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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

I'm fine with AT&T no longer supporting landlines if they start supporting fiber to every household.

US broadband is a joke compared to many other parts of the world.

At least every home that has copper should get fiber.

The excuse that the US is too big or we can't do it is bull. You did it before for electricity and telephone. It just requires competency, money and an infrastructure that isn't for profit.

Don't get me wrong, the services provided on the infrastructure can definitely be for profit but not the glass itself.

>>>You did it before for electricity

I huge part of Rural America Electricity is run by Coop's today, often non-profit anyway. Various attempts have been tried for these Coop's to also provide internet services including using Internet Over Power Lines technology, they all fail for some reason.

Also with Telephone and electric build out we did not have the levels of regulatory capture we do today. The US Tax Payer has spent BILLIONS on "broadband" roll out programs to pay for the infrastructure that should have bought fiber to every home including rural areas, the money was wasted on "Fixed Wireless broadband" and other schemes where by the ISP's more or less just pocket the money and there was no accountability by the federal agencies in charge of these programs, largely because they knew they had fat executive jobs at that ISP coming to them

Your implication that government is the solution to this problem by paying for the infrastructure is not based in reality, as government is the problem. Government and government corruption is what stopped fiber from already being a reality.

> I huge part of Rural America Electricity is run by Coop's today, often non-profit anyway. Various attempts have been tried for these Coop's to also provide internet services including using Internet Over Power Lines technology, they all fail for some reason.

They seem to be doing fine in Mississippi.

Where my wife used to live, there was a telephone cooperative. At the time, they offered DSL internet, but it now looks like they offer fiber also: https://www.mdtc.net/services/internet/

Some of the coops are mismanaged. I saw an article about a takeover of an incompetent coop management board that resulted in service improvement.

Like everything, it takes political will and community work to keep services responsible and reliable.

Yes; we need to address regulatory capture. That can be done. Saying ‘better things aren’t possible’ isn’t the solution.

I never said better things are not possible, this disconnect here is that despite all of recorded American history proven other ways people still believe we just need to "elect to right people" to government to fix everything wrong everywhere all problems in society

When in reality power corrupts and by giving power to government you corrupt anyone that enters the profession.

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. --- Ronald Reagan

Better things are possible they just do not come from government, they come in-spite of government

You did it before for electricity and telephone.

Not completely. There are still tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of Americans who never got electric, telephone, or even water service available in their homes.

Every six months or so there's an article in the Navajo Times about the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority managing to hook up another couple of dozen homes to electricity, but there are still many thousands to go.

There was a photo published during the pandemic of children gathered on top of a hill sitting in the dust and sun with their laptops because it was the only place they could get a cell signal to do their schoolwork.

Tens of thousands of American homes have no running water. I've visited many in Texas, West Virginia, New Mexico, and even California.

Time to get out of the Silicon Valley bubble.

It's not a silicon valley canard to overwhelmingly expect electricity and running water in the US. The difficulties faced by the Navajo are not representative of the country at large. The major service providers have preferred to put in place regional monopolies, rather than extend their fiber capabilities, that is the root of the issue.

I did research in Silicon Valley, there is no optic fiber. We have expensive comcast, or ATT or now Starlink.. or now 5G. I wish we had more options(high speed internet) for end users.

This really depends where you are physically located, the infrastructure available varies neighborhood by neighborhood, and in some cases block to block.

Some have two GPON fiber providers, others have one XGSPON provider, and yet other neighborhoods are served only with coaxial where it was easy to get to in the 1980s when the coax networks were built out, and copper services otherwise.

ATT and Sonic both have extensive fiber networks in SF.

In South Bay there are only few options

When you have such large numbers I can’t expect that there are zero people without these services. So to me this is a specious argument- we certainly did blanket the country with electricity and phone service. There will of course always be households without. I hardly see this as a “bubble” view.

> Not completely. There are still tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of Americans who never got electric, telephone, or even water service available in their homes.

…

> Tens of thousands of American homes have no running water. I've visited many in Texas, West Virginia, New Mexico, and even California.

