Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

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There is a weird dynamic in the US where many rural areas have garbage level internet access ... and some pockets have insanely high levels of service.

Somehow some random telcos have found a way (presumably government subsidies (I don't think that is bad)) to provide some amazing service, while others wallow in absolute trashy telco service.

I know folks with consistently low latency 1Gb service that is just amazing, and folks where the local telco literally left lines lying across their lawn providing terrible service claiming they'd get back to it and never did.

I worked with one rural telco provider who had datacenter grade switches running 1G sfps (they could have run 10G sfps on all of the ports if they chose to do so) ... one port per household. I talked to the guy running the show there for a while and he said they just had this massive budget so "why not?". He noted almost none of the houses used their service to its fullest extent with the exception of some local teens ;)

It would be interesting to overlay a map of high service levels on top of railroads and universities. Naturally, the backbone of the Internet has to travel through rural areas to reach urban centers, but universities (especially research universities) were also among the earliest sites connected and they tend not to be in urban centers. Railroad right of ways are great for long-distance cables, so they would likely be heavily used early in the construction of the Internet.

Sometimes, a higher quality of internet service can be attributed to 1. Household is in-between two major cities, 2. Household is close to major highway (lower cost of building and maintaining infra), 3. Household is in the vicinity of a highly valued facility (E.g. military), 4. Telco designated the area as a higher priority on the subsidized list.

I feel like it's more likely impacted by simple time: rural areas tend to see changes at a much slower rate, and I believe a (very) large chunk of the infra cost is just digging into the ground, and by the time it's being done for a rural area, it turns out fiber has become fairly cheap to produce...

So when the upgrades do finally roll around, it's not incremental -- it leapfrogs 2 decades or whatever of technology upgrades. A single upgrade places you far ahead of your peers, creating the dynamic you describe (and yet, your peers aren't actually that far behind, if they wanted to catch up)

The same thing occurs with third-world countries getting first-world tech; they get it sporadically, and so see large jumps of change instead of slow, incremental shifts; this also gives a bit of an advantage, as they don't have stale infrastructure from the incremental change, and so can make much more extensive use of the new tech. For example, China skipped credit cards and went directly to mobile payments -- and with only cash to compete, mobile took over entirely.

And so when these rural counties finally see an upgrade.. they see rapid full fiber coverage. There's simply no competing technology in the area, since its so far behind, and fiber keeps the county prepped for the next 20 years of no upgrades..

With the amount of money Americans have spent on internet everyone could have 100 gigabit by now.

The real question is how telcos have managed to spend all of their income. I know mine Frontier spends it all on interest payments for the service areas they’ve bought.

> The real question is how telcos have managed to spend all of their income.

It is returned to investors.

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