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Comment by jacobian | Hacker News Reader

"All" is just a wee bit hyperbolic.

I live in a rural county outside of Lawrence, KS. The fastest 'net connection I can get is Verizon 3G. In a decade, I'll be lucky if WiMax has made its way out that far, but there's absolutely no reason why a telco would run a physical pipe out to me. It'd be miles of cable/fiber with me and my chickens on the other end of it.

People who live in cities and tech hubs forget the fact that there's a lot of open space in this country. Much of the population may very well might have gigabit in a decade, but there'll always be a portion of the population who just live too far out in the sticks.

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Came here to post a similar story. 26 miles from the white house here, but in a lower density area. My home internet comes from a T1 that runs about $500/mo to provide 1.5Mbit. My other options are ISDN (128kbit) or sprint EVDO at about -100db, providing ~200-500kbit but with many, many dropouts. 5 years ago there were the same options. 10 years ago it was T1 or ISDN. 15 years ago the same.

Nobody wants to serve below a certain density with anything.

Comcast was asked by the county to provide a customer pays dig fees estimate. They wanted 2.2M up front. Verizon actually wants to stop maintaining the copper plant in the next few years. It's very possible that this would leave us without enough clean pairs in the neighborhood to use leased lines. They indicate that we're scheduled for FIOS somewhere around 2020.

Verizon actually wants to stop maintaining the copper plant in the next few years.

Verizon wants to do this everywhere, not just in low-density area's.

You may be technically correct, but from the perspective of Netflix, it's economically "all" in that the addressable market of US households without Gigabit ethernet will be so infinitesimally small to not be worth worrying about when thinking about customer acquisition/retention or expenses.

I'm surprised that you don't have access to dsl but do have access to 3G, I live in a pretty rural part of my state but dsl is still available (but my first real hop is 80-100ms) but it is 1mbit. My only other option is satellite internet or purchasing a t1 for ~300/month.

I must say though if the cell networks stop charging so much for access I could see a real use for it as it is much faster than satellite internet and if they encompass the whole country in 3G broadband for all would be more of a possibility.

> I'm surprised that you don't have access to dsl but do have access to 3G.

There are quite a few locations (including mine) where the remote infrastructure is fractured (for lack of a better term). The remote box out here, a Lucent Mod 5, is quite capable of housing a DSLAM, and I am certainly within a functional distance from the Lucent box (4k-5k feet). The problem is the distance from the Lucent box back to the CO (6 miles) which is on copper T1 circuits. No fiber out here. The ILEC, AT&T Florida, appears to have no interest in replacing the T1 cable with fiber, nor to populate the box with a DSLAM.

There is an ISP that has deployed 2.5GHz WiMax, but I'm on the fringe of the range, plus I have vegetation issues.

When I see a title like the one at the top, I always cringe, because I know full well that saying 'everyone' will get this is hyperbole.

FSO?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-space_optical_communicatio...

Did the local electric utility decide it wasn't worth running 120V power to your home either? I don't know of any reason that running fiber is any more expensive than running power lines (if anything, being able to piggyback the fiber on existing poles should make it cheaper).

They likely did. Electricity was pretty much nonexistent in rural areas until the 1930s when the Rural Electrification Administration provided loans to cooperatives to bring electric utility service to areas too sparsely populated to justify the costs for a traditional utility.

Yup, nailed it. Electricity didn't come to my area until the late 1940s; as far as I can tell, my house wasn't actually wired until the mid-60s.

I lived in Manhattan, one block away from central park. My only reasonable internet option was Roadrunner 10 Mbit. No FiOS. I seriously doubt that gigabit claim.

What was your option 1 decade ago? I bet it wasn't even 1 MBit.

This doesn't surprise me, I live in San Francisco, and my neighborhood has only one option for internet connectivity: comcast cable. Well, that or tethering via my cell phone.

And Comcast in San Francisco (at least in the mission) offers a 50mbit connect that (when I've had it in the past) works better than advertised. I think peak downloads we saw were just over 7MB/s.

What's the problem?

That Comcast is your only choice, and if you disagree with their business practices, usage caps, pricing, or 'network management' that the alternative is dial-up?

That's like arguing that electricity isn't available because you don't agree with how PG&E operates. Just because you don't want to give them your money doesn't mean they cease to exist.

The point remains that Comcast is still offering connections that are quite fast, and it's completely feasible (and expected) that they'd reach gigabit connects in the next 10 years.

Have you checked DSL options like AT&T or Speakeasy? I would be very surprised if that wasn't available in your area given that it goes over phone lines.

Sonic.net Fusion is the way to go for DSL in SF.

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