decades ago).

Yep, most farm land had rather large wind breaks because of various government programs to help deal with soil erosion. It was one of the things that struck me as a kid in North Dakota that you would see all these trees in a line or none at all.

Not sure but probably. Trees only seemed to be around houses. This was our place. https://goo.gl/maps/gN9UVEgNV652

I've been out in those parts before. It's very hard to explain the reality of it to people who've never experienced it. My wife came with, she's from South Korea and I told her not to expect her phone or yelp or anything to work there. She didn't believe me and fortunately we had done a little bit of planning ahead of time otherwise we wouldn't have even been able to find a place to eat! But the notion of being so remote that your mobile phone service won't work was hard for her to understand, "we're in America, why wouldn't it work?"

I think if people consider it more like a remote part of Central Asia it might form an easier image of what it's like there.

Still, it's also a stunningly beautiful part of the U.S.

That page shows the worst use of the internet in the world. 15.88 MB in size according to Firefox. And unintuitive gimmick navigation to boot. How does doing something like that help convey the message?

This seems like an extraneous tetchy comment but I don't think it is. Extant slow internet connections would be a lot more usable if websites weren't full of video/audio adverts, trackers, and JS being used for stuff (displaying text/images or doing some awful and slow scrolling) that browsers do well natively.

Try using the internet (beyond HN or gmail or pinboard) on a mediocre internet connection without any adblocker or noscript-equivalent. It gets nasty very fast.

To be fair, this isn't a justification for not building out better last-mile links -- just like, the miserable state of residential internet connections in the US is made a lot worse by awful bloated websites. https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ and http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm are good reads on this.

I may be wrong, but wouldn't the full "suite" of privacy tools, like uBlock, Privacy Badger, etc actually speed up these connections based on this?

Wait that was intentional? I honestly thought it was my graphics card glitching.

For reference, that would take roughly 53 minutes to load on a 56kbps modem.

That page has a bad case of terrible website design. When I scroll down, I expect bits of image not to zoom in from the left. I nearly closed the page before even getting to the headline. They've also somehow made space bar not scroll as far as it does on other websites (in Safari), so every time I scroll down I spend a second searching for where I ended up.

At least there's only two locations of awful design during the adventure that is scrolling. Once you reach the headline, there's only one really unintuitive bit further down the page (a map of the USA), and that bit is short.

Works ok for me but I have NoScript, uBlock, and Privacy Badger ckleaning out the crap for me.

I could not read it on my iPad in landscape mode. Worked fine in portrait orientation. I don't know why.

I switched to Reader. Looked like landscape could work if you were patient enough, but it was painful.

> if a household wants a download speed of 12 Mbps with an upload speed of 2 Mbps, they can expect to pay a whopping $90.

This is the worst internet in america? Wow. That is amazing! I'm incredibly impressed at how fast the worst place for internet in america is.

In highschool (Class of 2011) I dealt with 5 mbps just because my parents didn't want to pay for more. It was tolerable as long as you didn't want to watch youtube in HD. Honestly, I have little sympathy for people with 12mbps.

I'm in Canada, greater Montreal area. 5 Mbps for a bit under 30$ is pretty much the best deal around.

Honestly it gets the job done. I can watch Netflix in 720p.

I get the article, and entirely agree that internet, even broadband is a utility in this day and age. However, 25MBPS seems excessive to get email, file taxes and apply to jobs.

If you read the article in its entirety, you'd see few have access to broadband even if they could afford $90 a month. Dialup sounds like the best most can get, although I didn't see stats on that specifically.

HA!

Go to Northern Canada. Right now you'll pay well over $100 for supposedly 5Mbps, but which is really only 1 or 2 at best.

If you download more than 5GB in a month, you'll pay $25/GB for overages!

And even better, there is only one telco to choose from!

(I worked for that telco...)

The idea of metered connections for internet makes me shiver. They're likely going to become more popular in the coming years because they're too lucrative not to, but I will be resisting with all my power and pocketbook.

