70% of surveyed Americans say they can't do their job without internet
decisiondata.org
decisiondata.org
Smells like selection bias to me... are they interviewing people already at home because their work allows it?
They do mention -
> There are certainly some folks who work in healthcare, grocery stores, auto shops, etc., where you wouldn't think a strong home internet connection was a requirement.
But I still remain skeptical that so many claim they require home internet. At the very least work email can be done on a phone.
If I were an employee there, I'd say that I need an internet connection at home.
It's possible that some of the 70% are not considering their local library, though.
I don't use my personal phone for work. Anyone who does use their personal phone for work is being abused by their employer.
An abusive employer is going to make unreasonable demands of you, regardless of whether you use your personal phone for work.
Well your experience is more the exception than the rule today given my friends, family, and own anecdata.
> An abusive employer is going to make unreasonable demands of you, regardless of whether you use your personal phone for work.
Let me know when there's enough employers that most people without negotiating leverage can actually be employed by one that's not abusive.
Using your smartphone to log into your payroll site, or as the internet bridge to the company VPN, is not any different from using a broadband line and a laptop to do the same thing. Those systems shouldn't be able to interrupt you when you're not working, but they might still be accessed through a smartphone in lieu of a desktop or laptop.
Parroting implies blind repeating. I honestly believe my statement though. It's not parroting.
> That's abusive, because it allows the employer to send you work when you're off the clock.
No, it's abusive when doing work functions requires the use of my personal phone. Accessing an employer's VPN should not be done using devices or services that are wholly owned and paid for by me.
Allowing my employer to notify me, while I'm off the clock, of any work that's available or scheduling changes or emergencies definitely falls under personal devices can be used.
But when the employer requires you to use your personal devices and personal internet service to actually do any function of that work then that's where you and I clearly disagree.
> Using your smartphone to log into your payroll site
Payroll sites necessarily must be accessible from outside of the work VPN: payroll sites' reporting ability must be accessible after my employment has been terminated.
> or as the internet bridge to the company VPN
Using someone's personal internet service or phone service is unethical. Employers should pay for the internet bridge to the company VPN and all devices and services necessary to connect to it.
> is not any different from using a broadband line and a laptop to do the same thing
Nope, it isn't. Who owns it though?
> Those systems shouldn't be able to interrupt you when you're not working
Indeed.
> but they might still be accessed through a smartphone in lieu of a desktop or laptop.
Sure, but who owns it?
Another kneejerk thought also suggests that whatever few(?) that are open might take on increased traffic, at odds with distancing guidelines/mandates.
So if you don't have an internet connection at home, you don't have an internet connection.
Also, resiliency is a good thing. It is not redundancy if the two services have different business continuity profiles.
I could theoretically write code with a laptop from the back of a camel in the Sahara desert. That doesn't mean it qualifies as "able to do my job".
People who say, "Just use the library" are people who have never tried to just use a library.
Edit: The dailup part was an exaggeration but if your web app doesn't suck 3g and two bars or a 1Mb down DSL pipe should be fine for most CRUD type business tasks that. There's no reason that signing in and signing up for a shift should take more bandwidth than Craigslist.
They couldn't if they needed to work asynchronously. Or if they couldn't speak or hear well over the phone, the likelihood of which approaches 1 if you have so much as a different accent. Or if you don't want the other person to hear your accent.
It's a bit cliche maybe, but I know people who've benefited from all of those features of IP-based communication, and they're reasons to be happy about the Internet. And since just about any telecommunications system that transmits voice can be bullied into transmitting IP packets, there's really little cost.
Ask me how I know you haven't used dialup recently. First, you can't even get dialup in many places because the pots system has been ripped out and replaced by partial fiber. Second of all, Once you add a phone line and pay for dialup you're looking at a cheap broadband cost.
The employee has absolutely no control over that and sure, you could pass regulations - but those regulations are going to be fairly difficult to enforce.
But you know, we could just start trying to make sure everyone has decent internet. Work isn't the only benefits to this.
You know, saving data is saving energy.
Speeds 10x that shouldn't even be an option in 2020 honestly. It's a failure of capitalism that they are.
This may be the least reasonable assumption I have ever read.
And if we’re talking mobile, wouldn’t an app experience be the best?
I think the reaction from GP was likely due to a difference in how people interpret the meaning of the word can't, as in some people mean "I currently use the internet because non-internet solutions are inconvenient" vs "It's literally impossible to do my job without the internet or losing the internet would make my job completely irrelevant(such as being a dev on the Google search team)."
I think that even for work from home jobs, if the internet disappeared tomorrow a lot of employers would figure out how to do the important stuff with non-internet solutions, like accepting longer business timelines, couriering paper documents, sending faxes (this might require getting fax machines and landlines for employees, but companies will pay for them if they need to), and having telephone meetings instead of Zoom.
Some employers would probably cut employees/tasks that weren't adding as much value as the effort required to shift to non-internet solutions, but I don't think it would be as high as a literal interpretation of this survey would imply.
