17 ms·

70% of surveyed Americans say they can't do their job without internet

444 points by sharkweek 6y ago

bovermyer 6y ago
That sounds like internet access should be a public utility, with all that implies.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  What finally convinced some of my family members of that was that internet access is required in order to apply for housing. The last two times I moved, all rental applications were online only, without a physical form as a backup. Having a roof over your head requires not only having internet access, but having secure internet connection. I wouldn't trust putting personal details in on a library computer, for example.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    I think you're renting classier apartments than me. I've always just seen the state's sample form often without any modification.
    - bovermyer 6y ago
      It's definitely changing. Even a decade ago, I was seeing home-grown leases, including some with clauses of questionable legality. Now, a lot of the rental complexes either have their own online system (if they're owned by a big management company), or they use something like Avail if they're a one-off. I pay my rent through Venmo for my current house. Times have changed.
    - pnutjam 6y ago
      Woah, look at Mr. Fancypants with a state that cares about renters and provides a sample form.
- seveibar 6y ago
  How does the logic work? There are many necessities you pay for that aren't a public utility. The necessity of a resource doesn't seem to dictate the government should take care of it. A government monopoly is most effective when the cost of infrastructure dictates the inefficiency of a monopoly is a better alternative than a duopoly or competitive market no?
  - bob1029 6y ago
    I think the logic works in exactly the same way as with roads, power, sewer, water, etc., Just because the mode of access is intangible does not depreciate the importance of the resource. Do you feel there is justification for our roadways being classified as a public utility? How does that logic work? I feel the analogy of calling the internet an "information superhighway" is extremely apt here.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  Which could have adverse results in that most every utility has metered rates. far too many assume utility means high speed and limit free connectivity where it really means you are just guaranteed access
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Saying something should be run by the government because it's important seems like backwards logic to me. Should the government manage the production and distribution of food as well? Should all housing be government housing projects? Basic food and shelter are far more important than internet access.
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    The US government pours tens of billions into food production.[0] Direct subsidies account for 15% of agribusiness ("farm") revenues and the US government both underwrites and pays 63% of the costs of crop price insurance. Every developed country subsidizes their food industry to some extent or other. In the EU, the Common Agricultural Policy is the largest item in the EU budget. Food subsidies seem to be economically essential for a stable food supply, and politically essential to ensure stability in rural areas. Shelter, for its part, is heavily subsidized through the GSE[1] system. The GSEs underwrite mortgages, lowering interest rates for homebuyers, and stabilize the mortgage system by allowing mortgage issuing banks to offload the costs of internal failures onto the public instead of locking up the mortgage lending system. Tighter government regulation of internet availability, including public or quasi-public ownership, would be far from exceptional given the degree of government involvement in other essential economic areas including food and housing. [0] https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-data-says/ https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-sponsored_enterprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-sponsored_enterpris...
    - missedthecue 6y ago
      I said control, not support. The argument here considered is about the government controlling broadband, not giving subsidies to broadband companies. The government does not control food or housing supply and there are very few people who would advocate that they adopt that role. That is my point.
      - bleepblorp 6y ago
        I don't see a meaningful distinction between "control" and the existence of selective subsidies. The US government directs agribusiness to produce specific crops by giving the industry more money to produce those crops congress wants. This is "control." Food safety rules are also "control" of the market. As far as housing is concerned, GSE preferences (combined with additional support like the mortgage interest tax credit) distort the housing market by supporting owner-occupied housing, which is abnormal by global standards. This is deliberate shaping of the market, or "control" by most definitions. Also with regard to housing, the market is directly controlled through zoning laws and building codes. Zoning controls housing availability to artificially inflate prices, and building codes theoretically control construction quality. Food and housing are controlled markets.
NDizzle 6y ago
What? I always wonder where they get this data. I'm a software dev for two companies. I moved 1900 miles this summer. I'm currently outside of city limits using a LTE broadband connection (unlimited phone sim) and things work fine. Most people don't understand technology! Edit, looks like I read this incorrectly. I thought it said 70% said their home internet connection wasn't good enough for working from home.
