13 ms·

The Worst Internet in America

129 points by nafizh 9y ago

Smaug123 9y ago
That page has a bad case of terrible website design. When I scroll down, I expect bits of image not to zoom in from the left. I nearly closed the page before even getting to the headline. They've also somehow made space bar not scroll as far as it does on other websites (in Safari), so every time I scroll down I spend a second searching for where I ended up. At least there's only two locations of awful design during the adventure that is scrolling. Once you reach the headline, there's only one really unintuitive bit further down the page (a map of the USA), and that bit is short.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  Works ok for me but I have NoScript, uBlock, and Privacy Badger ckleaning out the crap for me.
- drxzcl 9y ago
  I could not read it on my iPad in landscape mode. Worked fine in portrait orientation. I don't know why.
  - macintux 9y ago
    I switched to Reader. Looked like landscape could work if you were patient enough, but it was painful.
i_feel_great 9y ago
That page shows the worst use of the internet in the world. 15.88 MB in size according to Firefox. And unintuitive gimmick navigation to boot. How does doing something like that help convey the message?
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Jeez, two comments on the story, both of them talking about the page's design (which is honestly fine). Here's a text-only version: https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-worst-internet-in-america/#content https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//fiv... We moving on now?
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    Wait, fine? It's catastrophically unusable in landscape on iPad without Reader View. The limited-to-landscape side scrolling gimmick covers pretty much the entire top of the article, which flickers in and out at display refresh rate if I scroll back and forth to try to read the content underneath. I can't read anything until the graf that starts with "FiveThirtyEight analyzed" on the latest iOS. https://i.imgur.com/e0XeLw5.png https://i.imgur.com/e0XeLw5.png I'd say the commentary is fair, since it's a good explainer for how one can harm UX very quickly when changing the semantics of scrolling and a reminder of the importance of testing across all platforms and orientations. Yes, this happens a lot on HN. Often, a discussion about how to fix it comes about, and we all learn something. I would guess you know that, though.
  - keithpeter 9y ago
    Sigh: I understand what you are saying, but then, the subject of the OA is communities that are excluded from some aspects of modern life by poor and expensive Internet access. One inevitably starts to think about why someone needs a connection capable of downloading at scores of megabits per second to access information and take part in (the human style) local networking. I then contrast the loading speed of a page with Javascript on with the loading speed when Javascript is disabled... (I get 350 kbits/sec down here). Back on the subject: am I right in thinking that a lower bandwidth connection - say 2Mb/s - would be cheaper to provide in some way than a full city scale pipe, or is it simply the cost of providing any kind of connection involving digging trenches just so high?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
mrkrabo 9y ago
Looking at the photos, I'm surprised there's Internet connectivity at all in those places, other than 3G or maybe WiMAX. I think it's not realistic to complain about this. The costs of bringing infrastructure to a place like this are simply too high.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  We brought electricity and phone service to these places. What makes internet different?
  - voltagex_ 9y ago
    Exactly - what of the social impact of not having Internet connectivity in 2017? How would that affect your ability to find and do work, to communicate, to shop?
    - mrkrabo 9y ago
      You don't need fibre for that. 3G is more than enough to browse Facebook, find a job, and buy toilet paper off Amazon.
      - voltagex_ 9y ago
        Have you tried to browse the Internet on 2 megabit (best case) recently?
        mrkrabo 9y ago
        HSPA+ is far, far from 2 Mbit. Also, I'm sure the Facebook app works wonderfully with 2 Mbit, because they've spent years optimising for that.
        mschuster91 9y ago
        Whatsapp/other messengers, FB and Twitter, maybe - but next to no other app is optimized for low internet speeds. Hell, ordinary games will regularly go into and above 200+MB territory for download... and in contrast to your computer where you can have DVDs with games sent to you by post, no such luck for smartphone apps.
birdman3131 9y ago
I used to live in Saguache County as a kid. We left in 2000 but this article does not surprise me. it is hard to adequately get across how desolate it was up there but i'll try. We had 40 acres of land and were considered city slickers because 40 acres was enough for 1-2 cows. We were friends with people with 25k acres. The ground was sand. 10 foot down was sand. You could water plants 3 times a day and they would still run out of water. (My mom fixed this with lots of silca gel for her garden.) We lived on a county road and the postal service would not deliver mail closer that 2 miles away. We never did put up a mailbox and instead just had a PO box in Moffat which was about 8 miles of gravel roads away. Annual rainfall is less than the Sahara dessert and temps would hit -40F in the winter. Some days would see 70F difference between day and night. Walmart was 40 miles away (Alamosa in one direction and Salida in the other.) In parts there are no trees for miles. We had ~30 trees by our house. The next ones were at another house 1/4 mile away and I believe the next were 2 miles away. Our phone system used an antenna that looked like the old tv arials and was solar with a battery on it. (96/97 era.) We had that for about a year before the phone company decided they needed the system more in alaska and would lay phone line for free rather than charging us $6k to run the lines half a mile. Then they waited a year to come get out system. The battery on it would routinely run out in the middle of a call.
- manmal 9y ago
  Wow that sounds hard. Have you ever considered founding a utilities company yourself and lay those lines for you and your neighbors? I have no idea how easy or hard that would have been.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    He was a kid when he lived there...