> Time to get out of the Silicon Valley bubble.

Only 10e4-10e5? Even writing as a Brit who chose Berlin over Silicon Valley when Brexit happened (so I don't think I'd count as "in the Silicon Valley bubble" in the first place), I'd call that a rounding error against the USA population.

Don't get me wrong, that ought to still be an embarrassment for the USA to leave anyone behind[0], and it feels like a bigger embarrassment the closer it gets to the last person; but also, that's a minority of even just the Navajo enrolled tribal members, who are themselves a minority of pre-European American groups in the USA, who are themselves a minority of the USA.

[0] I like the space program, but I can also empathise with all those that didn't care about the Apollo landings because of the rather more pressing issues they personally faced on the ground due to endemic lack of equality; I can't find the original quote I'm thinking of, but this has similar vibes: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1969/07/26/the-moon-hours

I'll never forget the story of Paul Bunyan telecom out in I believe it was Montana who used federal funds to build to cabins at a cost of like $10,000+ per cabin to lay copper (back when that was a lot of money) under the right to service clauses of the FCC.

It turns out that servicing 100% of the population isn't practical when people choose to live in very remote areas. I agree that it would be onerous for carriers to have to service 100% of the population with any kind of service, but I disagree with the current standard on non-copper services which amount to something like 80% of population within a given metro zone. It biases too hard towards city living, especially as we are seeing more and more people move away from cities.

Rural broadband in America is extremely difficult in most parts of the country, way harder than it needs to be. And don't get me started on WISP vs hardwire, hardwire is the only real internet and don't let anyone fool you otherwise.

Source: 10 years in the belly of the beast of telecom.

83% of the population lives in urban areas and it’s only increasing (projected to hit 90% around 2050).

It turns out that servicing 100% of the population isn't practical when people choose to live in very remote areas.

Mostly correct. However, not everyone chooses to live in a remote area. The Navajo, referenced above, are among the people who were forced to settle in a particular area, at the point of a government gun.

Moreover, if it wasn't for people living in remote areas, people in the cities wouldn't have food.

> Moreover, if it wasn't for people living in remote areas, people in the cities wouldn't have food.

We need to be careful with the words here.

Not much in the way of food is produced by people who live in what I would term "remote" areas.

Lots of food is produced by people who live in what I would term "rural" areas.

We can and should and must provide improved communications services to rural areas - I think we have a moral imperative to do so. The remote areas, however, are a different story. If they happen to end up being serviced by e.g. Starlink then great, but I don't think we have the same moral imperative there.

Most food is produced in rural areas with infrastructure, not remote areas. Farmers frequently live in town. Agricultural production costs are sensitive to logistics, so doing any kind of intensive agriculture in genuinely remote areas is expensive. You don't want to be too far from a rail spur if you are a farmer.

The only agriculture on remote land at scale is cattle ranching, which has the advantage that cattle can move themselves.

> It biases too hard towards city living, especially as we are seeing more and more people move away from cities

Urbanization is progressing.

Suburbia are not sustainable and should not be encouraged. As you just noticed, it takes way more money to service their infrastructure, and they bring in far less tax revenue to pay for it than dense mixed use developments.

I think some clarity in terminology may be required here.

Those cabins in MT are not in anything that could ever be called "suburbia".

Suburbia has its problems (many of them), but we're talking about a different class of living here: actual rural living, with neighbors a mile (or miles) away, no infrastructure other than dirt roads etc.

In the US people can and do choose to live many, many miles from the nearest infrastructure in remote areas, especially in the western US. I used to have a place in the mountains of Nevada originally occupied since the 19th century that was 15 miles from the nearest utility service. Many of the remaining off-the-grid places are like this and would require creating a new right-of-way across private and government lands as there are no formal roads to many of these places. The taxpayer cost would be astronomical relative to the benefit. (The established "roads" everyone uses are informal common law trails which don't exist as far as the government is concerned.)

It's way higher than thousands, at least for water. Millions of people in the US have their own wells for water and septic systems for waste water.