- turtlebits 6y ago
  When they say home internet, I'm pretty sure they mean an internet connection at home. A cellular LTE connection is just that.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    If you open the page on internet providers in your area, it appears that "home" internet providers are cable, fiber, and dsl. Cellular providers are in a separate category. That doesn't prove for certain what their methodology was for the main page, but it's sufficient for NDizzle to reasonably assume they are not counting cellular as "home".
- EE84M3i 6y ago
  I don't understand -- how is an "LTE broadband connection" not a "home internet connection"?
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    It kind of looks like they are classifying that as "Mobile (Cell) Internet Providers" rather than "Home Internet Providers" I tried the "About Our Internet Data" form and it wasn't 100% crystal clear, but the results implied they are only considering cable and dsl or whatever to be "home internet".
  - throwaways885 6y ago
    LTE isn't practical for more than one person. You're getting 10-100x less speed for your money, not to mention terrible latency.
blululu 6y ago
Note that this is a survey of Americans who are currently employed. It should be '70% of all currently employed Americans require home internet'. This statistic is likely inflated by the currently high unemployment numbers in sectors that cannot work remotely, and it overlooks the large portion of the populace that is not part of the work force.
dgrin91 6y ago
This doesn't really make sense to me. Only 30% of Americans have jobs where they can't work from home? Truck drivers, factory workers, cashiers, taxi drivers, etc all make up less than 30% of America? I dont buy that. Smells like selection bias to me... are they interviewing people already at home because their work allows it? They do mention - > There are certainly some folks who work in healthcare, grocery stores, auto shops, etc., where you wouldn't think a strong home internet connection was a requirement. But I still remain skeptical that so many claim they require home internet. At the very least work email can be done on a phone.
- rabuse 6y ago
  Yeah, seems odd. I remember seeing that retail is still the #1 employer not too long ago, and that doesn't require internet.
  - OnlyOneCannolo 6y ago
    Unless you don't clock out on your timesheet until you get home ...
  - foepys 6y ago
    Switching shifts with coworkers is so much easier with the internet. I know of a large German company that has a "shift market" where employees can switch shifts as long as certain constraints are fulfilled. You can either switch with coworkers directly or "auction off" your shift by giving a timeframe where you want your new shift to be and select the most convenient from the coworkers that answered. If I were an employee there, I'd say that I need an internet connection at home.
  - asdff 6y ago
    It does now. No one is going back to paper books and paper schedules.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  You can work as a factory worker and still require internet access for scheduling days off, getting payroll information, etc. In fact, it's likely that people not working desk jobs are those most in need of home internet access, as they might not be provided such at work.
wintermutestwin 6y ago
I live in semi-rural California. It would be a great place for SV tech to live - great schools, affordable (for CA) houses, awesome nature access, and you could drive to the Bay for a really important meeting. The problem is there are only pockets of cable internet and most places are lucky to get 2 bars of cellular. There is fiber running down the two major highways. The reasons why we are so disconnected are many and complicated, but the only real solution is that access should be driven top down as a public utility - just like power. Oh, and while they are at it, I shouldn't have to worry about my internet utility stealing my data. They have a monopoly and so I am forced to accept whatever they put in my contract. If I could negotiate, I'd charge these leaches billions for my data...
- dghughes 6y ago
  Rural Canada is a big problem for ISPs or so they say. Vast distances and little profit. Often the people who live in rural areas do so because it's cheaper to live there. Many may not be able to afford $200 Internet or maybe even $20 is too much. I know some rural folks who live on $6,000 per year. My province is small but even here in the rural areas ISPs balk at having to run fiber down a side road off the main highway. Even with money thrown at them from various governments over the last two decades they still won't budge. The places that do have DSL or wireless are often stuck in the "up to" scenario. Sure it's supposed to be 1.5Mbps but it's up to 1.5Mbps. Many people here are waiting for Starlink but I don't think that will be as good as promised. If the cost is low that will help but the dish will be a problem. Rural areas tend to have a lot of trees and here we also have snow 1/2 the year.
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    Absent StarLink, the higher price on rural areas sends inherent. The only way around this seems to be to subsidize it in some way. Should we really make everyone else pay so that some people can save money by living in a rural area? Why not then just straight up give them the cash and leave the rural area to nature?