  - sgt101 9y ago
    You need access to capital to do that, and if you have access to capital you probably aren't in a place that considers 2 cows as wealthy.
qq66 9y ago
Most of these articles about broadband access conflate Internet access with broadband speeds. Yes, Internet access is basically a necessity in modern life. However, 25Mbps download (which is the definition used) is absolutely not.
- rwallace 9y ago
  As I understand it, while the talk is about speed, the real issue is reliability: in rural America if you try to get broadband, some of the time you'll get a few megabits per second, which is enough to get by, but a good deal of the time, your nominally broadband connection won't be delivering any data at all.
dispo001 9y ago
I applaud the comparison with electricity. This is almost exactly how I look at it. I would compare Internet providers with utilities providing water, roads, sewage and even the post. To think at one time we had telegraph data lines that were little more than a mud battery and a pole. The wire would run up the pole, go though a relay switched by the previous pole and continue to the next pole where it would switch its own relay. The mud battery provided very little power, just enough to switch a relay but the technology was good enough to bridge almost unlimited distance. Without comparison with other services I would be tempted to argue my ISP provides really great services. Its 75 Euro for 300 Mbit and the package comes with a phone line and hundreds of channels of something called television. However, when compared honestly with similar services their service is terrible. People working there told me the entire network is ready to provide 1 Gbit to everyone and the employees don't know why they didn't make the switch. I can easily guess why, I'm not willing to pay much more than 75 Euro, 3 times the speed wont bring in 3 times the money. What it will do is reveal glitches in the network that would require fixing. If I remember correctly the people who created the ISP were very passionate about the technology but ended up selling the business. Not sure if that was related but if I was passionate about my business but couldn't upgrade because of a hunger for money I would get bored fast. Using more of this rather ignorant guess work I started to ponder how an ideal ISP should be implemented. What would it really cost? Which type of contract is best for the network rather than the user or the provider? Surprisingly, in some areas where big money hungry ISPs refused to deliver services people had to rethink and do it themselves. Like this one here! http://www.buergerbreitbandnetz.de/fernsehen-ueber-glasfaser-fuer-nur-995-e-im-monat/ http://www.buergerbreitbandnetz.de/fernsehen-ueber-glasfaser... The "Glasfaser – für nur 9,95 € im Monat" translates to fiber optic for 10 Euro (?!?) My German almost isn't but from reading around I gathered they needed 65% adoption but got 94%, each end user had to pay 1000 Euro in advance. 900 in the form of a lone and 100 worth of shares. To guess some numbers with that... 7 and a half years worth of 10 Euro/month does seem to add up to 900 Euro while profit made after that should increase the value of the investment. IOW, if it takes 20 years to repay the debt it would work out just fine for the investor/customer. Some quote from speedtest: "With an average Q2-Q3 2016 download speed comparable to that in Bulgaria and Moldova, Germany’s fixed broadband is slower than you might expect from Europe’s largest economy. At 40.38 Mbps, Germany ranks 29th in the world for average fixed broadband download speed and 72nd for average upload." A different page mentions: "Expect a 35€ bill on average for a broad-brand connection" Most important to keep in mind, the big ISPs refused to service the area. It makes a great proof of concept. (Assuming buergerbreitbandnetz delivers 1 Gbps) in this worse case scenario 10/35 buys 1000/40.38 times the bandwidth. Or 29% of the cost for 2476% of the service. Or the 2 figured combined their service is 8438% better than the conventional urban offering. Rural UK ISP https://b4rn.org.uk https://b4rn.org.uk happened when big business "could" only provide crappy services at crazy rates. B4RN charges 30 pounds for 1 Gbps. speedtest writes: "according to the Connected Nations 2015 report from the UK’s communications regulator, Office of Communications (Ofcom), 48% of rural areas don’t have access to broadband speeds of 10Mbps or higher." Of course our germans and these brits had money to make their own ISP happen. My Spanish and my Greek are even worse than my German but from reading around, apparently Guifi is the worlds largest Mesh network in Greece that originally started in Spain. http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet Trying to make sense of this document... https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://guifi.net/files/20170528InformacioAddicionalDenunciaGeneralitat_Final_signed.pdf&usg=ALkJrhjuH1IO9ufyAP6zEHXxdF1Xho6Hww https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&... ...it seems they are actively fighting a tax per meter that guberment is trying to inflict on their fiber optic cables. If I understood correctly they are mainly offended by established businesses putting their cable in before the tax was invented. It seems big business did more than seal the ground after digging in their cables. How different this is from the mundane consumer perspective where we all pay some corp as much as we can for as little as we would accept. We live in a world that is a bit like: when one asks why a carton of milk costs 200 Dollars the answer would be that if they charge 300 USD for it they wouldn't sell enough milk to justify the higher price. Our entire western society works like this (I almost called it a civilization) one delivers 12 Dollars worth of labor that is sold for 40 Dollars, etc, and eventually it becomes 1000 dollars as part of a mortgage or infinite dollars as part of someones rent. If that is the mentality or indoctrination that comes over these roads, in these letters and though this internet tube it might just be not worth having any of it. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/4/42/20150103143744%21Woodbridge_old_barn_raising.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/4/42/20150... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CPO4R8o5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CPO4R8o5M