Be glad you've never had to work somewhere where you're disposable, and your boss is forced to fire you for reasons they don't even believe in, like being mere minutes late. If your shift starts at 7:30 AM, you have to be there at 7:00 AM to be in line to have punched into the time clock before it turns 7:30. Making it to work in time to stand in line for the time clock before 7:30 isn't good enough.
This is why I never pay attention to self reported studies. You could argue they are crafted to make the most clickbait headlines while also saying nothing of worth.
A lot of clerical paper processing jobs and bean counting that don't exist anymore because of computers, and more recently, the internet.
In my last several white-collar jobs I could have got by without home internet with only small inconvenience.
You're misreading. It's not that 70% can work entirely from home, it's 70% can't never work from home. I don't believe that number either, but that's a different topic.
>At the very least work email can be done on a phone.
So, the internet connection that they use at home is different from "home internet" for the purposes of this article? If you really want to spit that hair, what is the meaningful distinction?
It doesn't make sense to me either.
> Only 30% of Americans have jobs where they can't work from home?
"Only" implies you think 30% is too low? You think more Americans can work without home internet?
I'm surprised it's as high as 30%. I think a lot more Americans can't work without home internet.
> Truck drivers, factory workers, cashiers, taxi drivers, etc all make up less than 30% of America? I dont buy that.
I'm not familiar with truck drivers. But I can easily see that they would need the internet to simply receive a phone call to alert them that a route has been contracted by their contracting company. Or to engage in a route marketplace. That's going to necessitate not only "home" internet, but probably also mobile internet too.
I'm not familiar with factory workers. But I hear they're overworked. And if they don't have home internet that often means they also don't have a way to get in contact with their bosses outside of the factory.
Cashiers need the internet because their employer's scheduling system is available on the internet. Not only that, but their schedules are often produced last-minute. Are you saying that a cashier must go to the retail premise and risk getting infected just to check to see whether they're scheduled for the day?
Taxi drivers... absolutely need the internet to work. Can you imagine being in a taxi today without having the ability to pay via your credit card? That's absurd.
What about emergency services like fire fighters, EMS, doctors ... are you saying that they don't need home internet?
I'm saying you're wrong. The modern world has moved into a place where we're hyper connected. Everyone's employers communicate on the internet. Lack of home internet hinders everyone's ability to work.
Worked in the industry for a bit, while it used to be a dinosaur, it's actually super tech-focused now for many.
It's not ideal, but it can work. The internet has made a lot of things happen smoother or faster, and some things happen in "real time" that previously could not, but as a whole... life without it wasn't horrible.
Kids used to write notes to each other instead of text messages.
Cashiers used to look at a schedule that was manually created and posted on the break room door on sundays. If you weren't working that day, you'd ask a friend to check for you.
It "can" work, yes.
But we don't ride horses any more; automobiles are here to stay. Suggesting that transportation isn't necessary for employment disenfranchises millions of people from reaching employment. I believe there's laws (or, at least, certainly ethics) that employers must compensate employees when they use their personal transportation for their employer's purposes. And, good employers offer public or private transportation to their own employees -- in the form of a "company car" or paid public transportation.
Likewise, the internet is here to stay. Suggesting that the internet isn't necessary for employment disenfranchises millions of people from reaching employment. Many lucky ones do have their own personal devices and services they can use. But I am of the opinion that this is unethical and should be more closely related to the "company car" or paid public transportation or compensating employees when they use their personal devices.
Kids do still write notes to each other. Thinking that a text message isn't a valid form of writing notes is ignoring the advancing methods of communication and burying your head in the sand. Kids' notes now include animated pictures, "memes", with whole websites dedicated to finding and creating them. Are you suggesting that these aren't valid forms of communication?
Bosses change schedules often. I've seen schedules be posted on Sunday, changed on Monday, and changed again Tuesday afternoon. And even if that weren't the case, your coworkers aren't friends: in a cutthroat environment your coworker will lie to you, state that you're not scheduled when you are, and your boss will fire you for not showing up. That happens when jobs are scarce. Fortunately, the internet helps to solve that problem by allowing employees to look at the schedule online.
Times change. Having access to the internet wasn't required forty years ago. It is required today.
It's actual somewhat of an interesting topic when you think of it.
Transport went from walking -> riding animals -> driving + flying. Communication went from talking -> moving physical messages -> radio -> telephone -> internet
I wish hackernews forums fostered better discussions on topics that are out of date the way reddit might. Unlikely anyone will ever see this reply.
Are there any good books that cover this sort of techno (r)evolution in depth?
The thing is, for modern life, you do need more than basic necessities. You do need electricity, you do need a telephone, and, more and more, you do need the internet.
You don't need these things, at home, to get your actual job done, even if you're a programmer, in most cases. You need them to do all the other things, like pay bills, use bank accounts, and so on.
Factory workers or construction workers can't do any work from home at all. But maybe people who do custom tailoring, or small-scale bakery like custom wedding cakes, can still WFH without a broadband connection being constantly up.