    - dghughes 6y ago
djrogers 6y ago
If you take a look at their 'about us' page and some of their other articles, it becomes pretty clear that this organization is a paid lobbying/PR firm for ISPs. Kinda calls into question their methodology and intent...
znpy 6y ago
The funny thing that in the us it's easier to raise money and get permits to develop electric and autonomous cars and to start a space exploration business than to develop a business in cheap, fast and reliable internet connections.
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  How do you know that it's easier?
  - znpy 6y ago
    I've seen that happen.
- toast0 6y ago
  Those other businesses have an opportunity for profits though. If you build a nice car, you can sell them at a premium price and the big automakers aren't going to compete until your unit numbers are big. If you make autonomous cars, that could certainly make money, and you get R&D tax incentives in the meantime. If you make cheaper space transport, the competition is still locked into their high cost systems. If you wire up a rural area, there's not a lot of customers and probably they won't be willing to pay premium prices. If you overbuild an existing area, you usually have to compete with the incumbent telco and cableco and both of them can use other areas to subsidize network upgrades and price drops, so you can't charge a premium price.
- DeonPenny 6y ago
  Because people can build private ISP from their garage now a days. Many small communities and in some cities have done that for like 20k
- paxys 6y ago
  Only one of those requires digging up your yard.
Someone1234 6y ago
One of the better ideas to handle "internet as a utility" is actually not to scrap private ISPs, but to give government a monopoly over the physical infrastructure in the "Last Mile" (i.e. fiber from central hub to business/home). ISPs lease the Last Mile at near cost (to pay for physical maintenance/improvements) and then are responsible for peerage agreements, subscriber management, network equipment, data budgets, plans, customer service, and other services (e.g. VoIP, TV over IP, etc). Nobody benefits from ten+ different fiber runs from data center to home or business, it is inefficient. So you have to consolidate it and then lease it, that way granting an actual competitive landscape where consumers would get many choices for their ISP (and their ISP is responsible for mediating with the government about physical issues/faults). Other countries have done this successfully. It also keeps government from being responsible for actually providing internet services, which could have civil rights problems (or politicians trying to decide winners/losers, etc).
- oneplane 6y ago
  We have a similar system for electrical distribution; per area a single organisation has sole responsibility for the physical infrastructure and they bill your energy company of choice. That means that on your invoice you have a fixed amount of infrastructure cost as a component, and your service/usage fee from the energy company. Same for gas. This is probably common (or at least more common than internet-infra-as-a-utility), but the concept of doing the same for data would benefit a lot of people. We had that for POTS/PSTN and Coaxical data (CATV/cable/whateveryoucallit) as well, which was privatised and now opened up again so you get your infrastructure component as a national fixed fee and you simply pay your provider of choice for the actual service.
  - asploder 6y ago
    I found this terminology confusing for many years, hope this clarification is helpful: - “Coaxial” refers to the design of the physical cable (Wikipedia has a better explanation than I can offer) - CATV refers to “Community Antenna Television”, the first cable systems in the USA, which fed the signal from a shared “community antenna” to homes in areas with poor broadcast reception. - “Cable” is the generic term for pay-TV and ISP services over coaxial cable
krisgenre 6y ago
>>We asked 950 currently employed Americans.. and the title goes "70% of Americans Say" Isn't the sample size miniscule to make such a big statement?
- krisgenre 6y ago
  Sorry, the actual article title goes "70% of surveyed Americans" but it has been edited here.
- blululu 6y ago
  Well that sample size would give an 95% confidence interval of ~ 2.8%. I don't think '68% of Americans' changes the story here. The main methodological problem is that only sampled employed Americans (Labor Force participation is ~60%), so it should really read '70% of American Workers'.
- asdff 6y ago
  It is definitely biased.
tiny_epoch 6y ago
Forget simply "doing your job". LIFE mostly requires an internet connection if you want to take part in society.
hrktb 6y ago
It’s a bit offputting to have a site called “decisiondata” giving basically no info on their data retrieval procedure or caveats that should be applied on their methodology. We don’t know much about who they polled, when or how they polled them, and of course no sample questions. Their citation of the BBC result have more info than their own. In this day and age I would have expected most people to be fine with just their cellular connection. Heck, I had a coworker working from home at the peak of the crisis only using their 4G data.
anonu 6y ago
My gut feel is that statistic seems high. Maybe there was a sampling error (selection bias?) where they sent a survey via email or asked people to Zoom?
