For example, the US has a great beer market now. It took several years before US beer - as a broad concept - was removed from the official foreigner list of things to bash the US with (which still includes such fan favorite fallback items as American cheese and Hershey chocolate).
That the US has had faster Internet access than most of Europe - including Germany and France - for the past decade, is a bash list counter that people intentionally pretend doesn't exist. It's very inconvenient reality and your typical American has no idea what the access speeds are across Europe, so they can't counter argue properly.
The access cost issue is also - fairly - of course on the bash list, although people never adjust for the far higher US incomes when pointing it out, naturally.
The US rolled out 4G much faster than Europe and it's going to roll out 5G much faster than Europe. That too is universally, intentionally ignored (despite the stream of articles you can google on the subject reporting how far behind Europe was in rolling out 4G and now again with 5G). That despite the fact that these items are matters of infrastructure and the US is supposed to be the worst on the planet when it comes to infrastructure (the US is spending more of its GDP on infrastructure than the EU).
Something has to be missing here.
16:10:46 Thank you for contacting us. An operator will be with you shortly.
16:10:46 Guest: Is there an installation fee for Gigazone internet?
16:11:08 Guest: Hi, I see that there's an $85 activation fee, but is there also an additional installation fee?
16:11:40 Operator JJ joined the chat
16:11:47 JJ: Hi there!
16:11:51 Guest: Hi!
16:12:13 JJ: There is no installation fee. It is rolled in with the activation fee which is waived if you sign a 6 month contract.
16:12:54 Guest: That's great--I was discussing this with friends and we can't figure out how it's possible! How can you afford to run fiber optic out into the country and charge so little for it?
16:14:36 Guest: Part of why I ask is because almost no other rural areas have this figured out
16:14:56 JJ: Well, there's a couple of ways. For a long time we required our members to have phone lines along with our internet service as there are a number of government grants that we can qualify for as long as we're building rural telephone infrastructure. That's the reason we still are required to require phone service in some of our service area.
16:15:13 Guest: I see, cool
16:15:52 JJ: Secondly, we're a co-op and committed to the community. If we plow a fiber line to your home and you end up moving some time in the future, the line remains for some other lucky co-op member in the future. It's kind of a "long-game" mentality.
16:16:05 Guest: Makes sense, thank you!
I'm in a city of 872k people and can't even get fiber. The fastest I can get at home, without going business, is 75mbps.
Sure... I can see your point that it “is a decision” for folks that choose to move to a rural area, but I don’t believe that’s the case for the other 99% of folks living there.
You can stop subsidizing our internet, and we'll stop supplying you with cheap food. Deal?
if subsidies weren't already being used by those supplying the food, entire businesses and families would fail. 'feeding the nation' isn't all that profitable without subsidies, from most angles.
so, I guess my point is that 'we'll stop supplying you with cheap food' is a hollow threat, given that the cheap food is over-produced and under-valued for the sake of an artificial economy that's largely enforced and legislated by 'citydwellers'. Most of the motivation to supply food is drawn from the incentives provided by the few in legislative power, not from profit nor moral imperative from 'rural-livers'.
If it's profitable to export soy from the US to china it most certrainly is profitable to import food from africa or australia after a storm.
Let the market incorporate the costs of broadband access into the price of food. The extra cost will almost certainly amount to fractions of a cent on the dollar.
Exactly: you receive cheap food in the city because it's subsidized. You are a beneficiary. Why should that be? Living in a city where it's impossible to grow food is a choice. So let's end that, along with internet subsidies (of which I'm a beneficiary) and we'll see if you're better off.
I am really not a big fan of the democratic party at large but a plan like this to take power away from the large internet monopoloies is going to be one of the only ways to make sure that internet infrastructure is kept up to date and that fast internet is available to everyone in the US.
Infrastructure like the internet pipes shouldn't be privately owned, simply because they value profit over maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure.
Maybe we can compromise with a system I have heard of ( in the nordic countries I believe) Where the local municipalities own the wires but you buy the service from a number of internet companies who rent the lines and provide service. This would increase competition and allow for private companies to not have to worry about the cost of upgrading the infrastructure.
1) It receives no public funding.
2) It has few public mandates or price controls. (No, “must offer subsidized service to disenfranchised people” or similar requirements.)