1. The survey found that only 63.8% said their job required a home internet connection pre pandemic, so it's closer to 40% of Americans with jobs that don't require home internet.
2. Sending emails from your phone at home is for all intents and purposes the same as a home internet connection. If you were no longer able to connect to the internet from within your home, you wouldn't be able to send those emails i.e. do your job.
3. There is a difference between jobs that can theoretically be done without home internet access, but that in practice require it. For example, you could theoretically drive a truck without any home internet. But, in practice, most truckers find loads and contracts via load boards, which you obviously need an internet connection to access.
With all of those considerations, the percentages don't seem too fishy to me. I buy that pre-pandemic, roughly 64% of Americans were in jobs that required them to connect to the internet from home for at least some work-related function, even if it is not the core of their work.
I'd suspect that there is strong selection bias, in that truckers, factory workers, cashiers, taxi drivers etc. were a lot more likely to lose their jobs in the pandemic and the ones that kept them are much more likely to work for "modern" companies that do require Internet. If you assume 37% of Americans are not in the labor force, 23% were unemployed and hence not in the survey, that implies 70% of the 40% remaining (~28%) require a home Internet connection, with about 3% being those whose employers recently switched to requiring Internet. That seems a lot more reasonable.
I think this is the crux of it. When you also add in jobs that require checking and responding to an email a couple of times a day, submitting a timesheet or expense reimbursement weekly, etc, then I think the numbers make sense. We're talking about jobs where 99.9% of the work is NOT done online but there are one or two quick tasks that do require an email or mobile app and so technically an internet connection is required.
Many of the machines running in the shop didn't have external network access (a few incidents with adult content and management just blocked everything on the floor) but still do email or access plans from the file share or work order itself. Their process was still mostly paper based including large format printing of plans with bar codes for tracking so if the network goes down they can still work.
It's this odd balance of welder demanded processes (workers would boycott new IT or automation tools so they had to hire a new guy to run a parts tower machine) combined with old school practices. When I was there 4 years ago it was mostly old dudes pushing out retirement to do 1 more year of income and buy their truck of choice while management was seeing SEC checks and auditing for tax/securities fraud. I'm surprised it's still in business at this point.
I can easily imagine that all of those could require an Internet connection. Could be something as simple as getting information crucial for your job exclusively via electronic communication.
And why would you assume that such jobs don't require internet access? Shift workers are sent their schedules via email. They talk to their bosses after hours via email. Factory workers often complete mandatory training (health/safety certs etc) from home. Just as once upon a time each employee having a phone number was once optional, basic administration of any vocation now requires internet access.
I'd say that monastic orders probably can go without, but I equally assume that there is an abbot out there somewhere staring at a screen and mumbling about how slow the wifi gets on sunday mornings.
Service workers use the internet to see what their shift is going to be, respond to work issues/surveys.
Etc.
The question was whether respondents needed to use the internet at home, not whether they need a physical wire going to their home. Needing LTE/3G at home to do work email = needing a home internet connection.
> Truck drivers, factory workers, cashiers, ...
For all of these, a lot of shift scheduling is done online these days.
Truck Drivers: Many are independent contractors. So, "one-man business owner and also sole employee" might be a better model and makes it abundantly clear that an internet connection is required.
Cashiers: there are vanishingly few people who are full-time cashiers and don't have a second or third job. Possible their other job requires a home internet connection.
Factory work: Most folks I know who work in factories tend to hop from job to job every year or two. In other words, they're constantly in job search mode. Job searches happen online.
Healthcare: Most healthcare professions require CEUs, which can often be done at least partially online and always require a home internet connection if taken seriously.
The graph says "internet at home", not "home internet". If that is the exact wording of the question asked, then some responders might reasonably interpret that their mobile plan would count.
I admit it is a bit confusing that the article says "home internet connection" in other places. It would be nice if the survey question and article were more specific.
- Restaurants and retail businesses also rely heavily on Internet, particularly for handling things like loyalty and credit card processing.
- Since many of those businesses take orders online, they also need an incoming connection in order to receive them. (You can still do this over the phone if it's just takeout, obv, but it doesn't scale nearly as well, especially at peak.)
- Additionally, lots of back-office software for managing them is now cloud-based, which (depending on your scope) can impact basic operational functions like supply chains, scheduling, etc.
ISPs lease the Last Mile at near cost (to pay for physical maintenance/improvements) and then are responsible for peerage agreements, subscriber management, network equipment, data budgets, plans, customer service, and other services (e.g. VoIP, TV over IP, etc).
Nobody benefits from ten+ different fiber runs from data center to home or business, it is inefficient. So you have to consolidate it and then lease it, that way granting an actual competitive landscape where consumers would get many choices for their ISP (and their ISP is responsible for mediating with the government about physical issues/faults).
Other countries have done this successfully. It also keeps government from being responsible for actually providing internet services, which could have civil rights problems (or politicians trying to decide winners/losers, etc).