contingo 9y ago
The infomap "Broadband is still foreign to much of the U.S." shows high speed internet largely confined to urban areas, as the article discusses. But large swathes of North Dakota are deep green. What's the reason for that?
- boomboomsubban 9y ago
  Oil money, North Dakota is the second largest producer of oil in the US. There was no big announced project, just a large number of grants and tax cuts to promote infrastructure investment. And, from the looks of it, a depressing amount of the area without access are the reservations.
  - bachmeier 9y ago
    > a depressing amount of the area without access are the reservations. I'm from North Dakota and went to high school on the Standing Rock reservation. They have their own institutions and legal system, so it's not surprising that they would have different coverage.
    - protomyth 9y ago
      Standing Rock also has to deal with two state governments.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    Uhm, well Three Affilated has a lot of oil money. It is actually going to the people instead of the tribe’s coffers (although the tribe is doing quite well too). The tribes have a lot of issues dealing with connectivity (the fed doesn’t help nor the BIE) but some are better off than Grand Forks and Fargo.
- protomyth 9y ago
  BEK and other rural electric cooperatives are really laying down the fiber. Plus, if you look at a competition map of ND most places have multiple choices.
ambrop7 9y ago
Assuming the page is from America, it seems quite close to the worst considering I had to scroll through ~3 pages equivalent of weirdly horizontally scrolling images while all but the sky of the images was obscured by a cookie warning spanning 1/3 of the page (uncovering an equally large subscription request after being dismissed).
Andrenid 9y ago
I live in Melbourne, AU.. 4km from city centre, in a brand new high-rise building. I pay AUD$80/mth for 8mbps down and 0.5mbps up over shitty copper that dies every time it rains. Pings are so bad lots of services like Netflix, YouTube, etc think I can't connect and just give me "Check your internet" errors when I load, until I refresh multiple times and get it to load. Funnily enough, our rural areas have better net than us here. I own a farm in the absolute middle of nowhere (region population of around 500) and it gets solid 24/4 and some farms nearby who face a better direction for fixed wireless get 50/8 (or something like that).
- protomyth 9y ago
  My buddy outside Valley City ND (calling it a city was wildly optimistic) gets 1 gigabyte up 256mb down for USD$90. As you’ve said, it’s a bit more than a rural / urban problem.
randyrand 9y ago
> if a household wants a download speed of 12 Mbps with an upload speed of 2 Mbps, they can expect to pay a whopping $90. This is the worst internet in america? Wow. That is amazing! I'm incredibly impressed at how fast the worst place for internet in america is. In highschool (Class of 2011) I dealt with 5 mbps just because my parents didn't want to pay for more. It was tolerable as long as you didn't want to watch youtube in HD. Honestly, I have little sympathy for people with 12mbps.
- auxym 9y ago
  I'm in Canada, greater Montreal area. 5 Mbps for a bit under 30$ is pretty much the best deal around. Honestly it gets the job done. I can watch Netflix in 720p. I get the article, and entirely agree that internet, even broadband is a utility in this day and age. However, 25MBPS seems excessive to get email, file taxes and apply to jobs.
- macintux 9y ago
  If you read the article in its entirety, you'd see few have access to broadband even if they could afford $90 a month. Dialup sounds like the best most can get, although I didn't see stats on that specifically.
- grecy 9y ago
  HA! Go to Northern Canada. Right now you'll pay well over $100 for supposedly 5Mbps, but which is really only 1 or 2 at best. If you download more than 5GB in a month, you'll pay $25/GB for overages! And even better, there is only one telco to choose from! (I worked for that telco...)
  - passivepinetree 9y ago
    The idea of metered connections for internet makes me shiver. They're likely going to become more popular in the coming years because they're too lucrative not to, but I will be resisting with all my power and pocketbook.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
mrbill 9y ago
My mother lives in rural Oklahoma, and her Internet connection (2-3Mbps/1Mbps for $60 a month) is a WiMax antenna on the roof of her house, pointed at another antenna on the water tower of the next town over. It's not great, but it's the only option she has other than satellite providers, and works well enough for Facebook, email, and online shopping.
- jonah 9y ago
  My parents had dial up until about 2 years ago. On a good day, they'd get 28.8, but typically it was more like 14.4 kbps! When it rained and water got in the phone lines, they got nothing at all. And yes, they'd try to get the phone company to fix the lines often to no avail. They are only 20 minutes from town but it's too far to get DSL or cable or anything like that and the terrain is too hilly for fixed wireless which did become available in their county four or five years ago. They finally broke down and got satellite internet a couple years ago but it's slow and expensive.
  - mrbill 9y ago
    When Mom was stuck with using a modem, I bought her a (literal) stack of USR Courier v.Everything modems (cheap, since a lot of ISPs in Austin were ditching dialup service around that time). She had lightning hits and storms so often that I told her "if you try to dial up and the modem isn't working, just unplug it, toss it in the trash, and plug in the next one off the stack." Had to do this even with surge protection inline for both power and phone line. Only in the past couple of years have I been able to get an LTE phone signal at her house (only while standing on the porch, not inside the building) and that's from a tower a few miles away...
Tepix 9y ago
This is an interesting market for the upcoming broadband satellite internet by Boeing, SpaceX, etc. They will provide low latency because they are in low earth orbit.
- vram22 9y ago
  Interesting, got any links about that? And do you know if it for the whole world or only some parts of it?
kronos29296 9y ago
I would do anything for your so called worst speeds. Your worst is better than my best speeds.