As others have pointed out websites have gotten much larger for no good reason. The article we all just read is apparently over 18MB. My internet also used to be much slower than what people in that town can have. However, the internet was optimised for that.

>As others have pointed out websites have gotten much larger for no good reason.

Yeah, but 12 Mb/s should be able to handle it without even noticing any lag. I have 15 Mb/s and it serves all my needs, including 1080p streaming.

Huge article even by today's standards. So the article would load in ~10 seconds under 12mbps, and thats assuming they don't have asynchronous progressive loading of larger images and such. - which i think they do.

Not really a big inconvenience IMO.

> > if a household wants a download speed of 12 Mbps with an upload speed of 2 Mbps, they can expect to pay a whopping $90.

Wow. I was just in South Africa. We paid ~$115 for 10Mbps down (of which we usually got 4-6) and 1 Mbps up. With frequent outages. Oh and capped of course (not that the cap ended up mattering with those speeds)

Serious question from someone who flinches at living more than ten minutes' walk from a train station and won't rent anything that doesn't have a crackerjack shower with painfully hot water and enough pressure to bruise, and an internet connection that sees less than a few minutes degraded service a year (although for speed, I actually don't demand that much - I'm happy with a couple of megabytes per second); why do people live there?

That's a genuine question; not "why" as said to imply that there is no reason. There must be reasons. I just don't know what they are.

Not generalities, please. I'm interested in first-hand information from people who actually live or lived there. Did you move to such a place? Why? What's the economy based on? Does it generate enough money to be self-sustaining, or does it exist through inertia? In areas with such low density of people, what jobs exist? Is it all farming or other such? How many people living there might actually like to move, but can't?

I think it's an interesting topic, more people should want to learn about life in other circumstances, so I'm not sure why you were downvoted.

Maybe just because no one has come by with an answer.

Not that it's what you're looking for, but this reminds me of Kacey Musgraves, who has some anti-country songs about the pain and false promises of small town life in a changing America. Merry Go Round and Blowin Smoke especially.

There's some social psychology research on "sense of place" that covers how drawn people are to staying in the place where they grew up, which makes it hard for some to leave. The Rum Diary (the novel, can't vouch for the film) is kind of a meditation on this too, though about Puerto Rico instead of the rural midwest.

Farming and ranching. Case closed.

Also, the rural population has quite a different culture than what you are used to. They don't _crave_ internet. Some of them likely ask the same thing about your culture. Why do you like living so close to each other? Everything is so fast and overwhelming.

"Farming and ranching. Case closed."

Is it? Are you a farmer or rancher? Why's it necessary to live so remotely? Is it not possible for a town to support farming and ranching? Is it necessary for everyone involved to live so remotely? Given the huge areas involved, living on the farm/ranch makes you local to one small part of it but still remote from all the rest, so why the need to live there?

"Why do you like living so close to each other?"

I don't, but it's the cost of having the things I do want. I want fast, reliable, cheap internet. I want my other utilities to be reliable as well. I want to be able to walk ten minutes to a mainline train station - it gives me a lot of opportunities very easily, needing nothing more than train fare. The density of people creates a lot of other opportunities; things that are wildly uneconomical in low-density communities become viable. Range of jobs, range of businesses for me to patronise, leisure opportunities. It's really about all those opportunities, and the people that make them. When I want to learn something, I just find a local class. If there isn't a local class, it's an hour from my door on foot and by train to central London (and I don't even live in a county adjacent to London), and there the opportunities increase by another order of magnitude.

We don't (necessarily) like living close to each other; we like all the opportunities that are created by that - economic and self-development - and we like the many things that become economical in doing so (cheap, reliable utilities and infrastructure and niche businesses and all the rest that I mentioned above).

Both Farming and Ranching require a sizable amount of land to be viable. It's much more viable to live on the land you farm (or ranch on), than it is to live in town. Beyond that, cities create higher land values that tend to make farming or ranching non-viable.

That said, even rural towns are very underserved in the US.