This is probably common (or at least more common than internet-infra-as-a-utility), but the concept of doing the same for data would benefit a lot of people. We had that for POTS/PSTN and Coaxical data (CATV/cable/whateveryoucallit) as well, which was privatised and now opened up again so you get your infrastructure component as a national fixed fee and you simply pay your provider of choice for the actual service.
- “Coaxial” refers to the design of the physical cable (Wikipedia has a better explanation than I can offer)
- CATV refers to “Community Antenna Television”, the first cable systems in the USA, which fed the signal from a shared “community antenna” to homes in areas with poor broadcast reception.
- “Cable” is the generic term for pay-TV and ISP services over coaxial cable
Technically you are using a DOCSIS connection which happens to use a coaxial cable. But not the same cable one as you'd have with CATV because that one didn't have the same ratings. There is also a difference with one-way broadcast and two-way communication where you also need a CMTS for that purpose. And to make it worse, sometime EOC is used which in itself is Ethernet, but not over CAT5/6/7 cables.
However, all of those words are better than people calling it 'the internet wire'.
I have no idea who you work for. But my personal experience with trying to get fiber from AT&T in what is supposed to be one of the most tech-forward regions of the world is laughable. The government may not be better, but at least I know where to aim my pitchforks and torches.
The situation with home internet is just so shitty.
I so agree with your last statement.
If you're in an area they serve, getting Sonic is much better, BTW. They can operate over AT&T FTTH and DSL. It's a tad more expensive, but the customer service is unbeatable.
Also, fiber can be analog, too.
* Slows down to 2G after 1 gigabyte.
I absolutely despise mobile ISPs.
The best networking option available is Comcast Gigabit Pro (2gbps both up and down).
I wrote up details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comc...
These two articles are also helpful:
- https://binaryimpulse.com/2019/11/comcast-gigabit-pro-instal...
- https://medium.com/@Gtwy/comcasts-2000mbit-fiber-to-the-home...
If you're not looking to spend that much, Comcast gigabit (non-pro) is cheap and gets you 1gbps down, but only 35mbps up. They're annoying to interact with, but once it's set up it's reliable.
Pro-tip: Ignore the Comcast website prices/packages. The only way to work with them is to call and get a friendly sales rep, then ask them to look through their options to find the best gigabit only plan (they have a lot more promotions available than they list online). This might take a few tries if you get someone on the phone that isn't very good. Comcast Twitter support is also pretty helpful.
You should be able to get something around ~$80, but it might require a multi-year contract to lock in the price. I also had to add $50/month to remove the 1TB cap because of this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast/comments/dqwsnj/comcast_dat...
You have to call them to get a quote, but here's a good blog post with the important info: https://binaryimpulse.com/2019/11/comcast-gigabit-pro-instal...
For clarity, the gigabit pro (2gbps) is both up and down.
Its also a bit of a chicken egg situation. If the majority of internet users had good upload maybe some "killer" p2p apps would be developed.
Wait until they've got it stable, likely around 1.8 or 1.9.
I'm currently still on the USG and regular comcast gigabit.
I think 2gbps is rare to find anywhere?
Comcast includes a Juniper ACX2100 switch for layer 2 and bringing the fiber into the house. I thought that was pretty cool. (Well 'includes', you have to pay to rent it from them.)
Seconded. We had AT&T Fiber a few years ago, and were having techs out just about every week to fix it and were given a nonsense reason like "this cable was loose" each time. Once we got fed up and canceled service, the tech told us that corporate fucked up the install for the whole neighborhood so they'd basically send techs out, tell them to lie, and have them add whatever bandaid was needed to fix it for just a little longer.
You've described why the government shouldn't be the entity making sole architectural decisions - you haven't explained why the government shouldn't own and fund the last-mile fiber.
My county "owns" all the roads around me - city employees aren't building the roads and more often than not aren't the ones architecting them either (slope, water mitigation, etc). They do maintain them after they're in place (plowing the roads/mowing the ditches).
Why would fiber need to be any different? I don't think anyone expects city employees to actually trench the fiber, that would all be outsourced. If they're a large enough entity they could very easily train and hire some fiber splicers to fix cut lines.
Honest question, I don't know the answer.
I guess I would be shocked to find out there is any significant number of local governments out there that demand to dictate architecture of something they have no expertise in. If ANYTHING, the times I see them get out over their ski's is when they trust a vendor consultant TOO much. See: every Oracle implementation ever.
A competitive market with a relatively low barrier to entry for last mile cable would benefit everybody. Everybody except AT&T and Comcast that is (& their millionaire shareholders in congress).
Even a nationally owned and run last mile would be better than what we have now though.
A tender for a brick house is, rightly, not going to be won by a wooden house proposal, even if it's cheaper and the company argues it's just as good.
People are upset at what trump is doing in relation to the USPS. Why would we want his administration in charge of broadband as well?
It's not that they're usually wrong, they simply aren't attempting to optimize towards that at all. Most The government tends to make decisions optimized against political merit, not engineering efficacy or solution fit. The reason they generally appear wrong is because generally engineering efficacy and solution fit have little if any positive correlation with political merit.
