3 ms·

Your question comes across as a bit rude. To answer it, because after half a year of looking, it was far closer to the ideal across a range of factors than anyt

Your question comes across as a bit rude. To answer it, because after half a year of looking, it was far closer to the ideal across a range of factors than anything else we’d found. I didn’t really notice how terrible the DSL was until after we purchased. The Eastern Shore in Maryland can be pretty rural, but it’s still Maryland. Euston is 15,000; my place is between two villages, one of 900 and the other of 1600. In town, Internet access _is_ pretty decent. But the countryside is another matter. Cities are economic powerhouses because they have network effects. My career has benefited from those network effects, and I think it would be a personal mistake for me to convert to a 100% remote position. But I can leverage a bit of that career capital to be remote sometime and take advantage of the vast cost differences between a coastal city and the rural Midwest, and get some lifestyle advantages from it (most importantly having my children see their extended family members far more frequently). I am going to have to invest a decent amount in equipment and services (e.g., MiFi, antenna, a router that’ll support line sharing with the cell, VPS, etc.) to make it work. That’s not to say “poor me,” far from it, but simply to point out that rural broadband can really suck in some places. And I’m lucky in that the cell signal exists; lots of places it doesn’t.

rayiner 8y ago
I'm trying to tease out what you value, in an economic sense. Khanna is proposing to spend a bunch of taxpayer money building fiber in rural areas, in hopes that it helps economically revitalize these places. But you're someone who already works in tech, and judges a house to be "closer to the ideal across a range of factors" even though it has nothing faster than DSL. If someone who already has a need for fast connectivity won't use connectivity as a dispositive factor in deciding where to buy a house, how valuable can fiber access really be? If people won't pick Town A over Town B because Town A has much better connectivity, what does that say about the value of Town A spending a bunch of tax dollars to build a fiber network? I think this is an important point, because we shouldn't make policy based on platitudes. If fiber really has the value the platitudes ascribe to it, we would see places with fiber being measurably more desirable than places without it.
- ghaff 8y ago
  I'm probably in the minority but I don't really understand the obsession with fiber. I have about a 25 Mbit connection at home and that's fine for remote work most of the time. My cable is sometimes a little wonky on video calls but that's not the end of the world. [And TBH people calling in from our offices have their own problems off and on as well.] Marginal DSL like my dad has--maybe 1 Mbit--is indeed something of an issue for my working from his house. (Also marginal cell coverage.) On the other hand, I know someone who works remotely from home who just has a satellite connection. Yes, having an internet connection is important. But I'm far less convinced of the incremental value of high-speed fiber.
- jonstewart 8y ago
  Well, for me, it isn’t about living there full-time, so the best possible connectivity wasn’t the biggest consideration; advertised DSL goes up to 18Mbps or more, and discounting that ideal to, say, 8-10 Mbps would still leave me in okay shape. The other factors were things like: size of property (35+ acres), quality of property (trails, garden space, places for kids to play outside, natural beauty, conservation), the house, and a balanced location between different families as well as airports. I will admit that I was surprised my DSL was _so bad_, considering we weren’t that far from town and not far away from a state highway. I agree with you that spending tax money on fiber won’t be a silver bullet for a rural community in terms of encouraging economic growth from the tech sector. It does help counteract the monopolistic rent-seeking behaviors of local telecom companies, however. I’m semi-optimistic about fixed wireless in the coming years. We’ll see about the Sprint/T-Mobile deal.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    >I’m semi-optimistic about fixed wireless I might be a bit pessimistic because WiMAX ended up being such a bust. OTOH, it seems as if consumer bandwidth needs are probably plateauing to a certain degree so another generation of wireless can possibly get things to a good enough point for many purposes.

rayiner 8y ago

I'm trying to tease out what you value, in an economic sense. Khanna is proposing to spend a bunch of taxpayer money building fiber in rural areas, in hopes that it helps economically revitalize these places. But you're someone who already works in tech, and judges a house to be "closer to the ideal across a range of factors" even though it has nothing faster than DSL. If someone who already has a need for fast connectivity won't use connectivity as a dispositive factor in deciding where to buy a house, how valuable can fiber access really be? If people won't pick Town A over Town B because Town A has much better connectivity, what does that say about the value of Town A spending a bunch of tax dollars to build a fiber network? I think this is an important point, because we shouldn't make policy based on platitudes. If fiber really has the value the platitudes ascribe to it, we would see places with fiber being measurably more desirable than places without it.

ghaff 8y ago
I'm probably in the minority but I don't really understand the obsession with fiber. I have about a 25 Mbit connection at home and that's fine for remote work most of the time. My cable is sometimes a little wonky on video calls but that's not the end of the world. [And TBH people calling in from our offices have their own problems off and on as well.] Marginal DSL like my dad has--maybe 1 Mbit--is indeed something of an issue for my working from his house. (Also marginal cell coverage.) On the other hand, I know someone who works remotely from home who just has a satellite connection. Yes, having an internet connection is important. But I'm far less convinced of the incremental value of high-speed fiber.
jonstewart 8y ago
Well, for me, it isn’t about living there full-time, so the best possible connectivity wasn’t the biggest consideration; advertised DSL goes up to 18Mbps or more, and discounting that ideal to, say, 8-10 Mbps would still leave me in okay shape. The other factors were things like: size of property (35+ acres), quality of property (trails, garden space, places for kids to play outside, natural beauty, conservation), the house, and a balanced location between different families as well as airports. I will admit that I was surprised my DSL was _so bad_, considering we weren’t that far from town and not far away from a state highway. I agree with you that spending tax money on fiber won’t be a silver bullet for a rural community in terms of encouraging economic growth from the tech sector. It does help counteract the monopolistic rent-seeking behaviors of local telecom companies, however. I’m semi-optimistic about fixed wireless in the coming years. We’ll see about the Sprint/T-Mobile deal.
- ghaff 8y ago
  >I’m semi-optimistic about fixed wireless I might be a bit pessimistic because WiMAX ended up being such a bust. OTOH, it seems as if consumer bandwidth needs are probably plateauing to a certain degree so another generation of wireless can possibly get things to a good enough point for many purposes.