My usage stats on our internet would disagree. Of course I’ve visited the college on weekends and found folks parked in the parking lot using the school’s wifi. I figure it’s a public service.

They don't _crave_ internet.

I'm not sure where you get your information from, but this is simply not my experience. I'm pretty sure that minimally, the teenagers and young adults crave it. Especially if they've went to college and gotten some sort of agricultural degree, where they had internet.

> Especially if they've went to college

I've been noticing a fair amount of "have went" on Youtube lately. Would you say "have taken" or "have took"? What about "was taken" vs "was took"?

I always say taken when using another verb (insert a technical grammar name here, probably a participle or something) Took stands on its own. For example: I have taken the test and Bob took the test Thursday.

It could also have something to do with regional dialects, I'm not entirely certain.

I live in a ruralish area--20 minute drive from the local university, but I'm surrounded by farms. I like the solitude and the space. I can't see any of my neighbors--the closest I get to that is seeing their utility pole light through the trees in the fall/winter. For the same price/month as a 1-bedroom, 1-car garage condo in town, I get a 3-bedroom house + drive-in basement + pole barn. Couldn't care less about the house, but the space in the basement is nice for bigger projects. I see a lot of folks out this way with backyard shops too.

I keep a few chickens; if I wanted I could have a huge garden too. Plenty of people keep cows, horses, chickens, etc.

Power is through a co-op; in my experience it's both cheaper and more reliable than the in-town utilities. Well water tastes good and works as long as I have power.

Internet I get through a WISP, it's not fast nor cheap but it's better than satellite (and, at the time, cell service). I did put up a 50' tower for that, which was quite an adventure.

I'm a grad student; the university is perhaps the biggest employer in the area but there are still some factory jobs and also some commercial science jobs in the area. My landlord used to be the butcher and farmed/raised cattle in his 'spare' time. Sadly, there's significantly fewer local businesses in the area than there were a decade or two ago, according to folks who have been here that long.

I mean, people live different places for various reasons. If you want to have a horse, for example, you need a certain amount of acres. I live near Annapolis, MD, but go 10 minutes west and it's horse farms. The bigger question is: to what degree should people in the city subsidize that lifestyle?

People talk about treating the internet "like a utility." But much of the county I live in doesn't have public water/sewer (many places more than 20 miles outside DC don't have public water/sewer). People pay to have a well/septic system built. We don't force the folks in the city to pay a lot more for water/sewer to subsidize the folks in rural areas. We just got public water/sewer where we live and we're paying off a $25,000 tax bill for the hookup charges.

> People talk about treating the internet "like a utility." But much of the county I live in doesn't have public water/sewer [...]

The Internet is more like electricity or telephony than water/sewer. Are these places connected to the public power grid, or do they depend on generators? Could the power poles be used for Internet wiring?

The Internet is much more like water/sewer. If you're not on the public water/sewer, you can always dig a well/build a septic system. Likewise, even in Saguache County, you can get satellite internet (12 down, 3 up). Yes, it's more expensive and more limiting, but so is building a well/septic system (both together can be $20,000+ easily). With electricity, it's highly impractical not to be on the grid (though that's changing these days with wind/solar).

Yes, you could run wired internet along the power poles, but who is going to pay for it? The electric grid was built during the Depression when labor was cheap. You couldn't do it today. (Just like NYC built its subway system at the turn of the 20th century, but the cost would be prohibitive today). And it'd be one thing if these people were cut off from job applications/wikipedia/etc. But spending a bunch of money to wire up rural places that can get satellite/wireless seems like a huge waste of public money to me when there are starving kids, etc.

I don't live there, but I do live in a remote part of California, near the Mendocino/Humboldt county line. It's 20 minutes to the post office and about an hour to the nearest "real" town. In some ways it's more isolated than the area described in the article, because of how steep and dense the terrain is (read up on the Lost Coast if you're interested).

The only available Internet is satellite (which sucks, it's like a phone plan with a certain amount of data and after that you're severely throttled).