At least with federal ownership we can mandate maintenance and repair requirements or timetables along with budgeting to do so in a timely manner. Or at least stop passing free money to ISP CEOs by giving millions of taxpayer dollars to them for upgrades and expansions that never come. I'd rather give a billion dollars to the Army CoE or a similar group to get things installed and maintained instead of profit to an ISP and at best slow expansion and data caps.
Wilson, NC figured it out when Comcast refused to put down fiber in town:
We owned lots of fiber, which was managed by third parties. The downstream customers benefited from better terms and buildout of the last mile infrastructure before private entities were doing it.
If we had the political environment that allowed for old style utility regulation, I would agree that commercial utilities would be better - the old dial up ISP market demonstrated how robust and effective competitive market prices were. But we do not have that environment today.
If local governments can own the roads and power utilities are forced to share power infrastructure there is no reason municipalities shouldn’t be able to own their last mile installation.
I try to be an optimistic person, but years and decades of gridlock and getting nothing done in the US is definitely wearing on me. There are so many things in this same category, of "We have Big Problem X", here's what research has shown works and doesn't work, here's how other countries are doing it more successfully, here's a very clear solution - but no, we'll just talk about it on and off every few months or years and then let inertia win and never actually do anything.
> I try to be an optimistic person, but years and decades of gridlock and getting nothing done in the US is definitely wearing on me.
That's just like, your opinion.
We do a lot of things well in this country, you just have to be willing to look. Public infrastructure like roads and power seem like they have plenty of examples of what works to get this built out.
I don't see why any other utility model needs to change significantly for last mile.
I'd argue that ISPs end up using infrastructure that is common (think tragedy of the commons) like a water pipe or power line and should be open or publicly owned/maintained. By exploiting exclusive ownership of a common resource, ISPs become rent seeking and suck cash from both customers and taxpayers. As long as they hold ownership of the lines, they can charge what they want or you have to pay a huge cost for a new fiber line or have no access.
So seize the lines, just like water and power, and allow well regulated companies to facilitate the utility like many states do for power. Allow cities to push for municipal control and management (ex taking over line maintenance in exchange for providing services. Force it into a system where it pays for its own upgrades vs millions to execs and share holders, just like health insurance in many countries.
San Francisco had a plan and still has a tax in place to bury power lines, but they pre-spent all the money in 2007, made much less progress than expected, and haven't made any additional progress on it since.
More generally, infrastructure like trains and bridges are incredibly difficult, unpredictable, and expensive to build now. The California high-speed rail and Caltrain extension are effectively indefinitely postponed at this point. It's a perfect example of exactly what I was saying - it's a problem that has been solvable in the past, there are examples of other countries doing a much better job of it, but the US is completely unable to do it.
Where exactly do you look at infrastructure projects in the US in the past 2 or 3 decades and see this success story you're talking about?
I guess you are not from Northern California where week long power outages are new normal.
As a Swede living in Japan, that system has worked well in both countries. In Japan you have the former telco monopoly NTT with its national flets network and competition in the private au, Sony NURO and various local networks. In Sweden you have many local municipality-owned companies as well as national competition fighting over customers.
It seems like Americans are always see options as black and white. The same thinking is reflected in your politics
Many developing nations never had any last mile to begin with and probably will never have any. There are more phones than people in this world. Multiple companies are bootstrapping satellite networks to serve internet all over the planet. Going forward, the only reason to have a wired connection into your house would be monopolist telcos hogging the locally available radio-spectrum backed by lots of government protection.
So, instead of governing the status quo of 15 years ago, governments should focus on ensuring there are no infrastructure monopolies on mobile internet. That means ensuring multiple providers are active and that no barriers exist for customers to switch provider. This drives them to compete on quality rather than luring in customers to years long contracts and lots of hurdles to get out of those; which sadly is the status quo in many countries.
The only reason sim cards still exist is because they are a key control mechanism. Soft sims were proposed early this century already and the only reason for sim cards to continue to exist is that it 'solidifies' your relation ship to your local telco monopolist. It's the same reason they make you obsess over owning a phone number, which is an ancient relic from the last century.
There is still significant improvement in last mile delivery, where different technologies enable different layouts and possibly different cost structures.
There isn't even a safety reason to make this a monopoly.
The monopoly in Internet provision is in the right of way. If new providers were able to construct their own last mile networks, then we would see more providers.
US West owned the lines to your home. Your DSL modem communicated with the DSLAM at a US West switching center, and US West relayed raw bits between you and your chosen ISP over something lower level than internet (ATM?).
US West essentially provided an unstructured dedicate virtual circuit bit stream between your DSL modem and your ISP, and your ISP provided internet on top of that.
Your ISP charged you for providing internet access, and US West charged you a fee for using their line.
I had CenturyLink DSL in Seattle circa 2009. IIRC it worked fine and wasn't absurdly expensive.
