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Comment by Arubis | Hacker News Reader

That’s…not terrible?

Getting broadband in rural America is rough, and the permissive atmosphere for monopolistic behavior by ISPs is maddening. Pricing for internet access is way worse than in East Asia or western and central Europe. Some folks can’t get real broadband at all, and they’re disproportionally lower down on the socioeconomic spectrum. That’s not fair. These issues are real.

But overall, 12th sounds…pretty reasonable? Those top ten spots will always be filled by nations with highly concentrated, relatively wealthy populations. 5-10 years ago, the US was in a much worse place comparatively.

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We moved to a small rural community where a T1 isn't even available. I can get a 3Mb DSL connection or satellite. I have both because I need to redundancy.

I did call to see what it would cost to have 'real' internet brought out here. They were happy to bring out a fiber line from the nearest town to serve our area. But it was going to cost me around $5k/mo with a 3 year contract for a 10Mb dedicated line. It's cheaper to do point to point relays from that far.

The real issue is that the telcos have been collecting fees for years specifically aimed at rolling out broadband into rural communities and they have done nothing but pocket the money.

Yeah, this is definitely a common experience & a real problem. Rural broadband _access_ can be spotty towards terrible. But it's probably not captured here--in fact, that might skew 'average speed' stats _higher_, since there's fewer folks willing or able to fork over money for those slower lines.

It's cheaper to do point to point relays from that far.

I would encourage you to look into this more, if you haven't already. I set up such a connection for my in-laws who live in rural Oklahoma, and it's been a resounding success. It still has issues, but it's worlds better than the antiquated satellite options they had before.

They'll likely transition to using Starlink when it's available as the point to point connection (3 hops for them) is difficult to troubleshoot since I'm a thousand miles away, but if Starlink isn't an option for you for some reason, a point to point connection can be a great choice.

I prepaid for Starlink 4 or 5 months ago and just waiting for my turn to get it.

We did talk about setting up a community point to point system but the 'old guys' that run the area are more interested in getting (forcing) more people on to 'city' water than anything actually useful because city water fees are the only thing keeping this town alive.

If good broadband is so important to you why did to move to an area where it's not available?

It's common for folks to have tightly constrained moving choices.

We recently moved into our one and only choice. We beat lottery odds to get it and it was one more choice than most here have (doz-100s applicants for each listing).

Because I also have a wife that wanted to live in the country? Where people live is rarely about 1 single thing, it's a compromise between all the needs and wants. For us, living in the country on a small farm checked an awful lot of boxes. And we were "told" that there was decent internet here - 25Mb was normal. After moving we found out that 2 or 3 was normal and TDS just flat lies about their offers.

Ah bummer! But I hope Starlink works out really well for you.

If you don’t mind, could you provide any more info on how to find providers for point to point relays? I didn’t even know this was an option and I’m having a tough time finding any information that isn’t specific to large businesses.

In my case (very small town), we shared a connection with a local business (feed store) that had a tall structure we could mount a pair of radios on (grain elevator), so we're not really using a "provider".

Sorry to not have better info for you, but hopefully someone else will see this and chime in!

Not the OP, but the people I've seen this do it DIY have all done it with Ubiquiti products. A single link can get a mile of range with clear LoS. Depending on how far out you are, that lets you connect to a "real" internet connection for cheap.

Mikrotik products are very popular among people running WISPs, and their product range reflects this, with a whole range designed specifically for that purpose.

Even their standard wall/ceiling-mount AP is weatherproof and comes with pole mount attachments.

Starlink might be a decent option for you. You said you have satellite, but that has me thinking HughesNet.

If a complicated and highly capable internet connection was important to you, why did you move to place where you almost certainly wouldn't be able to get it?

> and they have done nothing but pocket the money.

Oh what slander. Verizon, for example, has been paying that cash out as dividends.

> a T1 isn't even available. I can get a 3Mb DSL connection

3Mbps DSL is faster than a T1. That speed also suggests you're 3-4 miles from a CO, so it's not that rural. 3 miles might even make a fiber run possible if you're willing to pay.

Right, but it doesn't go up and down like a jackhammer when the weather is rainy, windy, sunny, hot, cold, or dry. And yes, we are 3.1 miles from a CO and the nearest fiber drop is 14 miles from here. The service guys are at the CO resetting equipment to get me back online so often I know them all by name and they know what the problem most likely is when my address comes up on a service ticket.

It's shockingly good. I'm actually very proud of this statistic. Most won't see material difference between 200mbps vs #1 spot of 250mbps. It's negligible.

However.

I think there's a rather huge sampling bias, because the data is gathered from people who come to Speedtest.com to run the test.

I'd wager most people's WiFi routinely stays well below 200Mbps anyway.

I'd also be more interested to the the first or fifth percentile rankings. I'd bet that we do pretty poorly, especially in terms of the 10mbps benchmark.

Edit: these stats also exclude people who have no internet at all (which is a subset of speed test users, but an important subset).

Seconded on sampling bias. It's a bit difficult to get a directly comparable figure from the FCC's Measuring Broadband America report, which tries to be representative. https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad...

I guess the closest would be "In September-October 2019, the weighted average advertised download speed was 146.1 Mbps among the measured ISPs, which represents a 100% increase from 2017 and a 8% increase compared to the average in September-October 2018 which was 135.7 Mbps."

>I think there's a rather huge sampling bias, because the data is gathered from people who come to Speedtest.com to run the test.

Any sampling bias would apply to all countries, not just the US.

I used to live in rural and the best to offer was a wimax connection. The problem was there wasn't enough people locally to justify building a second tower to handle more people, but there were enough people to slow down the single tower they all shared.

Ultimately it would have still made money for the company, just not enough, gotta get those earnings up!

I also tried satellite providers but they price gouged via bandwidth caps. After about 50gb used for the month you could upgrade to their ultra high bandwidth package, or accept dialup speeds for the rest of the month.

I still have plenty of friends who live in these places, and it really has an impact on life. People still use phone books and have regular cable tv. Only recently have some started to cut the cord.

Wired broadband in rural America has historically never been socially efficient and is mostly a patronage-based subsidy scheme. I say this as a nominal beneficiary of subsidized rural broadband.

That said, with the advent of starlink, reasonably high-speed internet in rural areas is now socially efficient, or getting there rapidly. I’m currently using starlink at my rural house and it’s great. It’s obviously still subsidized by venture capital, but there’s a very plausible route for it to continue with no subsidies whatsoever (unlike rural wired broadband).

I do see good things in the future for internet in rural areas. Between Starlink (maybe even other competitive satellite in the future?), 5G, and WISPs getting better and better, effective internet access in traditionally underserved areas should really start becoming both available and affordable.

With smaller towns/rural areas having a much lower cost of living and the expanding ability to work from anywhere with a decent internet connection, I hope we begin to see a resurgence of small town America. Not everyone wants to live in giant megacities.

>Those top ten spots will always be filled by nations with highly concentrated, relatively wealthy populations.

Romania, Thailand and Chile is top 10...

Chile is not a counter example. Almost all the population lives in the middle third of the country, and even then the Santiago area is drastically more dense.

I had similar feelings. At least in populated cities, internet speed has always been pretty great for me. I'm more concerned with the absurd notion of bandwidth caps and the exorbitant cost. Access is tricky: on the one hand, it's pretty unreasonable to expect internet companies to get cables out all the way to every mountain cabin and desert house; on the other hand, they charge so excessively and get so much government assistance that they should have more than a few dollars to spare.

On reflection, I'm curious how much of this is directly caused by US demographics shifting towards greater urbanization.

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