UncleOxidant 6y ago
Only 70%?
H8crilA 6y ago
Who is thinking of getting a second internet connection? I live in a place where I can get two connections over two different technologies (cable TV and fiber optic), and there are some cheap and lower bandwidth (~10MiB/s) options that make sense for a backup connection. I think it's better to avoid having 4G as your backup since if there's any wired connections outage your local mobile frequencies will very quickly get saturated.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Who is thinking of getting a second internet provider subscription? One of the reasons I have an unlimited mobile plan with uomited hotspot is that it is also the home internet fallback.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- snuxoll 6y ago
  I have two connections, a business-class DSL connection (100/10) and a residential cable connection (1000/50). Both ISPs in my area have random issues, and I really can not afford to have my service go down for hours at a time. It costs me a pretty penny ($135+$65/mo), but I have much better reliability and can balance traffic between them when they are both up (my home lab runs off the DSL connection as it has a static IP, but will fail over to the cable connection if it goes down. My personal systems, game console, etc. are the opposite).
abigger87 6y ago
Was this data collected over the internet?
hanniabu 6y ago
What would be required to make internet a basic right?
hinkley 6y ago
Early in the epidemic, someone posted pictures of a schoolbus parked near an area with poor internet service. You see, in this school district, the buses have wifi. So they were using this to tether some of the kids with no internet access to the school. I guess they have some way of leaving the wifi on with the bus turned off, and since they weren't using the buses anyway... It is still one of the classiest things I've seen come out of the quarantine. Unfortunately.
yujanshrestha 6y ago
If you are on the house hunt then you may want to check out a tool I made to help you narrow down places by internet speed: https://gigahood.com https://gigahood.com Hope that helps somebody. It sure did help me!
- axaxs 6y ago
  Hey really like your site. If I could add any suggestions, it would be - 1) use of an address picker/dropdown, though honestly I haven't run into issues, it just seems cleaner. 2) link to the companies listed? I see some odd names when I searched my old address that I couldn't even find in Google. Anyhow, thanks again!
- onionjake 6y ago
  Where do you get your data? If you look at any UTOPIA city, e.g. Layton, Utah, it shows it as symettrical gigabit as the max speed. They actually offer 10 Gbps residential plans.
GCA10 6y ago
I wish these sorts of insta-surveys would disclose more about how the polling was done. The cheapest way to do polling is via a pop-up notifcation on a heavily trafficked digital property, with online button-clicking to follow. But then you aren't really getting data on all Americans. You're getting data on people who happened to be hanging out on cnn.com, smokinggun.com or whatever. And that's going to skew quite severely to people who have above average digital activity. Same problem if they're using a ready-built panel of people who like to take online polls. They might be surveying differently, and spending more money. But given that the publishing organization, decisiondata.org, is in the business of guiding people on their ISP choices, I don't think this is likely to be a demographically balanced phone survey, let alone Census-grade field work. Sure, lots of us do rely on home internet to do a lot of work, especially now. But any effort to quantify this really ought to avoid big-time sampling problems.
gregors 6y ago
obligatory EPB post here - Chattanooga, TN - https://epb.com/home-store/internet https://epb.com/home-store/internet
Havoc 6y ago
Kinda hard to reconcile that with being a democracy that just killed net neutrality
astockwell 6y ago
The abysmal-yet-totally-American solution: have employers provide your home internet access. I sincerely hope we never end up there, that should be an Onion headline, but stranger (and sadder) things have happened ahem healthcare ahem.
- jjcon 6y ago
  With 5G it may not be all that different from employers paying employee phone bills
- notassigned 6y ago
  >Have employers provide your home internet access By 'have' I think you mean 'force'. We need to stop responding to everything with more regulation and required expenses for businesses. This always causes more problems than it fixes.
coding123 6y ago
This means that 70% of people are doing BS jobs (including me). Basically we've made information access and curation a full time job for 70% of the population. INFORMATION CURATION! The other 30% is doing all the hard work of keeping people fed or in support roles of transportation and construction for the information curators.