I moved up here recently after working as a developer in SF for a few years, so my situation and my reasons are a bit different than most of the local population. I did it because it is a beautiful place, I essentially live in a forest with no real neighbors. I have space to grow food and build things and just feel relaxed and free (I love the energy of the city but the lack of space gives me anxiety). Everyone I meet up here seems happy, friendly, and helpful. I feel more connected to the local community because it's not a writhing mass of millions of people. If you ever go camping for a few days and feel kind of rejuvenated by nature, it's like that, except permanent.

As for the economy, that is definitely an interesting question. This area was previously sustained by massive logging operations, and when that was curtailed things started going into decline (lot of abandoned/decrepit buildings around). Now there's a very strange shadow economy based on marijuana farming, that is starting to transition into a lawful enterprise. My own economic interests are around lodging/hospitality/resort type offerings.

I would say most people that live in the area like it and don't have any interest in moving to a city or something like that. I don't like calling it a "slower pace of life" but of course it is in some ways. We're not running around innovating and pushing the boundaries of technology and whatnot, but a lot of the people I know who are doing that don't seem very happy either.

My own economic interests are around lodging/hospitality/resort type offerings.

I do see that; areas whose economy is primarily based on people from cities/towns coming to spend their money in that area. I'm sure economists have a term for that; it's not producing "value" (for want of a better term) in the same way that those cities/towns do. It's where some of the "value" produced in those other areas gets spent.

I do need a better term than "value" here. That's not quite the term I mean. Maybe economists have a suitable term for it.

Economically, if people are choosing to spend their money somewhere, they believe that place is generating an equal amount of value for them.

Psychologically, value is totally subjective. You are making a distinction between, I guess, "rural tourism" value and, generally, "things a city does" value, but can you make an objective argument for one over the other?

Is there a difference in value-add between a hotel in the city and a bed-and-breakfast in the country? If the rural business makes furniture that people take back to the city, which way is the value going?

When I spend money, it's not to get equal value. I spend money because what I get for it is worth more to me than the money. Maybe everyone else is swapping money for something of equal value, but I doubt it. People spend money because they value the thing they buy more than the money in their hand.

For part of my childhood, my family lived in a fairly remote area right at the start of the Appalachian mountains. The nearest "restaurant" was a gas station 30 minutes away by highway.

I've never quite cottoned on to why we moved there, but it seems to have been a combination of my parents desire to buy a home and, not making much money, headed away from the nearest city until the real estate prices became affordable. This combined with a strong sort of (what I'll call) anti-social tendencies on the part of my father (who'd probably describe it more as a desire to be a self-made person with lots of individual freedoms and not having to deal with all the negotiations of living near other people). The people who lived near us seemed to be a mix of people like my parents who just wanted lots of personal space and privacy and were willing to deal with all the time and money wastes that come with that lifestyle, and generational locals who were often very poor (several of my neighbors didn't even have running water in their homes, still had outhouses and often hunted for the majority of their protein and family calories).

I personally hated it and ran into the city as I could afford as quickly as I could. But not that I'm getting older I'm also starting to want to remove the hassle of dealing with neighbors and am thinking of looking for a new place to live with more privacy. One difference, I'm much more affluent than my parents and am instead trying to find the lifestyle I want using raw monetary power to live closer in to the local urban centers.

I moved to Taos, New Mexico last year after 8 years in NYC. Taos has about ~5,000 people. I'm a freelance developer and author.

It's one of the most beautiful places in America, in my opinion. There's arts, culture, and incredible access to the outdoors. I ski all winter.

The internet is actually pretty decent here if you're in the right part of town. Some people have fiber.

My husband grew up in Pulaski, Virginia which out in the depths of nowhere to most people in Virginia, but got Comcast internet (poorly), Verizon (barely), and 251 acres of land for less than $200,000 dollars.

His family moved out there to satisfy his father's dream of being a gentleman farmer. He moved away after university because neither he nor his father are actually very good farmers.

