Industry Think Tank Pretends U.S. Broadband Secretly Awesome → It has to do with economics

Urban areas are great in terms of broadband availability and usually have one or two, maybe three broadband providers. Suburban areas usually have broadband as well. Rural areas are difficult to serve.

When it comes to wiring for broadband, serving areas where you have 8 customers on one pole yields a faster return on investment than one customer every couple of miles. AT&T/Comcast/Verizon love urban areas when it comes to broadband deployment because they can wire many customers in a short distance and that will yield a quick return on investment. Also, urban and suburban areas have a low per cost of home passed deployment cost as they can deploy 8 way taps on a single pole. A rural area is very costly to wire as you have to run miles of fiber/coax to serve very few customers and they'll never recoup the investment as the technology will be obsolete in a few decades. When I was in school, the school district wired the schools for Internet and they had to run cat 5 wire to each computer (which was labor intensive) and now we have Wi-Fi that would only require Wi-Fi Access points to be located strategically through the school and they only have to run Cat 5 to each Wi-Fi AP and they can serve many computers off that access point.

My opinion on rural broadband using tha analogy that I am giving is maybe wireline broadband may not be feasible for rural areas and we need to develop alternative technology to serve these unserved areas. Maybe the solution is wireless (provided we can free up spectrum) or another technology like power line carrier or looking for ways to improve DSL technology. Maybe the solution is a technology that has not been invented yet. That goes back to my analogy of the school system using wired drops to computers only to have Wi-Fi make that installation obsolete.

I always wondered as to why they couldn't run fiber to a box. Then from that box use wireless to git to homes. Add in range extenders to boost signal strength and range.

Though the wireless union guts might get pissed at the wired guys doing their job. Tuff crap.

An example would be the star network that smart meters use to transmit their data to a DCU unit [data collection unit]. The meters transmit on a radio freq, to the DCU. A DCU [If I remember correctly] can handle input from 500 meters. Then when they are polled by the central office, the DCU uses a cell phone signal to transmit the collected data home.

Sure we are talking about more data, when talking about the internet, but you'd think it would be possible to use such a system.

There have been suggestions to make Broadband a utility and have the prices controlled. Also, by being labeled a utility, the providers would have to build out to every home [and of course the tax payers would pay for this].
And I think it would break the lock on the last mile, and companies would have to open their networks to competitors. Again, is that a bad thing/
Consider the delivery of Natural gas to homes. In my area we have several providers, and they all use the same pipes. One company owns/maintains the pipes, everyone else pays a distribution fee to use the pipes.
Why can't broadband internet be like that? or like dial up, where you had a few dozen ISPs and just the telco to your door.
You paid the telco for the wire, and the ISP for the service.

It's hardly great, the vast majority has a choice between 2 or 1, and it's overpriced and usually restricted and capped. There isn't anything great about it. Most people are paying $60 + for service that should be half that or less, and it's all due to the lack of competition and established geographical boundary lines.

Back in the '90s, dial-up was $19.95 and that did not include the cost of the phone line ($12.60 on Qwest in Iowa), add the two numbers together and today that would be $46.06 adjusted for inflation between 1997 (when I first got Internet) and 2012. That does not include the taxes and fees. Many people bought second phone lines for Internet as they did not want to tie up phone lines to hours on AOL or chat rooms. So the costs of broadband are not much higher for broadband than they were for dial-up back in the '90s. And many people back then subscribed to cable. I subscribe to cable myself and find it cheaper to buy the triple play. Comcast also has a double play (Internet and TV) in my area as well.

And? I would expect there to be change in a 20 year span. Broadband connections in general are overpriced in North America.

If you want to classify Manhattan, NYC as "urban", then I must beg to differ. TWC has a monopoly on service in 95% of households. The service, which has a 15% failure rate in my experience, offers stated speeds of 25mb/0.75mb for $50/mo. plus fees.

Granted that RCN offers service in these homes too, the only problem is that they lease the lines from TWC and are not able to offer better prices or plans.