- grahamas 6y ago
  That quite a leap. Even ignoring other potentially beneficial jobs, do you really think that modern supply chains ("support roles of transportation” of food) can function without the internet?
- Legogris 6y ago
  I had to do a double take before I realized you were talking about me as well. We live in an information curation economy indeed. I wouldn't say that's inherently BS, though.
savanpatel 6y ago
Their sample size is 950 Americans. That's too low even for a county.
gregwchase 6y ago
CBS Sunday Morning did a recent segment about this issue [1]. In the video, it's mentioned the FCC estimated ~23M Americans are without broadband internet. Microsoft did another study, and estimates ~162M Americans don't have broadband internet. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hWXrHmbu-w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hWXrHmbu-w
alexfromapex 6y ago
What happens if there’s a solar event? Are governments ready?
cco 6y ago
So I had this thought the other day while talking to a friend that works at an electrical utility, the thought is naive so I'd love to hear some thoughts from people in the ISP game. My friend and I calculated that it takes about $1 worth of electricity per year to keep your smartphone charged, we have cheap power so let's say $1-3, but even on a very cheap MVNO it costs at least $360 per year to provide cell service to that same phone. There are a lot of assumptions here, I pay ~$30/month for 12GB of data, for a lot of people that's too little, for some more than enough, but its the orders of magnitude that are important, is it just the case that providing cell service is 100x to 300x harder than providing electricity? I'm curious to hear the answer from people in the field, because for my friend who works in power generation, electricity generation doesn't seem 100x easier than providing data service, no coal had to be mined or water reservoirs had to be created in order to send cat videos, his words lol.
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  It is not like it is a P2P mesh network. Land leases are expensive for tower placement, and they need electricity and a backup generator, to power the comm. equipment and the air conditioning. And then we can talk about HVAC maintenance.
  - palijer 6y ago
    Don't the utility companies have the same issues with infrastructure placement and land though? Or is there some eminent domain thing for power utilities that doesn't apply to telecom?
    - brendawalsh 6y ago
      Well, in the US, electric and telephone have more rights and regulations, compared to cable television. So, as a telecom, it is better to go in under the guise of a CATV company and use a franchise agreement, then as a phone company that also offers TV, and internet. Also, if the poles are already there (usually phone or power), the new entrant is able to lease a portion of the pole to string infrastructure. Sometimes the municipality owns the power company. Cellular providers lease tower space from private companies that negotiate the tower placement with private land owners.
grahamburger 6y ago
Something I've been wanting to run by the HN community - would you pay anything for a backup home Internet connection? How low do you think the price would have to be to get 50-80% of your neighbors to buy it? Would $20/mo be low enough? I've spent my career building and maintaining small, regional Internet Service providers. One of the realities of the market is that no matter how good your service is you can't get more than around 15-25% of people in an area to use your service. Most of the companies trying to do this on a large-ish scale (like Starry) are trying to break that barrier by selling wholesale contracts (like exclusive contracts to entire apartments buildings / communities) and/or by piling other services on top of the Internet service and reaching higher and higher speeds. I have a hypothesis that a company that could go the other direction and provide a really cheap, basic Internet connection (<20$/mo, 30mbps) could gain more market share in an area specifically because it would be cheap enough to be used as a secondary Internet connection. I'm thinking of three types of customer here: 1) Very price sensitive customers who just want the cheapest thing they can get that's still usable. Maybe they have Internet access at work and use satellite TV at home and are OK with very basic Internet service at home. 2) Customers who use the service as their primary connection and it saves them enough money to add tethering to their phone plan, so if the service is unreliable they can switch to tethering. 3) Customers who have cable TV and Internet and can switch over to this service when their cable Internet is slow or down. I'm thinking of two types of plans, one for $20/mo and one for 10$/mo + 1$/day that the service is used. These numbers mostly work out on paper as long as >60% of the homes in a community sign up to use the service and it's understood that support is going to be slow. Like, no phone support (email/text only), response times in 1-2 business days, and it might take a week to send someone out if your service is down (but we won't charge you for the time it was down.) Obviously this class of service only works if it's redundant with something else. I'm kind of thinking about it as the 'MagicJack' of Internet service - as home phone service started to become less essential (due to the redundancy of having a phone in your pocket) it became possible for a very low cost and not particularly reliable service to have a place in the market. They would not have had the strict geographic customer density constraint, though. The cool thing is that once you get to that 60-80% market penetration you can start offering really great plans at really great prices. Like 1gbps symmetrical for $50-60/mo, 10G symmetrical for ~$250/mo. If anyone is interested in chatting about this my email is in my profile. I'm not quite committed to pursuing it, but it's something I think about a lot and would love to get some outside perspective.
