Rural America Is Building Its Own Internet Because No One Else Will
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
And now every house has 10Gbps with free choice of operator.
Normally what most communities do is wait for one of the big fibre operators to reach them and start digging. But these locals did all the practical stuff like digging, laying fibre and building the actual grid themselves by hiring their own contractors.
Larger communities, towns and cities, usually have a city wide fibre grid managed perhaps by the local energy company or by the municipality. They in turn might out-source the fibre digging but they still manage the grid and determine what operators are offered to the citizens.
In big cities (we have three of those) you can find multiple city wide fibre grids. One managed by the municipality/city and some y large property owners that take it upon themselves to equip their buildings with fibre.
Regarding the wireless setups in the article I am very skeptical because this was a trend 10 years back in Sweden and a lot of people lost money by investing in it when they could have just waited a few years and had real fibre.
But the US is special because of its size. So wireless might be all they can get for many years.
The US has a population density of 35.0/km², while Sweden has one of 22.0/km². So it shouldn't really be bigger problem in the US because of geography.
If you are in a place with favorable geography it can sorta kinda work.
If you are in the Appalachian mountains, on the other hand, you are in a dissected plateau and most people live in valleys that are overlooked by a single ridge. You have to build a road over the ridge, run electricity, maybe run fiber, and with a really tall tower (remember we have trees on the East Coast!) you might look into the valleys on each side, and if you are really lucky, another valley over.
The kicker is that most of the places which are favorable for wireless already have cable. So the addressable market is this tiny sliver which can be served with fixed wireless and can't get cable.
I can tell you that they know exactly which areas can be profitable, and if one of those areas suddenly decides to try to do something on their own, all of a sudden lots of obstacles magically appear.
The problem is not that they could not afford to offer me a gigabit at $120 a month, but that they can't afford to give up $90 a month that they get without investing in their networks.
In the case of Frontier, it pays a dividend greater than earnings. It even pays a dividend in quarters where earnings are negative! It is not a "profitable" phone company, it is a company that is bleeding a copper network dry.
Communities may provide their own training and personnel, but they're generally subject to the laws of their state/nation/etc.
Law creation is probably the biggest outlier though
For global challenges like climate change, regulation at the global level seems like the right responses.
Not to mention the scale of rural communities makes the task proportionately less complicated. Scale matters very much. For example, if you are on the subway, how do you know who owns the magazine in your lap? There's a system of justice at work, it's very small in scale and you didn't need a lawyer to figure it out.
Most hardware for WISPs have back haul throughput rates advertised at 100-400 mbs, yet most end points at the customer premise will see data rates of 6 - 20mbs. Including the bad jitter, packet loss, and burstyness, and you've got something that is only good for browsing facebook.
All the hardware I am aware of still uses the old RTS/CTS methods for media access borrowed from the wifi protocol. Which works fine for 100 end points all within 100ft of each other... But stick 100 end points in a 5 miles radius all trying to get a "clear to send" ack and your in a world of hurt.
Yes I know... some tuning will go along way, but at least with the Motorola canopy family, they defaulted to supporting a 15 mile (or was it 20?) radius. And with the WISP's network admin (which is normally always the CEO's young nephew) never changing the defaults because it "just works". This puts a ton of latency on the network since everything is assuming to be waiting on hearing from the node 15 miles away (that may or may not be there). There are some newer systems out now that use TDMA for media access, but from the reviews I see, still getting more than 20mbs to a CPE is unlikely.
You best bet would be a gigabit back haul with some p2p access points covering no more than a mile or 2 each, but that means many more antennas and no place to put them. I've seen many WISPs "cover" 100+ square miles with just two access points. It just doesn't work.
6-20mbps with terrible quality would be a godsend for them and everyone else in the area.
They seem unable to perform any kind of maintenance without massively degrading network service over a /large/ area.
There are also rumors that technicians will drive to various areas and disconnect (paying) customers in attempts to see if anyone complains about missing service (supposedly as an attempt to boot off freeloaders).
Finally, they're Comcast. If there isn't competition in an area to drive service (it sounds like there isn't here) then they probably haven't pushed 100mbit out.
And all the beautiful scenery that goes with it? Or...?
Everyone is out to screw everyone else in order to make a buck. Shady used car salesman is a level of ethics and honesty that's about median when it comes to any sort of business (and it's more of a bell curve than bi-model IMO). The quaintness that makes the place marketable breeds busybodyism. There's a sense of community in the same way that companies that don't care about their employees loudly preach that they do. The roads are clogged with tourists from memorial day through labor day. From labor day until memorial day hospitals and holding cells are clogged with drug users and dealers. You get to watch the corrupt town government pour tons of money into special interest projects.
Of course, 4k netflix would be nice too, but I suspect these people just want some basics to start with.
The biggest problem is the latency. I'm about 40ms from the edge of my ISP before I get to the rest of the Internet (compare 5ms for wired urban Internet.) Also, as you allude to, with a smaller ISP it can often be the CEO's nephew in charge of stuff and professionalism suffers.
My older service was 900 MHz 1/0.25 MBps service. That was pretty awful, just too slow to do anything modern with it. The nice thing about 900 MHz is you don't need a clear line of sight.
Source: I built and ran a small WISP for 15 years.