Neliquat 9y ago
I am happy to get 1mb down on a good day. Libing in the mountains has its perks. But net access is not one of them. Most people only have access to dialup here, I got 'lucky' with a terribly provisioned dsl thanks to how close my home is to the highway and dslam.
thomk 9y ago
Hey, I remember fivethirtyeight.com, they "predicted" they election!
EliRivers 9y ago
Serious question from someone who flinches at living more than ten minutes' walk from a train station and won't rent anything that doesn't have a crackerjack shower with painfully hot water and enough pressure to bruise, and an internet connection that sees less than a few minutes degraded service a year (although for speed, I actually don't demand that much - I'm happy with a couple of megabytes per second); why do people live there? That's a genuine question; not "why" as said to imply that there is no reason. There must be reasons. I just don't know what they are. Not generalities, please. I'm interested in first-hand information from people who actually live or lived there. Did you move to such a place? Why? What's the economy based on? Does it generate enough money to be self-sustaining, or does it exist through inertia? In areas with such low density of people, what jobs exist? Is it all farming or other such? How many people living there might actually like to move, but can't?
- brownbat 9y ago
  I think it's an interesting topic, more people should want to learn about life in other circumstances, so I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Maybe just because no one has come by with an answer. Not that it's what you're looking for, but this reminds me of Kacey Musgraves, who has some anti-country songs about the pain and false promises of small town life in a changing America. Merry Go Round and Blowin Smoke especially. There's some social psychology research on "sense of place" that covers how drawn people are to staying in the place where they grew up, which makes it hard for some to leave. The Rum Diary (the novel, can't vouch for the film) is kind of a meditation on this too, though about Puerto Rico instead of the rural midwest.
- darkstar999 9y ago
  Farming and ranching. Case closed. Also, the rural population has quite a different culture than what you are used to. They don't _crave_ internet. Some of them likely ask the same thing about your culture. Why do you like living so close to each other? Everything is so fast and overwhelming.
  - EliRivers 9y ago
    "Farming and ranching. Case closed." Is it? Are you a farmer or rancher? Why's it necessary to live so remotely? Is it not possible for a town to support farming and ranching? Is it necessary for everyone involved to live so remotely? Given the huge areas involved, living on the farm/ranch makes you local to one small part of it but still remote from all the rest, so why the need to live there? "Why do you like living so close to each other?" I don't, but it's the cost of having the things I do want. I want fast, reliable, cheap internet. I want my other utilities to be reliable as well. I want to be able to walk ten minutes to a mainline train station - it gives me a lot of opportunities very easily, needing nothing more than train fare. The density of people creates a lot of other opportunities; things that are wildly uneconomical in low-density communities become viable. Range of jobs, range of businesses for me to patronise, leisure opportunities. It's really about all those opportunities, and the people that make them. When I want to learn something, I just find a local class. If there isn't a local class, it's an hour from my door on foot and by train to central London (and I don't even live in a county adjacent to London), and there the opportunities increase by another order of magnitude. We don't (necessarily) like living close to each other; we like all the opportunities that are created by that - economic and self-development - and we like the many things that become economical in doing so (cheap, reliable utilities and infrastructure and niche businesses and all the rest that I mentioned above).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kome 9y ago
And that's why web developer should stop using JavaScript without reason and use pure and clean HTML, CSS and well compressed images.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
shmerl 9y ago
How is SpaceX low orbit satellites ISP project progressing?
mtalantikite 9y ago
"For around $30 a month, New York City internet providers offer basic packages of 100 Mbps service." I'd love to know where in NYC this service exists. I currently pay $60/month for 50Mbps and often get half that speed in practice. My office Internet service is even worse, it goes out 3-5 times a day and I've had maybe a dozen techs come out to look at both spaces. They won't even let me use my own modem because it's business Internet, which they charge 3x the price for. I've looked for alternatives, but have never had any other option than over-priced terrible service from Time Warner/Spectrum for the past decade.
diebir 9y ago
Sounds doubtful. Worst Internet is not on the Navajo res (UT, AZ)? Not in Hanksville, UT or a bunch of other small towns in Southern Utah? I am not even talking about ranches in places like Robbers Roost canyon complex. Nothing in Colorado is really remote and unpopulated. Roads and people are everywhere. Maybe San Juans qualify for remote wilderness somewhat.
mtl_usr 9y ago
As a Canadian, this article sums up pretty well the internet situation in most of the country, even in "urban" areas. Due to the "Canada is different" mentality here, foreign, more efficient companies are forbidden from making business here, leaving the market to a few local operators that have no incentive to make the service any better. This leads to the country being years later in terms of broadband technology compared to other western countries. There is no excuse for that. Canadian tech is always pretty much a crippled version of the same product from the United States at a higher price. Even in hardware, the same MacBook is 1,799.00 $ in the US but 2,399.00 $ in Canada. Saguache County is in the same situation thanks to it's remote location, but I bet you it'll get fixed far sooner than Canada's nonsense situation in term of internet access. I hope the ambitious infrastructure plan the US has adopted will somewhat cover the installation of better rural internet access.

