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[Seriously, what makes high speed internet so special that rural areas should not have it?] I can see both sides of the "argument". On one side, the internet
by Unklejoe 10y ago
[Seriously, what makes high speed internet so special that rural areas should not have it?]
I can see both sides of the "argument".
On one side, the internet is becoming a basic requirement for everyday life in this day and age (not yet though; there are still many people who do perfectly fine without it). I predict that it will eventually be considered as necessary as electricity itself. Depriving people in rural areas of that can be seen as somewhat inhumane and unfair.
On the other side, it seems kind of selfish to expect a company/government/whatever to spend billions of dollars to deploy infrastructure into areas where they will have one customer every 10 miles. This would eventually lead to increased costs for everyone, including those who have made the "sacrifice" of living in more densely populated areas.
One of the benefits of living in rural areas is that you're away from people. One of the downsides of living in rural areas is that you're away from people.
NOTE: I'm mainly thinking in the context of the USA's midwest, where you can have areas where there is one house every XX miles.
When it comes down to it, I am more of a supporter of the former side of the argument. Maybe not to the extent of forcing a company/government to cover the entire country in high speed internet, but something more along the lines of "all areas with a reasonable population density". This is how things work with waste water sewage where I live. If you live in the middle of no where, you don't have access to running water and sewage; you need a well and a septic tank. But if the area has X amount of people per Sq mile, then the utility is forced to install it.
My reasoning is mainly because the exclusion of non-profitable areas in terms of internet coverage extends well beyond rural areas.
There are even areas within densely populated cities that don't have access to real high speed internet (mainly low income areas). That's not right to me.