IF you are willing to spend the money and invest the time to get it properly deployed and configured, it is possible to achieve decent performance even with 802.11-based gear. For example I'm typing this over a connection with two wireless hops that goes 10 miles to the nearest town that achieves 150/150 with sub-5ms RTT. All the links are point-to-point though.
btw rule of thumb is to take whatever advertised throughput a piece of wireless gear has and divide it by four to get a realistic actual performance. 1/2 for the loss between "air" tx-rate and achievable packet payload throughput, then another 1/2 for the difference between full duplex and half-duplex. So that "400Mbps" radio will actually deliver 100, best case.
We use Cambium ePMP hardware (the Motorola team split into UBNT and Cambium) in 1 mi radius' and see ~40-90 Mbps down and 10-40 Mbps up.
TL;DNR Montana probably has faster internet than you. http://tsi.io
Essentially being a rural ISP/WISP is no easy task.
Getting access to rooftops is infinitely easier than trenching fiber.
Can you scale wireless in a modest city like KC? At what CIR? You would have to make use of extensive caching. Even the best hardware like ubiquity tops out for backhaul at 2Gb. That's always been the problem is wireless can't scale with speed. At least not in any spectrum us mortals can use.
There are only six residencies in my unincorporated township. All but one have DSL, now. The one that doesn't have it, doesn't want it. They live beyond where the power and phone lines stop, anyhow.
Anyhow, they are all pretty happy and grateful. As I was moving into the area, this was a good ice breaker. I'd say that I definitely got good value for the money. I get ~12 Mbps down. More importantly, a neighbor brought me some Piccadilly, just today. Worth every penny.
It's sad, but this is wishful thinking. If anything, tech-related jobs are more concentrated in urban areas than other service industries. These places have no economic viability outside the specific circumstances (coal mining, farming) that caused people to move there in the first place.
An online freelancer with a low cost of living can live decently.
There's no question it can make a meaningful difference near-term. The obvious long-term solution is further urbanization or near-urbanization, convincing people to leave those dying regions for greater opportunity.
Also, this idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136091
When I call a support line and get "Walter" who is going to help me, I know they are in a different hemisphere and am mostly unsatisfied with talking to them because they are trained with scripts and they talk like robots.
If I called and recognized a Kentucky accent, chances are that person is going to be more relatable and personable than "Walter" from 8 timezones away.
Mr./Mrs. Kentucky might crack a joke and get me to lighten up a little about why XYZ isn't working. If both calls have the same result, I walk away from talking to Mr./Mrs. a little more satisfied than with "Walter".
The same could be said if it was reversed, if someone was calling from the far east and ended up talking with Mr./Mrs. Kentucky it is going to be hard for them to be relatable and personable to someone from the far east.
Call centers insist so much on following scripts that I am not sure there would be opportunities to make jokes even if the person was in the same country as you.
Also, do you think that Americans want to hear a Kentucky accent? I would rather speak to a foreigner than hear someone with a village accent from my country. Those places have a reputation for low education and low culture, and so it is hard for customers to trust any employee with that accent who claims he can help you. I know that call centers have moved to my country and to the Philippines because English speakers in these countries have a more "neutral" accent.
I'd list all the telecommuting job sites, but there seems to be a thousand of them now.
The US median income is about $37,000 per year ($17-$18 per hour). To get beyond ~$13 to ~$17 per hour doing lower skill telecommuting work, you have to have a resume with something meaningful on it.
If you're from Appalachia, it's not difficult to teach yourself any number of skills (from database admin to javascript), go to a local small college to pad your resume with that, get a certification or two if applicable, and then get a job working remote at an entry level tech job that pays considerably better than anything local (few of those jobs exist locally there). A person can go work at a local AT&T or similar store doing sales in an Appalachian town, get some sales experience, and then go apply for a remote sales job making more than they'll get locally. Particularly right now is an ideal time, the US labor market is getting very tight.
I grew up in Appalachia and entirely self-taught my way out of it in the mid 1990s. It was a helluva lot more difficult to do back then. And that process is trivial compared to working in a coal mine, and it's a lot less soul destroying than toiling away for a decade earning $10-$15 at a local Walmart.
Eastern European and freelancer here. I can do all that freelance work for much cheaper than any American from a dying coal town. Furthermore, we Eastern European freelancers generally tend to be university educated, are used to working in a global cross-cultural marketplace, and we have a large pool of local talent we can subcontract work out to and thus grow our business. Anyone in rural America who now starts trying to make it in freelancing is likely to lose out to us.
On the other hand, one thing we cannot do – due to our foreign passports – is easily move to a large American city. So, I think moving to the cities is a better option for someone in a dying coal town than staying there and hoping for success in the digital economy.
For what it’s worth, I am now a digital nomad. I don’t stay in my country on that salary, I travel among countries that are even cheaper. Someone who intends on staying in their dying coal town in Appalachia does not have that option.
Time zone isn't so important, inasmuch as many freelancers in Europe are happy to adapt to North American hours.
Instead of the kind of policy they had with telephones, with the Universal Service Fund, and the like, to subsidize the massively higher deployment cost. It's not just in the middle of nowhere, the run length are vastly longer. Of course it's going to cost more money. Electrical lines, water and sewer do too.
Go ahead and kick the FCC and Pai around for screwing up net neutrality, but the Obama-era ULS expansion thing was never going to happen the way the FCC had written those regulations.