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Mississippi looks particularly bleak in regards to broadband speeds.
by sbr464 8y ago
Mississippi looks particularly bleak in regards to broadband speeds.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 8y agoOh wow. Especially with its juxtaposition with Alabama. I bet the map looks even more bleak in another five years.
- scarface74 8y agoSerious none snarky question. Is there anything about Mississippi that is not bleak? I’ve lived in GA all of my life and at least we have the Atlanta metro and to a lesser extent Macon and Savannah. Tennessee has some cities that I wouldn’t mind living in.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoMaybe some people don’t like living in cities and see your pros as cons?
- moorhosj 8y agoSlow broadband, high poverty, poor education and high obesity are pretty universal “cons”..
- heywot 8y agoAnd not all of those are represented in rural areas. And "slow broadband" feels hilariously out of place in that list.
- scarface74 8y agoTell that to developers who would be able to get a better paying job working remotely if they had decent broadband.
- heywot 8y agoI realize we're discussing this on HN but developers are a small microcosm of the communities being listed. Sure, there's examples that might combat the generality of my statement...but let's not be pedantic when that wasn't the subject to begin with. I can work remotely with a very basic internet connection. So can others. And you can be a successful developer (in your country, let alone your county) without working remotely.
- scarface74 8y agoI stayed with my parents for a summer (long story) and worked remotely - it was painful. I could barely do video conferencing let alone upload and download large datasets fast over DSL. I ended up setting up a VM on AWS to work from. But on a less anecdotal note, legitimate companies are doing “rural sourcing” of call centers where everyone works remotely and they give you a special boot disk that only runs thier software. They pay better than minimum wage and the requirement is a decent - above DSL internet connection.
- ghaff 8y agoMy dad in Maine is the last house that can get DSL on a private road. Internet "works" but you can't do video or anything like that. One neighbor I know has a hot spot through Verizon though mobile signal isn't great either. I believe some others have satellite. If I had to work from there, I'd have to do something to supplement the DSL.
- smileysteve 8y agovisiting in rural Alabama, up to last year AT&T DSL was the only option. The speed wasn't the problem so much as 2 simultaneous connections (ie browser and video conference) would kill the connection.
- ghaff 8y agoI've worked with people who didn't have broadband available. Basically, they got satellite and dealt with the outages due to weather and the costs. So you don't do much video streaming for entertainment and just dial in to calls unless there's some need to do video. It's a pain and you have to make compromises, but it can be done.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> And not all of those are represented in rural areas. But all of them are representated in Mississippi, which (not “rural areas”) is what was being discussed. > And "slow broadband" feels hilariously out of place in that list. Both slow broadband as mentioned upthread, and even moreso low broadband subscription rates as actually covered in the source article, are opportunity-limiting.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoI own a house in a rural area with no internet options other than cellular (not in Mississippi though) and gigabit up/down fiber is coming from my electricity company next year. I could do anything via internet then and the houses and cost of living are incredibly cheap.
- scarface74 8y agoIt’s not small town vs city, it’s the lack of opportunity, and just the backward thinking from years of baggage and history. I’m not just referring to the stereotypical MAGA small town “rural America”, I see it from minorities too (I am Black).
- ip26 8y agoI was listening to an interesting podcast talking about education in Mississippi that talked about the interesting angle of basically, when you're ranked the worst in the country, you're willing to think more radically & don't have to fight as much entrenchment. Not that I'm looking to move there, but who knows, maybe in thirty or forty years we'll be studying Mississippi on how they turned it all around.
- zjaffee 8y agoMost of the counties with below 50% have populations smaller than most big city suburbs. While it's certainly still bleak given these are mostly just poor communities that at most subsist from agriculture, the vast majority of people in the state live in the blue area.
- smileysteve 8y agoThough, I wonder if we should continue to track this. If you're not using broadband yet, it's most likely that a mobile device meets all of your needs. Even in a major metro area, in a millennial demographic, I know very few non computer scientists that require much more than a cell phone.
- squish78 8y agoNetflix, Xbox Live, etc..
- ghaff 8y agoThose are not exactly requirements to live.
- smileysteve 8y agoCable and Satellite solve a similar problem as Netflix. I don't have a video game console... I've had multiple significant others (sub 30s) who only had a tv and smart phone at home.
- adjkant 8y agoAnecdotally I have friends from 20-26 and not a single one is without a computer. Phones getting more powerful doesn't eliminate the computer. In fact, I know way more people without a TV than without a comnputer, as the computer replaces the TV.
- tpush 8y agoI doesn't say anything about speed though, does it? Only subscription rates.