129 points by nafizh 9y ago

That page has a bad case of terrible website design. When I scroll down, I expect bits of image not to zoom in from the left. I nearly closed the page before even getting to the headline. They've also somehow made space bar not scroll as far as it does on other websites (in Safari), so every time I scroll down I spend a second searching for where I ended up. At least there's only two locations of awful design during the adventure that is scrolling. Once you reach the headline, there's only one really unintuitive bit further down the page (a map of the USA), and that bit is short.

kwhitefoot 9y ago
Works ok for me but I have NoScript, uBlock, and Privacy Badger ckleaning out the crap for me.
drxzcl 9y ago
I could not read it on my iPad in landscape mode. Worked fine in portrait orientation. I don't know why.
- macintux 9y ago
  I switched to Reader. Looked like landscape could work if you were patient enough, but it was painful.

i_feel_great 9y ago

That page shows the worst use of the internet in the world. 15.88 MB in size according to Firefox. And unintuitive gimmick navigation to boot. How does doing something like that help convey the message?

scrollaway 9y ago
Jeez, two comments on the story, both of them talking about the page's design (which is honestly fine). Here's a text-only version: https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-worst-internet-in-america/#content https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//fiv... We moving on now?
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  Wait, fine? It's catastrophically unusable in landscape on iPad without Reader View. The limited-to-landscape side scrolling gimmick covers pretty much the entire top of the article, which flickers in and out at display refresh rate if I scroll back and forth to try to read the content underneath. I can't read anything until the graf that starts with "FiveThirtyEight analyzed" on the latest iOS. https://i.imgur.com/e0XeLw5.png https://i.imgur.com/e0XeLw5.png I'd say the commentary is fair, since it's a good explainer for how one can harm UX very quickly when changing the semantics of scrolling and a reminder of the importance of testing across all platforms and orientations. Yes, this happens a lot on HN. Often, a discussion about how to fix it comes about, and we all learn something. I would guess you know that, though.
- keithpeter 9y ago
  Sigh: I understand what you are saying, but then, the subject of the OA is communities that are excluded from some aspects of modern life by poor and expensive Internet access. One inevitably starts to think about why someone needs a connection capable of downloading at scores of megabits per second to access information and take part in (the human style) local networking. I then contrast the loading speed of a page with Javascript on with the loading speed when Javascript is disabled... (I get 350 kbits/sec down here). Back on the subject: am I right in thinking that a lower bandwidth connection - say 2Mb/s - would be cheaper to provide in some way than a full city scale pipe, or is it simply the cost of providing any kind of connection involving digging trenches just so high?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

mrkrabo 9y ago

Looking at the photos, I'm surprised there's Internet connectivity at all in those places, other than 3G or maybe WiMAX. I think it's not realistic to complain about this. The costs of bringing infrastructure to a place like this are simply too high.

kalleboo 9y ago
We brought electricity and phone service to these places. What makes internet different?
- voltagex_ 9y ago
  Exactly - what of the social impact of not having Internet connectivity in 2017? How would that affect your ability to find and do work, to communicate, to shop?
  - mrkrabo 9y ago
    You don't need fibre for that. 3G is more than enough to browse Facebook, find a job, and buy toilet paper off Amazon.
    - voltagex_ 9y ago
      Have you tried to browse the Internet on 2 megabit (best case) recently?
      - mrkrabo 9y ago
        HSPA+ is far, far from 2 Mbit. Also, I'm sure the Facebook app works wonderfully with 2 Mbit, because they've spent years optimising for that.
        mschuster91 9y ago
        Whatsapp/other messengers, FB and Twitter, maybe - but next to no other app is optimized for low internet speeds. Hell, ordinary games will regularly go into and above 200+MB territory for download... and in contrast to your computer where you can have DVDs with games sent to you by post, no such luck for smartphone apps.

birdman3131 9y ago

I used to live in Saguache County as a kid. We left in 2000 but this article does not surprise me. it is hard to adequately get across how desolate it was up there but i'll try. We had 40 acres of land and were considered city slickers because 40 acres was enough for 1-2 cows. We were friends with people with 25k acres. The ground was sand. 10 foot down was sand. You could water plants 3 times a day and they would still run out of water. (My mom fixed this with lots of silca gel for her garden.) We lived on a county road and the postal service would not deliver mail closer that 2 miles away. We never did put up a mailbox and instead just had a PO box in Moffat which was about 8 miles of gravel roads away. Annual rainfall is less than the Sahara dessert and temps would hit -40F in the winter. Some days would see 70F difference between day and night. Walmart was 40 miles away (Alamosa in one direction and Salida in the other.) In parts there are no trees for miles. We had ~30 trees by our house. The next ones were at another house 1/4 mile away and I believe the next were 2 miles away. Our phone system used an antenna that looked like the old tv arials and was solar with a battery on it. (96/97 era.) We had that for about a year before the phone company decided they needed the system more in alaska and would lay phone line for free rather than charging us $6k to run the lines half a mile. Then they waited a year to come get out system. The battery on it would routinely run out in the middle of a call.

manmal 9y ago
Wow that sounds hard. Have you ever considered founding a utilities company yourself and lay those lines for you and your neighbors? I have no idea how easy or hard that would have been.
- jacobush 9y ago
  He was a kid when he lived there...
- sgt101 9y ago
  You need access to capital to do that, and if you have access to capital you probably aren't in a place that considers 2 cows as wealthy.