That's still running water. I'm talking about homes with zero options for water. Not even a well.

And sometimes (like in New Mexico), thousands of homes are cut off from water infrastructure because some rich guy doesn't want a pipe running under his golf course.

Where has this happened in New Mexico?

The point is that fiber penetration is still nowhere near copper/POTS penetration in the US. Not even close, despite decades of subsidies and tax breaks to the telcos to make universal fiber a reality.

If people want to live in the hinterlands and avoid the conveniences of society, well that's up to them. Why should anyone else pay for their lifestyle choices? If they want to live off the land (and off sewer, water, electric and telephone utilities) they can go do it. Otherwise, these rugged individualists need to suck it up and move closer to town.

There are plenty of places in Bellevue, Washington mere blocks from major Microsoft offices where only copper is available, and the VDSL2 on offer is intermittent due to the lead clad copper lines having water infiltration and being past their standard service life.

Getting Lumen, Astound, Verizon, Comcast or any of the other vendors who have fiber under 100 feet away to even quote a directional bore is a multi-month process, then the number they give you is a "fuck you" 6 digit price, and they certainly won't let you pull a permit from the city, hire your own contractor to do the directional bore, then pull cable through your conduit.

> It just requires competency, money and an infrastructure that isn't for profit.

Or massive government financing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act

Money and an infrastructure that isn’t for profit pretty much directly implies massive government financing.

If I'm not mistaken, AT&T and friends got similar grants to install high-speed internet multiple times. They just... didn't do it.

> It just requires competency, money and an infrastructure that isn't for profit.

Uhhh.... Most of the nationwide infrastructure was put into place by the railroad companies that were definitely for profit organizations.

I wonder if that's because the USA is that stupid, or if it's just not as population dense as other countries with faster speeds? According to this statistic, it's not very dense, meaning it's super expensive to build broadband. Because it's pretty much a question of physical area covered, not number of people serviced. This stat says the USA is on the lower end of density

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST?locations=U...

> This stat says the USA is on the lower end of density

Yes, but America's population isn't evenly distributed across the entire dry surface area. The population is clustered tightly in cities like it is in many other countries, it's just that the cities are further apart from each other. [1]

The better metric, IMO, is the percentage of people who live in urban vs rural areas. [2] The US is 85.8% urban, which is right in line with other developed countries. Spain is 81.5%. France is 88%.

With this in mind, the expensive part would be the trunk line but America has that. [3] It's missing the last mile, especially in urban areas.

[edit] For the record I don't think it's stupidity, I think deregulation, a lack of competition and a laissez-faire policy attitude allowed a few large players to chronically under-invest in infrastructure. And of course the perennial regulatory capture, with some 16 states literally banning municipal ISPs or making it difficult to set up. Good, cheap fiber to the home is available in Chattanooga, for example, thanks to a city-run utility. They sell city-wide 25Gbit FTTH (!!). [4] That model is illegal in states like Missouri, which itself ranks 43rd in broadband coverage.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/geo/popul...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/urban-vs-rural-majority

[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/15/166239/first-det...

[4] https://epb.com

but connectivity is also not a problem in the denser areas. I live in a medium sized city in the midwest, I have access to 3 Wired Broadband Providers, including 1 Fiber, with a 2nd fiber provider rolling out in the area and could be accessible to me in the next 18-24 mos...

hell even my former home, in a town of 1500 people, I had access to 1 wired Broadband, and 1 Fixed Wireless, and I just learned that a fiber provider has plans to complete wire most of the rural areas of the county by 2025...

Deregulation is not the problem, government corruption is.

> For the record I don't think it's stupidity, I think deregulation

Corrupt legislation is 100% the problem. You have it completely and hopelessly backwards

https://baltimorebrew.com/2016/10/18/city-set-to-approve-10-...

Yes. It is a strangely regulated deregulation/privatization through corrupt legislation. Seems we all agree here and your comment is needlessly insulting.

It's hard to compare housing styles and density when you only have a binary choice of "urban" and "rural". One form of "urban" areas could have extremely different costs per customer to service than the other. Think dense condos and townhouses versus every house with 1-3 people on nearly acre lots. Both are often considered "urban".

