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Comment by carlivar | Hacker News Reader

I love the U.P. I have been there almost every year of my life, first from Illinois where I was raised, and now I make the trip with my kids from California. I love the forests, the lakes, and the rivers, and I try to let my kids experience that (there isn't much uncrowded freshwater in southern California). The people, being very Finnish (like half my family), are best described as stoic.

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I have to say, from reading TFA, it sounds quite appealing. I'd guess good internet service is pretty uncommon in those parts, which would limit its potential as an isolated remote-work kind of place. But if you're financially independent and like solitude, sounds pretty good.

There’s 4 or 5 areas with gigabit actually from smallest ISPs like packerland / CCI. They’re in some of the more populated areas of course.

Depends on just how remote you want to be. Broadband is available in the more populated towns. When I was in Houghton, the only major service interruption I remember was from a backhoe operator digging where he shouldn't.

Most of the towns in the area have decent internet, although I remember having a lot of outages, at least a few every winter during bad storms. I'm not aware of any gigabit connections but the speeds are enough to stream movies, play games, and fiddle around online. If you go off into some of the more remote areas, like 10-30 minutes outside of a town, you're largely stuck with satellite internet.

Yes I would be there more if I could work some of the time. Our family property doesn't even have reliable cell service much less wired Internet.

As someone from Michigan, the UP, while great in its own right(just as the rest of the state of Michigan outside of Detroit and it's suburbs), is very much being idealized here.

I live on the west coast now and the beauty simply does not compare. I can't speak specifically for California but even SF, its surrounding hills and even the time I've been in LA make the UP pale in comparison.

We're talking about dirty rural communities with no mountains, and no oceans- forget about jobs. Oh, and I hope you like hot summers and freezing, feet-of-snow and ice winters.

There is a reason some places are more expensive than others.

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