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Comment by nknighthb | Hacker News Reader

The reality is that nobody cares about the poor schmuck in rural Nebraska.

80% of the US population is urbanized. Most of the ones that aren't still have access to DSL, cable modems, or fixed wireless of at least a few megabits.

Of the remaining population, a lot of them don't want to play video games or can't afford them anyway. Some (probably large) portion of those that are viable gaming customers will simply make do with satellite connections.

The "poor schmuck in rural Nebraska with 25kb/s" market segment is just too small to economically justify catering to.

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That isn't actually the reality. For example, if nothing else, it's clear that Sony does care about the poor schmuck in rural Nebraska.

But more generally, why are you only talking about the United States? What you are saying might be true of the US, but plenty of places across the wider world are home to people who play video games but don't have an internet connection. Or have a spotty internet connection. Or have a connection with restrictive data caps (meaning digital download only would be impossible).

Much of the first world is better connected than the US. If you're talking about gamers with both money and poor connections, they're far more likely to be in the US than anywhere else.

South Africa and many countries in Latin America can afford to pay $400 for the console. But they certainly can't count on a >1.5mb/s reliable internet connection.

So yeah, MS screwed the pooch on this one and that will now all be Sony territory.

I'm not going to canvass all Latin American countries, but the median per-capita income for South Africa is about US$500.

Are you unwittingly basing your comment on the standards of the still-privileged White minority, comprising less than 9% of a country of just 53 million?

Racial politics aside, 5 million people is a lot of potential MS customers.

Maybe, but Microsoft/Xbox One was not the relevant subject, Steam was.

Am I the only one who actually read the comment I originally replied to?

By the way, even the top 10% of South African households have an average income of just US$15,000, so the actual potential customer base is still smaller than you think.

Having just arrived back from South Africa from visiting my relatives on vacation, I was shocked to find a few highly computer-literate cousins over there who only had a 3G dongle to provide Internet for their entire homes. Another relative had a bandwidth-capped DSL line that was barely faster than ISDN basic rate. Income was not the issue.

you can get uncapped 4mb/s adsl for under R450pm in soweto and most middleclass suburbs from a multiple ISP.

Plus, as once a poor schmuck in rural Nebraska, we had decent DSL.

As once a poor schmuck in not-even-that-rural Alabama, we never could and still cannot get decent anything there. Best I could come up with when I still lived there and what my mother still uses is mobile internet with a small cap.

You've checked Hughesnet and Exede?

> You've checked Hughesnet

I say this as a former customer... Hughesnet is an absolute joke. Looking past their incompetent installers (who provided me with a major leak in the roof over my kitchen) and their horrible uptime (clouds in the sky = service outage), at it's best the internet service could only be described as painfully slow. Super high latency, constant dropped connections, poor throughput and to top it all off customer service that I'd rate as equivalent to cell phone providers.

Please, do yourself a favor, and stay far away.

The technology has gone through an iteration or two, with the latest coming in the last year. Your judgement may have been valid in the past (though you're providing a far worse perspective than I've heard from anyone else), but if you haven't been a customer for a while, your past experience is not a predictor of current performance.

As for the incompetent installers, they're probably the exact same local contractors working for Dish Network or DirecTV. Results will vary by area.

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