I am absolutely ready to be convinced otherwise, but my gut reaction to this strategy is that it sounds like a needless carve out for private industry. If 98% of a project is taxpayer funded, private companies shouldn't be able to charge whatever they like for the final 2%. Maybe competition would stop that from happening, but why take that risk? What is the benefit?
They are also avoiding the GPON approach and running fiber direct from "fiber huts" to homes so that they can simply use standard networking equipment to service customers.
They have providers offering up to 10Gbps for $199! https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/
Oh, and while they are at it, I shouldn't have to worry about my internet utility stealing my data. They have a monopoly and so I am forced to accept whatever they put in my contract. If I could negotiate, I'd charge these leaches billions for my data...
My province is small but even here in the rural areas ISPs balk at having to run fiber down a side road off the main highway. Even with money thrown at them from various governments over the last two decades they still won't budge.
The places that do have DSL or wireless are often stuck in the "up to" scenario. Sure it's supposed to be 1.5Mbps but it's up to 1.5Mbps.
Many people here are waiting for Starlink but I don't think that will be as good as promised. If the cost is low that will help but the dish will be a problem. Rural areas tend to have a lot of trees and here we also have snow 1/2 the year.
My friend and I calculated that it takes about $1 worth of electricity per year to keep your smartphone charged, we have cheap power so let's say $1-3, but even on a very cheap MVNO it costs at least $360 per year to provide cell service to that same phone.
There are a lot of assumptions here, I pay ~$30/month for 12GB of data, for a lot of people that's too little, for some more than enough, but its the orders of magnitude that are important, is it just the case that providing cell service is 100x to 300x harder than providing electricity? I'm curious to hear the answer from people in the field, because for my friend who works in power generation, electricity generation doesn't seem 100x easier than providing data service, no coal had to be mined or water reservoirs had to be created in order to send cat videos, his words lol.
Land leases are expensive for tower placement, and they need electricity and a backup generator, to power the comm. equipment and the air conditioning.
And then we can talk about HVAC maintenance.
So, as a telecom, it is better to go in under the guise of a CATV company and use a franchise agreement, then as a phone company that also offers TV, and internet.
Also, if the poles are already there (usually phone or power), the new entrant is able to lease a portion of the pole to string infrastructure.
Sometimes the municipality owns the power company.
Cellular providers lease tower space from private companies that negotiate the tower placement with private land owners.
I don't know the answer, but one part of it might be that electricity is a "commodity" that you can effectively buy from anywhere in the country, or perhaps anywhere in the world, via the power grid. Whereas for cell service you're effectively buying from one of three companies, I think. So way less competition.
there are some small exceptions where it was traded on the power grid with deregulation. it caused the enron scandal. do you remember enron?
the issue is we have limited frequencies to use for cell phones. any time you have another player, you are wasting that bandwidth by splitting it up more. we should have 1 cell phone provider for each area of the country, and it should be regulated like a utility. that is what will make cost lower, not more competition. there are things that are physically limited, so running it capitalist style is not appropriate because of high barrier to entry. capitalism only works well with low startup costs.
i like how most of europe has internet for dirt cheap. it's public land, it's public cables. all an isp does is lease cables and provide service with their equipment connected.
Even ignoring that bit, electricity has different scaling considerations. Everyone’s computers don’t need access to special Youtube electricity and Twitter electricity. It all just comes from a localized grid and can come from any standard generation source.
Internet access would certainly be way cheaper if it didn’t provide global connectivity.
Yes, unfortunately. It's at least that much harder. For a similar comparison think of traditional radio - you buy the radio, and that's it. You might wonder how that's possible when it costs so much to beam data to your phone wirelessly? It's a complex question with a lot of nuance, but there are two important reasons that float to the top:
First, Internet requires reliable two way communication. Neither radio or electricity require that. These means economies of scales work in favor of electricity generation and radio transmission - they can put up a huge plant or radio tower, crank the power up, and serve a lot of customers far away. The customer's device doesn't have to talk back. Imagine if each home had to have a mini generator to send electricity back to the power plant - that would cost a lot!
Second, Internet service requires much, much more precise electronics than power or radio transmission. The Ethernet port on your laptop can understand signalling at (at least) 1gbps (1 billion bits per second, more or less). And that's not even that much - large networks today are doing 100 of times that on single physical connections, with electronics on both sides both modulating and demodulating those signals simultaneously. All that expensive (both to design and to manufacture) electronics adds up, and is accounted for in the cost of getting those bits to you.
I will also add that Telcos are wickedly inefficient. Multi-million dollar projects just to update a public website, tens of millions in advertising, more PMs and Business Analysts and Middle Managers than people doing actual work, etc. etc.
Of course they want to make a tidy profit too.
In my area the cost to deploy service seems to be primarily driven by the cost of labor to bury things. That impacts electricity more than cell data, as you actually have to physically reach every one of your customers.
Also your meter is two-way. It's just sending your usage data back, not power.