qq66 9y ago

Most of these articles about broadband access conflate Internet access with broadband speeds. Yes, Internet access is basically a necessity in modern life. However, 25Mbps download (which is the definition used) is absolutely not.

rwallace 9y ago
As I understand it, while the talk is about speed, the real issue is reliability: in rural America if you try to get broadband, some of the time you'll get a few megabits per second, which is enough to get by, but a good deal of the time, your nominally broadband connection won't be delivering any data at all.

dispo001 9y ago

I applaud the comparison with electricity. This is almost exactly how I look at it. I would compare Internet providers with utilities providing water, roads, sewage and even the post. To think at one time we had telegraph data lines that were little more than a mud battery and a pole. The wire would run up the pole, go though a relay switched by the previous pole and continue to the next pole where it would switch its own relay. The mud battery provided very little power, just enough to switch a relay but the technology was good enough to bridge almost unlimited distance. Without comparison with other services I would be tempted to argue my ISP provides really great services. Its 75 Euro for 300 Mbit and the package comes with a phone line and hundreds of channels of something called television. However, when compared honestly with similar services their service is terrible. People working there told me the entire network is ready to provide 1 Gbit to everyone and the employees don't know why they didn't make the switch. I can easily guess why, I'm not willing to pay much more than 75 Euro, 3 times the speed wont bring in 3 times the money. What it will do is reveal glitches in the network that would require fixing. If I remember correctly the people who created the ISP were very passionate about the technology but ended up selling the business. Not sure if that was related but if I was passionate about my business but couldn't upgrade because of a hunger for money I would get bored fast. Using more of this rather ignorant guess work I started to ponder how an ideal ISP should be implemented. What would it really cost? Which type of contract is best for the network rather than the user or the provider? Surprisingly, in some areas where big money hungry ISPs refused to deliver services people had to rethink and do it themselves. Like this one here! http://www.buergerbreitbandnetz.de/fernsehen-ueber-glasfaser-fuer-nur-995-e-im-monat/ http://www.buergerbreitbandnetz.de/fernsehen-ueber-glasfaser... The "Glasfaser – für nur 9,95 € im Monat" translates to fiber optic for 10 Euro (?!?) My German almost isn't but from reading around I gathered they needed 65% adoption but got 94%, each end user had to pay 1000 Euro in advance. 900 in the form of a lone and 100 worth of shares. To guess some numbers with that... 7 and a half years worth of 10 Euro/month does seem to add up to 900 Euro while profit made after that should increase the value of the investment. IOW, if it takes 20 years to repay the debt it would work out just fine for the investor/customer. Some quote from speedtest: "With an average Q2-Q3 2016 download speed comparable to that in Bulgaria and Moldova, Germany’s fixed broadband is slower than you might expect from Europe’s largest economy. At 40.38 Mbps, Germany ranks 29th in the world for average fixed broadband download speed and 72nd for average upload." A different page mentions: "Expect a 35€ bill on average for a broad-brand connection" Most important to keep in mind, the big ISPs refused to service the area. It makes a great proof of concept. (Assuming buergerbreitbandnetz delivers 1 Gbps) in this worse case scenario 10/35 buys 1000/40.38 times the bandwidth. Or 29% of the cost for 2476% of the service. Or the 2 figured combined their service is 8438% better than the conventional urban offering. Rural UK ISP https://b4rn.org.uk https://b4rn.org.uk happened when big business "could" only provide crappy services at crazy rates. B4RN charges 30 pounds for 1 Gbps. speedtest writes: "according to the Connected Nations 2015 report from the UK’s communications regulator, Office of Communications (Ofcom), 48% of rural areas don’t have access to broadband speeds of 10Mbps or higher." Of course our germans and these brits had money to make their own ISP happen. My Spanish and my Greek are even worse than my German but from reading around, apparently Guifi is the worlds largest Mesh network in Greece that originally started in Spain. http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet Trying to make sense of this document... https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://guifi.net/files/20170528InformacioAddicionalDenunciaGeneralitat_Final_signed.pdf&usg=ALkJrhjuH1IO9ufyAP6zEHXxdF1Xho6Hww https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&... ...it seems they are actively fighting a tax per meter that guberment is trying to inflict on their fiber optic cables. If I understood correctly they are mainly offended by established businesses putting their cable in before the tax was invented. It seems big business did more than seal the ground after digging in their cables. How different this is from the mundane consumer perspective where we all pay some corp as much as we can for as little as we would accept. We live in a world that is a bit like: when one asks why a carton of milk costs 200 Dollars the answer would be that if they charge 300 USD for it they wouldn't sell enough milk to justify the higher price. Our entire western society works like this (I almost called it a civilization) one delivers 12 Dollars worth of labor that is sold for 40 Dollars, etc, and eventually it becomes 1000 dollars as part of a mortgage or infinite dollars as part of someones rent. If that is the mentality or indoctrination that comes over these roads, in these letters and though this internet tube it might just be not worth having any of it. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/4/42/20150103143744%21Woodbridge_old_barn_raising.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/4/42/20150... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CPO4R8o5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CPO4R8o5M

contingo 9y ago

The infomap "Broadband is still foreign to much of the U.S." shows high speed internet largely confined to urban areas, as the article discusses. But large swathes of North Dakota are deep green. What's the reason for that?