3) It faces no build-out or universal service requirements. It took Stokab almost 20 years to wire the city. They did it based entirely on demand/revenue potential. They deployed first to businesses and areas with the most revenue potential. Stokab didn’t need public funding because it could deploy in a revenue-directed manner. This is illegal in almost every US city. New York flipped out and tried to file a civil rights lawsuit when Verizon couldn’t meet the five year deadline for wiring the city.
4) It charges large up front fees to hook up to the network.
Stokab would be burned to the ground with civil rights lawsuits if it was attempted in New York or San Francisco.
Likewise, Sweden’s approach to wiring rural areas was very market oriented. Unlike the US, it didn’t mandate providers to serve rural areas (cross subsidizing them with revenues from urban areas). It gave rural homeowners a tax credit of about $600 to subsidize laying their own fiber.
That was without having to dig up concrete and repair too.
Otherwise, it's like 10~20min to sufficiently properly terminate the fiber at the ends and that. You can likely get around that if you just order pre-terminated fiber at like 1$/plug and just plug it in at the ends instead of splicing. Sure, this will higher losses, but money.
Fiber is literally cheaper than copper for >150m or >=10Gbit/s (though direct-attach cables up to 3~5m are even cheaper) if you can get by without field-terminating fibers.
The contiguous United States is 3,119,884.69 square miles (the United States makes up a little less than 1/3 of North America). There are individual states larger than several European and Asian countries.
Sure, there's not someone living in every single square mile but they are spread out. The fastest I can get at home, in a city fo nearly 900k people, is 75mbps down without going to a business line. Even delivering that speed to 80% of the population would probably require several billion in just equipment (lines included).
To go into a market, an ISP has to be able to reasonably recover their roll-out costs from that market. If they spend xxx dollars rolling out to a town, and then if they can hope to sell service to 75% of the homes, but are only going to make 0.5x or even xx of that back each year as profit, is it reasonable for them to spend xxx amount just to deploy when it might be a decade or more before they recover their initial investment? And what about the (likely) x to xx a year to maintain the equipment from squirrels/birds/storms/drunk drivers, and then upgrading the technology etc.
It's great when you have a small country, that you can drive across in a day, but when you're talking about 1/3 of a continent everything is orders of magnitude more expensive and more difficult.
I think people easily fall into the "well that country has it!" but they don't realize that "that" country is tiny. Let's take the country with the fastest internet [1], Taiwan, with an average speed of 85.02Mbps - it is 13,974 square miles, that's 0.44% (zero point four four) of the contiguous United States. 41 states are larger than Taiwan.
[1] https://www.swedishnomad.com/fastest-internet-in-the-world/
Today we take it for granted that you can go anywhere in the United States and flip a light switch to turn on a light. But without that public investment, there would be big swathes of the country still living by the light of candles and oil lamps.
These problems can be solved, but the private sector will never solve them, because the profit motive isn't there for them to do so. It requires public investment.
Also, you claim that "remote settlements" have little economic value, and yet their economic value is highly restricted when they don't have access to the internet so how can we claim that to be true?
Clean water, sewer, electric, internet, and USPS logistics service are table stakes (in the US). It's silly to make this out to be "Live in the suburbs or rural areas? Mad Max for you!".
Counterpoint: How's that cheap, high speed Gb FTTH internet working out for you in downtown NYC or SF? /s
I do think the costs could be more even but this isn't a new trade-off
I haven't though directly seen the cost difference though. I just know growing up one the big things the neighborhood wanted was a connection to city water
You don't accept bad air quality, traffic, crime, consumerism pressure, ads on every street corner, weak and shallow local communities, and proclame "well don't be surprised because you chose civilization". You expect and demand improvements like any other decent human being.
Giving money to big telco's hasnt worked. I think the best way to cover rural areas is wireless, via local WISPs or local government run ISPs. It would be nice to see some of the low-band spectrum being reclaimed from TV stations (sub 1GHz) go towards these efforts, since higher bands wont be able to cover as much area.
It's shitty to hang people out to dry, but at the same time, people MUST move in the above example. Coastal residents can't do whatever they want and expect others to share the costs.
What about the sea life and baby turtles that will die due to raising coastal areas?