I get a bit wistful about it, since it is beautiful countryside and I'd like to live there but the lack of amenities keep me away. Virginia as a whole has lots of empty land, so simply sitting 1.5 hours (during rush hour) outside of DC is enough plop one down in farmland.

Much of the time, it's because their parents or grandparents live there. Having family connections makes it hard to move away from a place, unless you like risk.

Which, of course is how those families got there in the first place...

Yes, from some of the answers above it's not so simple as farming and ranching. Sounds like there are many poor people living in what we might consider poverty; I wonder how many would prefer a life working a job and lifestyle in a town or city but simply can't make that move for lack of money, education, connections.

I live in Melbourne, AU.. 4km from city centre, in a brand new high-rise building. I pay AUD$80/mth for 8mbps down and 0.5mbps up over shitty copper that dies every time it rains.

Pings are so bad lots of services like Netflix, YouTube, etc think I can't connect and just give me "Check your internet" errors when I load, until I refresh multiple times and get it to load.

Funnily enough, our rural areas have better net than us here. I own a farm in the absolute middle of nowhere (region population of around 500) and it gets solid 24/4 and some farms nearby who face a better direction for fixed wireless get 50/8 (or something like that).

My buddy outside Valley City ND (calling it a city was wildly optimistic) gets 1 gigabyte up 256mb down for USD$90. As you’ve said, it’s a bit more than a rural / urban problem.

My mother lives in rural Oklahoma, and her Internet connection (2-3Mbps/1Mbps for $60 a month) is a WiMax antenna on the roof of her house, pointed at another antenna on the water tower of the next town over.

It's not great, but it's the only option she has other than satellite providers, and works well enough for Facebook, email, and online shopping.

My parents had dial up until about 2 years ago. On a good day, they'd get 28.8, but typically it was more like 14.4 kbps! When it rained and water got in the phone lines, they got nothing at all. And yes, they'd try to get the phone company to fix the lines often to no avail. They are only 20 minutes from town but it's too far to get DSL or cable or anything like that and the terrain is too hilly for fixed wireless which did become available in their county four or five years ago.

They finally broke down and got satellite internet a couple years ago but it's slow and expensive.

When Mom was stuck with using a modem, I bought her a (literal) stack of USR Courier v.Everything modems (cheap, since a lot of ISPs in Austin were ditching dialup service around that time).

She had lightning hits and storms so often that I told her "if you try to dial up and the modem isn't working, just unplug it, toss it in the trash, and plug in the next one off the stack." Had to do this even with surge protection inline for both power and phone line.

Only in the past couple of years have I been able to get an LTE phone signal at her house (only while standing on the porch, not inside the building) and that's from a tower a few miles away...

"For around $30 a month, New York City internet providers offer basic packages of 100 Mbps service."

I'd love to know where in NYC this service exists. I currently pay $60/month for 50Mbps and often get half that speed in practice. My office Internet service is even worse, it goes out 3-5 times a day and I've had maybe a dozen techs come out to look at both spaces. They won't even let me use my own modem because it's business Internet, which they charge 3x the price for.

I've looked for alternatives, but have never had any other option than over-priced terrible service from Time Warner/Spectrum for the past decade.

The infomap "Broadband is still foreign to much of the U.S." shows high speed internet largely confined to urban areas, as the article discusses. But large swathes of North Dakota are deep green. What's the reason for that?

Oil money, North Dakota is the second largest producer of oil in the US. There was no big announced project, just a large number of grants and tax cuts to promote infrastructure investment. And, from the looks of it, a depressing amount of the area without access are the reservations.

> a depressing amount of the area without access are the reservations.

I'm from North Dakota and went to high school on the Standing Rock reservation. They have their own institutions and legal system, so it's not surprising that they would have different coverage.

Standing Rock also has to deal with two state governments.

Uhm, well Three Affilated has a lot of oil money. It is actually going to the people instead of the tribe’s coffers (although the tribe is doing quite well too).

The tribes have a lot of issues dealing with connectivity (the fed doesn’t help nor the BIE) but some are better off than Grand Forks and Fargo.