boomboomsubban 9y ago
Oil money, North Dakota is the second largest producer of oil in the US. There was no big announced project, just a large number of grants and tax cuts to promote infrastructure investment. And, from the looks of it, a depressing amount of the area without access are the reservations.
- bachmeier 9y ago
  > a depressing amount of the area without access are the reservations. I'm from North Dakota and went to high school on the Standing Rock reservation. They have their own institutions and legal system, so it's not surprising that they would have different coverage.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    Standing Rock also has to deal with two state governments.
- protomyth 9y ago
  Uhm, well Three Affilated has a lot of oil money. It is actually going to the people instead of the tribe’s coffers (although the tribe is doing quite well too). The tribes have a lot of issues dealing with connectivity (the fed doesn’t help nor the BIE) but some are better off than Grand Forks and Fargo.
protomyth 9y ago
BEK and other rural electric cooperatives are really laying down the fiber. Plus, if you look at a competition map of ND most places have multiple choices.

ambrop7 9y ago

Assuming the page is from America, it seems quite close to the worst considering I had to scroll through ~3 pages equivalent of weirdly horizontally scrolling images while all but the sky of the images was obscured by a cookie warning spanning 1/3 of the page (uncovering an equally large subscription request after being dismissed).

Andrenid 9y ago

I live in Melbourne, AU.. 4km from city centre, in a brand new high-rise building. I pay AUD$80/mth for 8mbps down and 0.5mbps up over shitty copper that dies every time it rains. Pings are so bad lots of services like Netflix, YouTube, etc think I can't connect and just give me "Check your internet" errors when I load, until I refresh multiple times and get it to load. Funnily enough, our rural areas have better net than us here. I own a farm in the absolute middle of nowhere (region population of around 500) and it gets solid 24/4 and some farms nearby who face a better direction for fixed wireless get 50/8 (or something like that).

protomyth 9y ago
My buddy outside Valley City ND (calling it a city was wildly optimistic) gets 1 gigabyte up 256mb down for USD$90. As you’ve said, it’s a bit more than a rural / urban problem.

randyrand 9y ago

> if a household wants a download speed of 12 Mbps with an upload speed of 2 Mbps, they can expect to pay a whopping $90. This is the worst internet in america? Wow. That is amazing! I'm incredibly impressed at how fast the worst place for internet in america is. In highschool (Class of 2011) I dealt with 5 mbps just because my parents didn't want to pay for more. It was tolerable as long as you didn't want to watch youtube in HD. Honestly, I have little sympathy for people with 12mbps.

auxym 9y ago
I'm in Canada, greater Montreal area. 5 Mbps for a bit under 30$ is pretty much the best deal around. Honestly it gets the job done. I can watch Netflix in 720p. I get the article, and entirely agree that internet, even broadband is a utility in this day and age. However, 25MBPS seems excessive to get email, file taxes and apply to jobs.
macintux 9y ago
If you read the article in its entirety, you'd see few have access to broadband even if they could afford $90 a month. Dialup sounds like the best most can get, although I didn't see stats on that specifically.
grecy 9y ago
HA! Go to Northern Canada. Right now you'll pay well over $100 for supposedly 5Mbps, but which is really only 1 or 2 at best. If you download more than 5GB in a month, you'll pay $25/GB for overages! And even better, there is only one telco to choose from! (I worked for that telco...)
- passivepinetree 9y ago
  The idea of metered connections for internet makes me shiver. They're likely going to become more popular in the coming years because they're too lucrative not to, but I will be resisting with all my power and pocketbook.
ajmurmann 9y ago

mrbill 9y ago

My mother lives in rural Oklahoma, and her Internet connection (2-3Mbps/1Mbps for $60 a month) is a WiMax antenna on the roof of her house, pointed at another antenna on the water tower of the next town over. It's not great, but it's the only option she has other than satellite providers, and works well enough for Facebook, email, and online shopping.

jonah 9y ago
My parents had dial up until about 2 years ago. On a good day, they'd get 28.8, but typically it was more like 14.4 kbps! When it rained and water got in the phone lines, they got nothing at all. And yes, they'd try to get the phone company to fix the lines often to no avail. They are only 20 minutes from town but it's too far to get DSL or cable or anything like that and the terrain is too hilly for fixed wireless which did become available in their county four or five years ago. They finally broke down and got satellite internet a couple years ago but it's slow and expensive.
- mrbill 9y ago
  When Mom was stuck with using a modem, I bought her a (literal) stack of USR Courier v.Everything modems (cheap, since a lot of ISPs in Austin were ditching dialup service around that time). She had lightning hits and storms so often that I told her "if you try to dial up and the modem isn't working, just unplug it, toss it in the trash, and plug in the next one off the stack." Had to do this even with surge protection inline for both power and phone line. Only in the past couple of years have I been able to get an LTE phone signal at her house (only while standing on the porch, not inside the building) and that's from a tower a few miles away...

Tepix 9y ago

This is an interesting market for the upcoming broadband satellite internet by Boeing, SpaceX, etc. They will provide low latency because they are in low earth orbit.

vram22 9y ago
Interesting, got any links about that? And do you know if it for the whole world or only some parts of it?

kronos29296 9y ago

I would do anything for your so called worst speeds. Your worst is better than my best speeds.