This is actually a pretty good illustration of what I'm talking about - sending a few bytes a month for power usage data is much different than maintaining a constant bit rate of >0mbps from each customer. It's the difference between broadcasting 40 channels to everyone and reserving 1 channel for a bit of upload (fairly easy with old technology) and giving everyone their own channel for upload (much more difficult).
You're not wrong that a huge portion of the costs is putting things in the ground, though. The advantage that power companies have is that a lot of that work has already been done, and they don't have to upgrade as often because power usage requirements aren't changing as rapidly as bandwidth requirements. They also have the (arguable) advantage of usually being a government granted monopoly, so they don't have to worry about building something out and then being undercut by a competitor.
There is a lot to dig in to here, but consider this from a different perspective - there is actually quite a bit of competition among mobile providers, and yet prices aren't dropping very quickly. You could argue that that's because of corruption and collusion (in some cases it probably is) but also consider that any one of those companies would absolutely love to take market share from the cable companies. If Verizon could undercut Comcast and give you Internet and TV at home over their wireless network they would do that in a heartbeat. The only reason they're not doing it is because it would be too expensive. Or, more precisely, they are trying to do it, that's what 5G is, and it's costing them a fortune.
EDIT: Also consider another perspective - the power companies themselves would love to provide Internet service! On paper they are in a great position to be able to do that. They already have infrastructure, technicians, billing platforms, captive customers, etc. The reason they're not doing it is because their infrastructure doesn't support it, and couldn't really be made to do it without spending so much money on it that they could not be cost-competitive with existing products.
A useful comparison is the cost of fixed wireless internet service vs mobile service. The price/GB of the former is usually far lower than the latter despite running on exactly the same infrastructure.
I merely point out that I struggle to believe that the physical infrastructure costs are large components of the cost of service. Unlike power delivery, where the physical distribution infrastructure seems to be the majority share. Or at least it is if my bill breakdown is to be believed.
Glad you brought this up, fixed wireless is my career so this is something I've thought about a lot over the last 15 years or so. I would argue that the difference in pricing between fixed wireless and mobile is actually almost entirely driven by the 'fixed' qualifier - it's just much easier and cheaper to deliver Internet service to a fixed point where you can put a high gain antenna (like a rooftop) than it is to deliver to a cell phone in someone's pocket inside a building.
Of course the next question is why don't the mobile operators do home service with a fixed antenna on the rooftop like fixed wireless operators do, but using their massive spectrum and tower footprint advantages? I don't really know the answer to that. There have been a lot of efforts to do this, actually - the earliest one I know of was Sprint putting up these diamond shape antennas on rooftops back in the late 90s / early 00s. I think at least part of it is that it's hard to have high-gain antennas on rooftops coexist with low-gain antennas in cell phone on the same medium, and another part is that it's hard to hire and train and manage folks to do the home installs. I do believe that part of the push to 5G is to enable this type of service, though.
In terms of the fixed costs. For electricity, the price you pay powering your phone is subsidized by the price you pay powering your HVAC. The portion of the electricity infrastructure that powers phones is negligable.
In contrasts, the cellular networks exist almost entirely to run phones; so the cost phone users pay needs to be enough to maintain the entire network.
To be a fair comparison, you would need to imagine a world where phones were the primary consumers of the electric grid. In such a world, I would expect to see electricity prices rise significantly
This is actually an interesting thought experiment. Maybe the best solution would be shipping powerbanks around?
I've always just seen the state's sample form often without any modification.
Now, a lot of the rental complexes either have their own online system (if they're owned by a big management company), or they use something like Avail if they're a one-off.
I pay my rent through Venmo for my current house.
Times have changed.
Do you feel there is justification for our roadways being classified as a public utility? How does that logic work?
I feel the analogy of calling the internet an "information superhighway" is extremely apt here.
Every developed country subsidizes their food industry to some extent or other. In the EU, the Common Agricultural Policy is the largest item in the EU budget.
Food subsidies seem to be economically essential for a stable food supply, and politically essential to ensure stability in rural areas.
Shelter, for its part, is heavily subsidized through the GSE[1] system. The GSEs underwrite mortgages, lowering interest rates for homebuyers, and stabilize the mortgage system by allowing mortgage issuing banks to offload the costs of internal failures onto the public instead of locking up the mortgage lending system.
Tighter government regulation of internet availability, including public or quasi-public ownership, would be far from exceptional given the degree of government involvement in other essential economic areas including food and housing.
[0] https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-sponsored_enterpris...
The government does not control food or housing supply and there are very few people who would advocate that they adopt that role. That is my point.
As far as housing is concerned, GSE preferences (combined with additional support like the mortgage interest tax credit) distort the housing market by supporting owner-occupied housing, which is abnormal by global standards. This is deliberate shaping of the market, or "control" by most definitions.
Also with regard to housing, the market is directly controlled through zoning laws and building codes. Zoning controls housing availability to artificially inflate prices, and building codes theoretically control construction quality.
Food and housing are controlled markets.
Hope that helps somebody. It sure did help me!