BEK and other rural electric cooperatives are really laying down the fiber. Plus, if you look at a competition map of ND most places have multiple choices.

As a Canadian, this article sums up pretty well the internet situation in most of the country, even in "urban" areas. Due to the "Canada is different" mentality here, foreign, more efficient companies are forbidden from making business here, leaving the market to a few local operators that have no incentive to make the service any better. This leads to the country being years later in terms of broadband technology compared to other western countries. There is no excuse for that. Canadian tech is always pretty much a crippled version of the same product from the United States at a higher price. Even in hardware, the same MacBook is 1,799.00 $ in the US but 2,399.00 $ in Canada.

Saguache County is in the same situation thanks to it's remote location, but I bet you it'll get fixed far sooner than Canada's nonsense situation in term of internet access. I hope the ambitious infrastructure plan the US has adopted will somewhat cover the installation of better rural internet access.

And that's why web developer should stop using JavaScript without reason and use pure and clean HTML, CSS and well compressed images.

Assuming the page is from America, it seems quite close to the worst considering I had to scroll through ~3 pages equivalent of weirdly horizontally scrolling images while all but the sky of the images was obscured by a cookie warning spanning 1/3 of the page (uncovering an equally large subscription request after being dismissed).

Most of these articles about broadband access conflate Internet access with broadband speeds. Yes, Internet access is basically a necessity in modern life. However, 25Mbps download (which is the definition used) is absolutely not.

As I understand it, while the talk is about speed, the real issue is reliability: in rural America if you try to get broadband, some of the time you'll get a few megabits per second, which is enough to get by, but a good deal of the time, your nominally broadband connection won't be delivering any data at all.

This is an interesting market for the upcoming broadband satellite internet by Boeing, SpaceX, etc. They will provide low latency because they are in low earth orbit.

Interesting, got any links about that? And do you know if it for the whole world or only some parts of it?

I applaud the comparison with electricity. This is almost exactly how I look at it. I would compare Internet providers with utilities providing water, roads, sewage and even the post.

To think at one time we had telegraph data lines that were little more than a mud battery and a pole. The wire would run up the pole, go though a relay switched by the previous pole and continue to the next pole where it would switch its own relay. The mud battery provided very little power, just enough to switch a relay but the technology was good enough to bridge almost unlimited distance.

Without comparison with other services I would be tempted to argue my ISP provides really great services. Its 75 Euro for 300 Mbit and the package comes with a phone line and hundreds of channels of something called television.

However, when compared honestly with similar services their service is terrible. People working there told me the entire network is ready to provide 1 Gbit to everyone and the employees don't know why they didn't make the switch. I can easily guess why, I'm not willing to pay much more than 75 Euro, 3 times the speed wont bring in 3 times the money. What it will do is reveal glitches in the network that would require fixing. If I remember correctly the people who created the ISP were very passionate about the technology but ended up selling the business. Not sure if that was related but if I was passionate about my business but couldn't upgrade because of a hunger for money I would get bored fast.

Using more of this rather ignorant guess work I started to ponder how an ideal ISP should be implemented. What would it really cost? Which type of contract is best for the network rather than the user or the provider?

Surprisingly, in some areas where big money hungry ISPs refused to deliver services people had to rethink and do it themselves.

Like this one here!

http://www.buergerbreitbandnetz.de/fernsehen-ueber-glasfaser...

The "Glasfaser – für nur 9,95 € im Monat" translates to fiber optic for 10 Euro (?!?)

My German almost isn't but from reading around I gathered they needed 65% adoption but got 94%, each end user had to pay 1000 Euro in advance. 900 in the form of a lone and 100 worth of shares.

To guess some numbers with that... 7 and a half years worth of 10 Euro/month does seem to add up to 900 Euro while profit made after that should increase the value of the investment. IOW, if it takes 20 years to repay the debt it would work out just fine for the investor/customer.

