| What about the rest of us? What is needed is some sort of incentive (be it carrot or stick) to get broadband of any kind rolled out to rural America.
I live about 50 miles from the center of a major city, and about 20 miles or so from the nearest fully-served suburb. In that nearby suburb there are plenty of choices - cable, DSL, and WISP for fixed, plus "Wireless broadband" (cellular 3g/4g). I can get 20Mb on my cellphone in town. Out here, though, there's practically nothing. There's one small neighborhood where the phone company actually offers DSL - at a top speed of 1.5/.75 Mbit unless it's down. There's a small mom-and-pop WISP (actually based in another town about 100 miles away) that offers 1/.5 when it works. Outages are frequent and often last for days. One time, I kid you not, I called regarding an outage and was told that a radio on one of the towers took a lightning hit (understandable - it happens) and the technician's wife was having a baby so it wouldn't even be looked at for at least three days - that's how tiny this company is.
For mobile connectivity, on T-mobile there's only Edge, and it is either oversold or has undersized backhaul since all I can get out of it is about 30K (Edge should be able to do over 100K). Sprint has spotty coverage, but with an antenna and amplifier, I can get EVDO, but of course everyone knows Sprint's 3G is pitifully slow, usually under 500k (oversold?) unless you catch it at 3 or 4am. ATT is also edge-only out here, and the Verizon is EVDO but slower than Sprint.
That leaves the only option for real broadband in the boonies to be satellite. At least ViaSat's Exede actually offers decent speed if you are in one of the beams, but there is still the high cost, low allowances, and high ping times to endure.
When is more attention going to be paid to getting convenient and affordable broadband roled out to the rural markets? Perhaps instead of simply auctioning off spectrum to the highest bidder, dole it out contingent upon a carrier being required to use a portion of that spectrum to provide affordable rural broadband service. |
