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Comment by mrkrabo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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