2) link to the companies listed? I see some odd names when I searched my old address that I couldn't even find in Google.
Anyhow, thanks again!
Kinda calls into question their methodology and intent...
You see, in this school district, the buses have wifi. So they were using this to tether some of the kids with no internet access to the school. I guess they have some way of leaving the wifi on with the bus turned off, and since they weren't using the buses anyway...
It is still one of the classiest things I've seen come out of the quarantine. Unfortunately.
If you wire up a rural area, there's not a lot of customers and probably they won't be willing to pay premium prices. If you overbuild an existing area, you usually have to compete with the incumbent telco and cableco and both of them can use other areas to subsidize network upgrades and price drops, so you can't charge a premium price.
But then you aren't really getting data on all Americans. You're getting data on people who happened to be hanging out on cnn.com, smokinggun.com or whatever. And that's going to skew quite severely to people who have above average digital activity.
Same problem if they're using a ready-built panel of people who like to take online polls.
They might be surveying differently, and spending more money. But given that the publishing organization, decisiondata.org, is in the business of guiding people on their ISP choices, I don't think this is likely to be a demographically balanced phone survey, let alone Census-grade field work.
Sure, lots of us do rely on home internet to do a lot of work, especially now. But any effort to quantify this really ought to avoid big-time sampling problems.
We don’t know much about who they polled, when or how they polled them, and of course no sample questions. Their citation of the BBC result have more info than their own.
In this day and age I would have expected most people to be fine with just their cellular connection. Heck, I had a coworker working from home at the peak of the crisis only using their 4G data.
I live in a place where I can get two connections over two different technologies (cable TV and fiber optic), and there are some cheap and lower bandwidth (~10MiB/s) options that make sense for a backup connection. I think it's better to avoid having 4G as your backup since if there's any wired connections outage your local mobile frequencies will very quickly get saturated.
One of the reasons I have an unlimited mobile plan with uomited hotspot is that it is also the home internet fallback.
It costs me a pretty penny ($135+$65/mo), but I have much better reliability and can balance traffic between them when they are both up (my home lab runs off the DSL connection as it has a static IP, but will fail over to the cable connection if it goes down. My personal systems, game console, etc. are the opposite).
Isn't the sample size miniscule to make such a big statement?
The other 30% is doing all the hard work of keeping people fed or in support roles of transportation and construction for the information curators.
I wouldn't say that's inherently BS, though.
Well that’s unfortunate because I can’t believe your facts, if they are indeed facts.
Then subsidizing home office set up/construction.
I've spent my career building and maintaining small, regional Internet Service providers. One of the realities of the market is that no matter how good your service is you can't get more than around 15-25% of people in an area to use your service. Most of the companies trying to do this on a large-ish scale (like Starry) are trying to break that barrier by selling wholesale contracts (like exclusive contracts to entire apartments buildings / communities) and/or by piling other services on top of the Internet service and reaching higher and higher speeds.
I have a hypothesis that a company that could go the other direction and provide a really cheap, basic Internet connection (<20$/mo, 30mbps) could gain more market share in an area specifically because it would be cheap enough to be used as a secondary Internet connection. I'm thinking of three types of customer here:
1) Very price sensitive customers who just want the cheapest thing they can get that's still usable. Maybe they have Internet access at work and use satellite TV at home and are OK with very basic Internet service at home.
2) Customers who use the service as their primary connection and it saves them enough money to add tethering to their phone plan, so if the service is unreliable they can switch to tethering.
3) Customers who have cable TV and Internet and can switch over to this service when their cable Internet is slow or down.
I'm thinking of two types of plans, one for $20/mo and one for 10$/mo + 1$/day that the service is used. These numbers mostly work out on paper as long as >60% of the homes in a community sign up to use the service and it's understood that support is going to be slow. Like, no phone support (email/text only), response times in 1-2 business days, and it might take a week to send someone out if your service is down (but we won't charge you for the time it was down.) Obviously this class of service only works if it's redundant with something else. I'm kind of thinking about it as the 'MagicJack' of Internet service - as home phone service started to become less essential (due to the redundancy of having a phone in your pocket) it became possible for a very low cost and not particularly reliable service to have a place in the market. They would not have had the strict geographic customer density constraint, though.
The cool thing is that once you get to that 60-80% market penetration you can start offering really great plans at really great prices. Like 1gbps symmetrical for $50-60/mo, 10G symmetrical for ~$250/mo.
If anyone is interested in chatting about this my email is in my profile. I'm not quite committed to pursuing it, but it's something I think about a lot and would love to get some outside perspective.
Most people don't understand technology!
Edit, looks like I read this incorrectly. I thought it said 70% said their home internet connection wasn't good enough for working from home.
That doesn't prove for certain what their methodology was for the main page, but it's sufficient for NDizzle to reasonably assume they are not counting cellular as "home".
I tried the "About Our Internet Data" form and it wasn't 100% crystal clear, but the results implied they are only considering cable and dsl or whatever to be "home internet".