Some quote from speedtest: "With an average Q2-Q3 2016 download speed comparable to that in Bulgaria and Moldova, Germany’s fixed broadband is slower than you might expect from Europe’s largest economy. At 40.38 Mbps, Germany ranks 29th in the world for average fixed broadband download speed and 72nd for average upload."

A different page mentions: "Expect a 35€ bill on average for a broad-brand connection"

Most important to keep in mind, the big ISPs refused to service the area. It makes a great proof of concept. (Assuming buergerbreitbandnetz delivers 1 Gbps) in this worse case scenario 10/35 buys 1000/40.38 times the bandwidth. Or 29% of the cost for 2476% of the service. Or the 2 figured combined their service is 8438% better than the conventional urban offering.

Rural UK ISP https://b4rn.org.uk happened when big business "could" only provide crappy services at crazy rates. B4RN charges 30 pounds for 1 Gbps.

speedtest writes: "according to the Connected Nations 2015 report from the UK’s communications regulator, Office of Communications (Ofcom), 48% of rural areas don’t have access to broadband speeds of 10Mbps or higher."

Of course our germans and these brits had money to make their own ISP happen.

My Spanish and my Greek are even worse than my German but from reading around, apparently Guifi is the worlds largest Mesh network in Greece that originally started in Spain.

http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet

Trying to make sense of this document...

https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

...it seems they are actively fighting a tax per meter that guberment is trying to inflict on their fiber optic cables. If I understood correctly they are mainly offended by established businesses putting their cable in before the tax was invented. It seems big business did more than seal the ground after digging in their cables.

How different this is from the mundane consumer perspective where we all pay some corp as much as we can for as little as we would accept. We live in a world that is a bit like: when one asks why a carton of milk costs 200 Dollars the answer would be that if they charge 300 USD for it they wouldn't sell enough milk to justify the higher price.

Our entire western society works like this (I almost called it a civilization) one delivers 12 Dollars worth of labor that is sold for 40 Dollars, etc, and eventually it becomes 1000 dollars as part of a mortgage or infinite dollars as part of someones rent.

If that is the mentality or indoctrination that comes over these roads, in these letters and though this internet tube it might just be not worth having any of it.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/4/42/20150...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CPO4R8o5M

The German page you found is for a deal where existing customers can get IP-TV for 10€/month. The 50MBit/s plans start at 26€/month or so.

Ah, thanks.

Sounds doubtful.

Worst Internet is not on the Navajo res (UT, AZ)? Not in Hanksville, UT or a bunch of other small towns in Southern Utah? I am not even talking about ranches in places like Robbers Roost canyon complex.

Nothing in Colorado is really remote and unpopulated. Roads and people are everywhere. Maybe San Juans qualify for remote wilderness somewhat.

I would do anything for your so called worst speeds. Your worst is better than my best speeds.

How is SpaceX low orbit satellites ISP project progressing?

Looking at the photos, I'm surprised there's Internet connectivity at all in those places, other than 3G or maybe WiMAX.

I think it's not realistic to complain about this. The costs of bringing infrastructure to a place like this are simply too high.

We brought electricity and phone service to these places. What makes internet different?

Exactly - what of the social impact of not having Internet connectivity in 2017? How would that affect your ability to find and do work, to communicate, to shop?

You don't need fibre for that. 3G is more than enough to browse Facebook, find a job, and buy toilet paper off Amazon.

Have you tried to browse the Internet on 2 megabit (best case) recently?

HSPA+ is far, far from 2 Mbit.

Also, I'm sure the Facebook app works wonderfully with 2 Mbit, because they've spent years optimising for that.

Whatsapp/other messengers, FB and Twitter, maybe - but next to no other app is optimized for low internet speeds. Hell, ordinary games will regularly go into and above 200+MB territory for download... and in contrast to your computer where you can have DVDs with games sent to you by post, no such luck for smartphone apps.

I do it pretty regularly. It's fine with a good content blocker, almost unusable without.

2mbit is useable. It's slow but usable. Have you tried browsing with 56kbit after your data plan ran out? You'll have to wait minutes for sites to load and some don't load at all. For comparison 2 mbit is enough to live stream basically anything in LD if you pipe it through rabb.it first.