US “urban” areas are much less dense than many other countries. Imagine servicing a building with 100 apartments vs 100 detached homes spread out over a square mile.

Agree. True "urban" starts at roughly 5000/sq.m density.

Many countries have had the trunk lines installed for over two decades now. During the dotcom bubble massive fiber trunks were installed in railway and highway rights-of-way - just in time for wavelength-division multiplexing to become economically viable and make most of them redundant.

Across the whole US, sure. But what's the density of the top 50 cities in the US and what is their internet like?

New Zealand is way lower than the US on that measure - almost half the density - yet around 87% of households here have access to FTTP with speeds of up to 800Mbps/500Mbps (you can get a slower plan for lower cost, but the lines all support at least that). Around 40% have actually connected, mostly because people don't have a reason to change from VDSL2.

That metric isn't the right one to look at.

Exactly. Look at population density inside those cities. You'll find the US is living in what they call cities, but that they are all far from one another compared to the rest of the world.

> I wonder if that's because the USA is that stupid

The USA is a continent made up of 50 countries [states]. Think European Union. Most people don't grasp or understand the sheer size.

So.. the USA failed 50 times instead of 1? Not sure how that's supposed to be an excuse for anything.

The bureaucracy of state governments is almost unfathomable unless you've experienced it first hand. Start with a meeting to discuss a meeting about another meeting... When you get to that last meeting, a supposed "working session", there's 20 people there supervising and note taking, and the one actual person who seemingly does anything has called out for the day.

Canada is bigger than the USA, and is a distinct part of the same continent.

Merely being big isn't a good argument.

Canada is also not great at providing high speed Internet outside of the more populated regions.

Most of the test results I've seen, mobile and landline, place it above the USA.

You'd have to give a careful and precise definition of what your care about in order to get a more nuanced answer, which is kind of the same point I was driving at by saying "being big isn't a good argument".

It isn't that dense, but also, the utilities are monopolies that just print cash for shareholders because they don't have to invest.

AT&Ts stock price is at a near thirty year low, their dividends are lower than ever and they have a massive amount of debt.

On the other hand you have "cable is the future, I love copper" Germany

Helmut Kohl right?

Germany seems to be a prime example of how privatization can't work for infrastructure. Having the road ripped up every time another provider wants to add fiber is insane.

> I'm fine with AT&T no longer supporting landlines if they start supporting fiber to every household.

that actually did happen with dad. He was working and off a sudden his internet stopped working, put up a screen saying he was on "vacation hold" and to call in and remove it.

He called in, got it removed. Next day, he can a call from AT&T retention telling him he needed to upgrade to the fiber and they were discontinuing their copper plan

What is "hilarious" is that elsewhere, AT&T sells outdated DSL, still. But they lobby to have DSL speeds and customers removed from broadband surveys and requirements because they are "obsolete and outdated".

They still sell them. In some cases, your only option. But they don't count for dragging down AT&T's broadband 'scores' and 'speeds' because ... it's inconvenient and reasons...

The trick is to mandate "telephone service", not "analog landline". That'd allow them to transition to telephone-over-fiber, making new connections worth the effort.

AT&T is the Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) in various areas of California. They have applied to the CPUC to have "targeted relief" from that telephone service obligation.

Currently, AT&T could provide telephone service via fiber, rather than copper, wherever they may choose to do so. So, currently, they can transition to fiber-to-the-premises wherever they want. Their COLR obligation does not require copper wires as the technology.

I wonder if it's the difficulty of laying wires. The number of permits that need to be pulled when wiring a city just makes it prohibitive.

Citation needed. The US is #8 in median speed for home broadband and #13 in mobile.

Considering that anything above 15mbps is enough for 4K Ultra Netflix I think the US is doing just fine.

https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states

Christ do you remember 15mbps? those were dark days.

I'm grateful for 5mbps when traveling.

* Weeps in 56k tones *

I don't think I ever got more than 20kbit on my 56k modem. Usually more like 12.

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