Rural Americans can't check email or use credit cards because of slow Internet | Hacker News Reader

Rural Americans can't check email or use credit cards because of slow Internet

foxnews.com

36 pointskimsk11215 comments

Don't worry, under Pai's new standards, ISPs will add extra fees for the ability of your internet connection to process credit cards. No extra guarantee of reliability of course, just extra fees. And no your city can't help because the same political party regular accepts bribes from said ISP to prevent local votes from mattering.

Fox News spun this into an anti-tax spiel, of course.

Interesting article.

> Some small-town residents say it’s nearly impossible to do simple tasks like check email and stream videos. Eric Pelka, a post office employee in Julian, Pa., told Fox News at times they had to turn seven to eight people away a day because of poor Internet connection.

I'd also wager that it stops some people from moving to the area. I recently was looking to move to a rural area and a make or break factor was internet. I passed on so many beautiful locations because there was no internet available.

Absolutely. I'd love to live in a less populated area. The requirements would be:

Gas and grocery within 30 minutes (should be easy). Doctor within 30 minutes. Usable internet (stream SD videos).

There's 5000 emergency rooms and 3500 Walmarts in the US.

So the first two don't narrow things down a lot.

Most people having those requirements are the major reason these areas are sparsely populated.

"Check email" is comfortably accomplished with dial up connection speeds.

Streaming video not so much, but there's always satellite service for that kind of thing.

Not to say that rural areas don't have a problem with good internet access, but they don't have good access to a lot of other services either. That's why they are called "rural"

Eh, if you're just pulling text-based e-mails through a desktop client, maybe, but these days e-mails can be pretty fat and if you want to use a browser based mail client like say, gmail.com, you're going to have to switch to the "simple HTML" interface.

FYI if you want to get a feel for what browsing at different connection speeds is like there's a setting on the Network tab in the Chrome dev tools that will allow you to do that.

What I read from this: Lots of image and javascript-laden webpages are leaving people out in ways their developers may not be aware of. Why should you need broadband to pay your credit card bill? You shouldn't. Yet when I think of the heavy web UI I see when I pay my cards, yes, it's not surprising.

Can't even imagine living in an area without 3 supermarkets in walking distance and broadband cable/4G.

As someone once famously tweeted: "why would you live there". Although I guess you can see the stars at night?

You live there because you don’t have to put up with the crowds that necessitate having three grocery stores. I mean, $DEITY H. $DEITY on a pogo stick, you need three stores from which to buy your food or you can’t imagine living here? You’re being sarcastic and it went right over my head, right?

I totally don't mind crowds, but I do mind most everything needed daily be available within a walking distance, and the ability to find that particular item in one of four grocery stores closest to my apartment. This, and never having to drive. (So I live in New York.) </offtopic>

Why do you need more than one supermarket?

As someone who lives near many supermarkets, you tend to frequent a couple of them and remember roughly what inventory you can expect in each, so you go to one or another based on what you might be eating, or maybe you know that item X is more expensive or lesser quality at market Y.

I guess this also gives various supermarkets an incentive to compete with each other, improve inventory and prices across the board, and better cater to various market segments. So the average supermarket is better in a place where supermarkets are abundant. (That's been true in my life experience, though it's anecdotal.)

I don't live in such area, but I don't oppose to the idea of living in one. I think there is something romantic and charming about watching stars burning firewoods at night, listening to birds chirping in the morning and chill out reading books during the day. What's romantic about spending money on Chinese clothes in Walmart/LV, posting nudes on snapchat on 4 Gees and shitposting memes on 4chan on a 100Gbps network? It's the same boring, mindless shit.

Other than that, some people might be stuck and simply don't have a choice. You should listen to S-Town. Gives a lot of insights into a brilliant mind that got stuck in a rural area. To quote part of the reason:

"So why don't I move? There's got to be people in Fallujah right now, or Beirut, that just asked each other the same question. You know, why the hell don't you get out of here, Hassan? And Hassan's answer is, I don't know. Hassan has probably gone out there and made a sand maze or something. His aging mother can't decide which one of her hijabs she's going to wear that day, and she ends up peeing all over herself, and he has to clean her up or some damn something. He keeps thinking, OK, maybe one day it'll get better, although secretly he knows it never will.

I have this old crummy Ford truck. You can't be a redneck and live in Alabama without a damn Ford truck, can you? And I keep thinking, could I put everything that I would put in that truck and drive down that driveway for the last time? But then again, who would take care of Mama? Who would feed the puppies? Who'd water the flowers? Who'd prune the maze?"

The problem is line attenuation 90% of the time in middle america

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