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Comment by tengbretson | Hacker News Reader

Cool and all, but I'd settle for a cellular network in Wyoming.

I don’t think that has anything to do with Nasa or Nokia?

It has to do with that the expense of setting up a cellular network is so expensive that it hasn't be done in large parts of the earth, much less another celestial body.

That's the business of network providers. To acquire the hardware, install them, and operate the service. That has nothing to do with Nasa or Nokia.

I don't know why there are areas in US that lack service providers. Maybe someone here can explain it - I presume the reason has to do with something US specific about the business rather the overall cost since lots of low GDP areas globally can have good cellular coverage.

I get 4G in Russia, on a mountain in a crevice that has a glacier and 4 goats.

Jokes aside, you'd be surprised how good network coverage is in some remote areas that seemingly have very little economic value.

It's not so much average earnings per person as average people per square mile. The network providers only want to invest where the return on that investment meets or exceeds some floor. Parts of the US are so sparsely populated the phone contracts for cellular would be huge to justify building the towers and backhauling the signals.

Somewhere, a person with the expertise to deploy cellular networks is working on this rather than WY.

Deploying a cellular network is a simple exercise in capital expenditure and operating it as a service run of the mill business.

It's not about technical expertise but of business. Why the business does not provide the service? I have no idea.

So lets close all catering in casinos, bars and all of Vegas untill every child in Africa is fed.

And all distilleries and breweries, since they waste perfectly good produce to brew alcohol, and just increase our healthcare costs

And gold courses.

Contrary to what British newspapers might like you to believe, NASA is always capitalized.

There are so many things named with stupidly inconsistent capitalization that we should all stop caring and just capitalize the first letter like any other proper noun. I often have to google a product or company name to find out the correct capitalization, which is often hard to find because the stylized logo doesn't even use it.

I've been wanting to move to Wy, but I can't figure out what locations actually have decent internet. Looks like Casper has gigabit fiber? That's all I can tell so far.

In live in San Antonio and while you can get gigabit AT&T even Google Fiber (I can get either) many neighborhoods have 25-50 mbit max from AT&T so you get whatever your cable provider (Spectrum offers).

I was living in far south Austin last year, and I could only get ATT DSL (10M down, 4M up).

I'm in San Antonio as well and I've had gigabit fiber in both downtown (currently) and north side residences.

For a second there, I was like "when did the mattress company relocate to Wyoming..."

What do you consider decent? Gigabit only? You can get at least 60-100 Mbps in most towns, as long as you aren't out of town. Probably gigabit if you're willing to pay a lot. Spectrum is the main option in the big towns. Looks like you can get gigabit from them in the big towns for $110/month for the first 12 months. Not sure what it would go to after that.

If you live out of town, or in a really small town, you're gonna have tougher luck

When I was looking for property in WA and OR there was absolutely no way to get internet (even DSL was a big maybe) outside of towns.

You normally have to get wireless internet, as long as you are in range.

WA has some municipal fiber networks. In my county, you can get hooked up if you foot the bill to extend the network to your property and find a retail provider to service your account. There's an online map that shows where the fiber currently is, you'll save a bunch of money on fiber construction if you build near where it already is.

Depending on the area, you can't even get internet outside of full cities. I own a house that's a few miles outside of a small town in Oregon. When I moved up here from the bay area recently, I had to rent a second house in the nearest city 30 miles south because there is absolutely no terrestrial internet service even within the city limits of my ~700 person town.

100-200 mb/s is decent for me. I can multiplex multiple cable modems so not a problem. It would be great to get something at the edge of town that has a lot of land, but I might have to settle for DSL.

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