Too many people are stuck with slow, expensive, and unreliable cable and/or DSL ISPs. Some have no choice whatsoever. Some others get to choose only from two equally awful options. We need legally available competition EVERYWHERE.
I can only imagine how fucked rural America is.
Contrast that to the reaction to Tesla's autopilot that will happily drive you into an embankment at fatal speeds.
In the scale of the US, that's a blatantly false statement.
It's < 50,000 people out of 330 million. Or less than 0.02% of the population. Most of that is because they're living in quite isolated locations far from any population.
The figure is so high the WorldBank lists the US at 100% access to electricity with all the other affluent nations. Brazil is at 99.8% for reference, Vietnam is 99.4%, India is 97.8%.
Areas, as in places you can live.
I wasn’t saying it was whole chunks of the country. Just that there are many places, not necessarily in the same place and not necessarily enough for anyone to care about. The latter kind of being the problem…
Here are the economics for a fiber optics deployment in 2021 for a rural town of ~800 premises, where about 60% got service. They charge customers about $100/month for symmetric 75/75mbps internet plus phone.
It costs about $40K per mile to run the fiber down the road on existing utility poles. It costs between $2K and $4K to run the drop from the utility pole to the home.
Those two numbers (miles of road, number of premises) get you in the ballpark of the cost of deployment in a town/county. More premises per mile obviously decreases the cost per premise - that's why utilities prefer dense areas (cities).
https://discuss.broadband.money/c/broadband-grant-events/ala...