2 megabit is far lower than the best case for 3G HSDPA...

My parents live in rural Australia and their internet is 3G through a basic roof-mounted 850 MHz whip antenna getting a signal from some 15-20 km away, and they get a solid 6 MBit down, which is fine even for a decent-quality YouTube stream. Their main hurdle is the $8-10/GB that Telstra charges for the privilege.

That's good to hear - I think that's HSPA instead of original 3G. VividWireless wasn't an option?

The original 3G was 384 kbps... I doubt there are many places left on the planet still running that.

VividWireless looks like it only exists near cities, no coverage at my parent's address. None of the other main wireless providers (Optus, Vodafone) have signals anywhere near them, only Telstra NextG. They're even lucky when it comes to geography since they live on the right side of the valley... 800m in the other direction and they'd be in radio shadow. Even Telstra's own coverage map doesn't actually show coverage for them!

Last time I was there I read that Telstra was building a 700 MHz LTE network. If that replaced the 850 MHz HSPA network and reached them they could get some really great speeds.

I use 1mb down every time I go to my parents house. It's not fast but it gets the job done.

Telemedicine and video-based education, I'm sure, will be perfectly fine too, right?

Lived there once. (More info in my other reply.) They wanted 15k to bring electric lines half a mile. $6k for phone. We never did have electric outside of solar/wind/genarator. We had phone service via a device they installed that had a solar panel and an antenna that looked like this on it. https://cdn.instructables.com/FNY/J38K/GXQPMTQV/FNYJ38KGXQPM...

After a year or so they decided they needed it more in Alaska and they laid the line for free. Then waited a year to collect the equipment they so desperately needed in Alaska.

Any chance of ADSL over that line they laid? At least a few Mbits/sec?

Not in rural situations like that, the line length limits are pretty harsh on DSL.

We had friends of friends growing up who used a 900 megahertz cordless phone with homemade directional antennas on the handset and base station to get phone service across the valley!

It's interesting that it's so expensive to get electric service these days.

I wonder how things actually looked in the heyday of the rural electrification board.

My parents live in rural Australia (similarly 40 miles to the nearest supermarket) so I have some idea but obviously it's very different geography and a different a situation - they have electric and a rotten phone line (certainly can't reach 56K), but get their internet through a rooftop antenna connecting to 3G.

Probably similar: https://www.minnpost.com/mnopedia/2017/02/power-farmer-minne.... The article quotes $600 per mile in 1939. That's $10,500 per mile adjusted for inflation, but the inflation metric isn't a good one here. Inflation is calculated using consumer prices. The inputs for electric (or telecom) infrastructure are mainly labor and materials, which are relatively more expensive than they were back in 1940. For example, if you scale $600 by the change in minimum wage over that time, you get $20,500, about what's quoted.

It is my understanding that the REA charged a flat fee per home and ate the cost to the extent it exceeded the fee. They also setup generating stations and gave loans to power companies (and later rural telephone companies).

A lot of that assistance isn't available anymore.

I'm guessing internet service needs continual upgrades (for higher speeds) in a way that electricity and phone service do not.

It's also possible that Americans have less stomach for subsidizing rural lifestyles now since America is more urbanized now. As it stands, rural counties are already almost invariably subsidized by urban counties at the state level. Here's an example for Washington state: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/welfare-state/Content?oid...

Ironically, the rural counties are the ones that vote for the politicians that cut taxpayer funded services (but not taxpayer funded subsidies for their farms, obviously).

I suppose neither voter is then voting in their own (financial) interests if rural voters tend to vote against rural infrastructure and urban voters tend to vote to subsidize rural infrastructure. Maybe I'm whitewashing this somewhat, but it's slightly heartening that many voters support their ideal vision of a country over their personal interests.

The real cost is laying the last mile infrastructure. If it is fiber or coax, equipment upgrades may be needed in the future, but they are far cheaper than pulling new cable.

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