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Comment by thathndude | Hacker News Reader

I’m so delighted to see the promise (as in, potential) of the Internet playing out properly.

So often, the stories of the Internet are how it failed to become what we’d all hoped (open, naturally regulating, democratizing). Well, we all know that didn’t happen.

Good Internet, coupled with adjusted attitudes towards employment will allow the US to take advantage of the vast amount of land we possess. We don’t need to crowd into cities. We can reconnect with a more natural way of living. And semi-ironically, technology will be what allows that.

A boy can dream . . .

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Why do so many people believe that? Here in Maryland, there are towns with municipal broadband in rural areas on the eastern shore. (Maryland has a fairly extensive public fiber backbone to which rural towns can connect.) There is no tech related business activity or jobs. The only economic activity is farming and tourism. In fact, due to the way Verizon built out here in the early 2000s, there are many quasi-rural areas that have had fiber since 2005-2006, but still have no municipal water or sewer. It doesn’t seem like it’s done anything for the local economy.

We cannot even bring tech jobs to second tier cities, what makes anyone think that technology will enable that for rural towns? Kansas City has had fiber for almost a decade. Can we point to data showing that any of the economic benefits have been realized? What about places like Chattanooga Tennessee? Are they doing better than similarly situated small towns?

These seems like “build it and they will come” techno-Utopianism.

Well, in the article, they did mention creating 600 hundred work from home jobs in 500 years. It did require effort though, not just the existence of good internet.

But it does seem possible to bring jobs to rural America.

Chattanooga is not a “small town”. The Chattanooga MSA has almost 550,000 people. Its home to a lot of industries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattanooga,_Tennessee

While waiting in a temp apartment to move into a new home in a hinterland satellite of LA (a fairly large one, ~350k pop or so), I was delighted (and somewhat skeptical) to learn that AT&T had a U-verse package with 1GB/1GB fiber for like $90 a month - uncapped no less. For 90 glorious days I sat there incredulously running speedtests of all stripes, trying to get the bandwidth to back off at various times of the day. But it was not a tease; steady 800-900 mbps real throughput night and day.

Sadly it was only available in a small strip adjacent to a highway, and once the house was ready (out in a farther suburb) I had to relinquish this moment to sweet reverie and go back to my Charter life as a humble 100/20 megabit peasant.

Dream, and then do. Do you live somewhere without municipal fiber? If so, champion the cause! It pays dividends to your local community, and clearly has the potential to increase quality of life.

https://muninetworks.org/content/muni-fiber-models-fact-shee...

We've got it here in Centennial Colorado. Symmetric Gigabit

https://coloradosun.com/2018/09/13/municipal-broadband-citie...

Unfortunately, some of the same people who would benefit the most from “subsidies” are the ones who continuously vote for politicians who want to cut them out.

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