Neliquat 9y ago

I am happy to get 1mb down on a good day. Libing in the mountains has its perks. But net access is not one of them. Most people only have access to dialup here, I got 'lucky' with a terribly provisioned dsl thanks to how close my home is to the highway and dslam.

thomk 9y ago

Hey, I remember fivethirtyeight.com, they "predicted" they election!

EliRivers 9y ago

Serious question from someone who flinches at living more than ten minutes' walk from a train station and won't rent anything that doesn't have a crackerjack shower with painfully hot water and enough pressure to bruise, and an internet connection that sees less than a few minutes degraded service a year (although for speed, I actually don't demand that much - I'm happy with a couple of megabytes per second); why do people live there? That's a genuine question; not "why" as said to imply that there is no reason. There must be reasons. I just don't know what they are. Not generalities, please. I'm interested in first-hand information from people who actually live or lived there. Did you move to such a place? Why? What's the economy based on? Does it generate enough money to be self-sustaining, or does it exist through inertia? In areas with such low density of people, what jobs exist? Is it all farming or other such? How many people living there might actually like to move, but can't?

brownbat 9y ago
I think it's an interesting topic, more people should want to learn about life in other circumstances, so I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Maybe just because no one has come by with an answer. Not that it's what you're looking for, but this reminds me of Kacey Musgraves, who has some anti-country songs about the pain and false promises of small town life in a changing America. Merry Go Round and Blowin Smoke especially. There's some social psychology research on "sense of place" that covers how drawn people are to staying in the place where they grew up, which makes it hard for some to leave. The Rum Diary (the novel, can't vouch for the film) is kind of a meditation on this too, though about Puerto Rico instead of the rural midwest.
darkstar999 9y ago
Farming and ranching. Case closed. Also, the rural population has quite a different culture than what you are used to. They don't _crave_ internet. Some of them likely ask the same thing about your culture. Why do you like living so close to each other? Everything is so fast and overwhelming.
- EliRivers 9y ago
  "Farming and ranching. Case closed." Is it? Are you a farmer or rancher? Why's it necessary to live so remotely? Is it not possible for a town to support farming and ranching? Is it necessary for everyone involved to live so remotely? Given the huge areas involved, living on the farm/ranch makes you local to one small part of it but still remote from all the rest, so why the need to live there? "Why do you like living so close to each other?" I don't, but it's the cost of having the things I do want. I want fast, reliable, cheap internet. I want my other utilities to be reliable as well. I want to be able to walk ten minutes to a mainline train station - it gives me a lot of opportunities very easily, needing nothing more than train fare. The density of people creates a lot of other opportunities; things that are wildly uneconomical in low-density communities become viable. Range of jobs, range of businesses for me to patronise, leisure opportunities. It's really about all those opportunities, and the people that make them. When I want to learn something, I just find a local class. If there isn't a local class, it's an hour from my door on foot and by train to central London (and I don't even live in a county adjacent to London), and there the opportunities increase by another order of magnitude. We don't (necessarily) like living close to each other; we like all the opportunities that are created by that - economic and self-development - and we like the many things that become economical in doing so (cheap, reliable utilities and infrastructure and niche businesses and all the rest that I mentioned above).

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kome 9y ago

And that's why web developer should stop using JavaScript without reason and use pure and clean HTML, CSS and well compressed images.

deleted 9y ago
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shmerl 9y ago

How is SpaceX low orbit satellites ISP project progressing?

mtalantikite 9y ago

"For around $30 a month, New York City internet providers offer basic packages of 100 Mbps service." I'd love to know where in NYC this service exists. I currently pay $60/month for 50Mbps and often get half that speed in practice. My office Internet service is even worse, it goes out 3-5 times a day and I've had maybe a dozen techs come out to look at both spaces. They won't even let me use my own modem because it's business Internet, which they charge 3x the price for. I've looked for alternatives, but have never had any other option than over-priced terrible service from Time Warner/Spectrum for the past decade.

diebir 9y ago

Sounds doubtful. Worst Internet is not on the Navajo res (UT, AZ)? Not in Hanksville, UT or a bunch of other small towns in Southern Utah? I am not even talking about ranches in places like Robbers Roost canyon complex. Nothing in Colorado is really remote and unpopulated. Roads and people are everywhere. Maybe San Juans qualify for remote wilderness somewhat.

mtl_usr 9y ago

As a Canadian, this article sums up pretty well the internet situation in most of the country, even in "urban" areas. Due to the "Canada is different" mentality here, foreign, more efficient companies are forbidden from making business here, leaving the market to a few local operators that have no incentive to make the service any better. This leads to the country being years later in terms of broadband technology compared to other western countries. There is no excuse for that. Canadian tech is always pretty much a crippled version of the same product from the United States at a higher price. Even in hardware, the same MacBook is 1,799.00 $ in the US but 2,399.00 $ in Canada. Saguache County is in the same situation thanks to it's remote location, but I bet you it'll get fixed far sooner than Canada's nonsense situation in term of internet access. I hope the ambitious infrastructure plan the US has adopted will somewhat cover the installation of better rural internet access.