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Comment by jqueryin | Hacker News Reader

I am one of these 39M Americans. My sole provider is AT&T through a 6mbps DSL line. I live in Charlotte, NC within 20 minutes of the center of the city.

It's unfortunate that I live on a more rural road where there's an approximate 1 to 1.5 mile stretch of road with absolutely no houses. Beyond that, my street has only 20 houses after this stretch. This is definitely off-putting for carriers to install new lines down to us because they're likely to not see ROI foreeeever.

I really don't know what to do. Satellite is currently unacceptable with the bandwidth caps and latency.

Does anybody have any suggestions? I've contacted all of the major providers looking to get updates to our area.

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Parents have a strikingly similar situation in VA, except they can't even get DSL. They eventually went with Verizon over LTE after years of crappy satellite internet. You can't purchase more than 30GB/mo, but otherwise, it's worked great for them.

The only problem with the LTE service is that so many things like to silently update in the background---they can bump up against that 30GB limit without intending to.

Maybe contact your board of supervisors or whatever they're called in your neck of the woods? At least you could get them thinking about the problem next time the service contracts are up for negotiations.

What's your LTE situation look like? Also, how do you like your neighbors? It might be worth someone's while to run fiber out there if they could guarantee they'd have 100% uptake to those other houses.

LTE is spotty. Looking at coverage maps, it does some interesting things and covers half of our street but our house remains uncovered for the most part.

I don't know that I could get 100% uptake, but I could definitely get 50%. At one point I read that they have cutoffs of, say, a minimum of 10 houses to qualify for serviceability. I think this is an attainable number. There's actually another 20 or so homes at the beginning of the road that I believe to be unserviceable too.

Is there a way to contact the NTIA regarding their BTOP program? I'd personally be interested in seeing where they're investing their money given North Carolina took in a very large chunk ($150M). I'm all for trying to strong arm this until I get better service.

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