microcolonel 6y ago
100% of surveyed Americans say they can't do their job without food.
deeteecee 6y ago
"We asked 950..." Okay I closed the article and left. I guess I'm surprised people keep saying they're surprised by the percentage and whatnot.
- jazzyjackson 6y ago
  I mean 950 is not a bad sample size (gives a 3% margin of error for populations of millions) the trouble is they don't say where they found these 950 people. So yeah, if it was an email survey or a people-who-answer-telephone-calls-from-strangers-during-the-workday, they may have selected for information workers.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Crossing fingers that starlink enables 100% connectivity here
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tempsy 6y ago
Prediction...employers are going to have to start paying for or subsidizing home internet, with some already paying for cell phone bills. Then subsidizing home office set up/construction.
ixtli 6y ago
And yet whenever people suggest it should be a municipal utility like the telephone the response is astonishment.
tekknik 6y ago
> “ Please note that DecisionData does have a paid financial relationship with some of the providers listed. This does not impact which providers are shown, as we show all providers we have data for.” Well that’s unfortunate because I can’t believe your facts, if they are indeed facts.
Macumbapotatos 6y ago
At first I thought "How are 70% of Americans tied to the internet? What about taxis, factory workers, truckers, some brick and mortar?" Then I remembered that most of these jobs require some form of internet to gain key inputs to work. Truckers may need GPS and connection to HQ, brick&mortar is interwoven with procurement and operations, factory workers may have multiple pieces of equipment that are at least partially tied to the internet, so on and so forth.

444 points by sharkweek 6y ago

bovermyer 6y ago

That sounds like internet access should be a public utility, with all that implies.

MereInterest 6y ago
What finally convinced some of my family members of that was that internet access is required in order to apply for housing. The last two times I moved, all rental applications were online only, without a physical form as a backup. Having a roof over your head requires not only having internet access, but having secure internet connection. I wouldn't trust putting personal details in on a library computer, for example.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  I think you're renting classier apartments than me. I've always just seen the state's sample form often without any modification.
  - bovermyer 6y ago
    It's definitely changing. Even a decade ago, I was seeing home-grown leases, including some with clauses of questionable legality. Now, a lot of the rental complexes either have their own online system (if they're owned by a big management company), or they use something like Avail if they're a one-off. I pay my rent through Venmo for my current house. Times have changed.
  - pnutjam 6y ago
    Woah, look at Mr. Fancypants with a state that cares about renters and provides a sample form.
seveibar 6y ago
How does the logic work? There are many necessities you pay for that aren't a public utility. The necessity of a resource doesn't seem to dictate the government should take care of it. A government monopoly is most effective when the cost of infrastructure dictates the inefficiency of a monopoly is a better alternative than a duopoly or competitive market no?
- bob1029 6y ago
  I think the logic works in exactly the same way as with roads, power, sewer, water, etc., Just because the mode of access is intangible does not depreciate the importance of the resource. Do you feel there is justification for our roadways being classified as a public utility? How does that logic work? I feel the analogy of calling the internet an "information superhighway" is extremely apt here.
Shivetya 6y ago
Which could have adverse results in that most every utility has metered rates. far too many assume utility means high speed and limit free connectivity where it really means you are just guaranteed access
missedthecue 6y ago
Saying something should be run by the government because it's important seems like backwards logic to me. Should the government manage the production and distribution of food as well? Should all housing be government housing projects? Basic food and shelter are far more important than internet access.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  The US government pours tens of billions into food production.[0] Direct subsidies account for 15% of agribusiness ("farm") revenues and the US government both underwrites and pays 63% of the costs of crop price insurance. Every developed country subsidizes their food industry to some extent or other. In the EU, the Common Agricultural Policy is the largest item in the EU budget. Food subsidies seem to be economically essential for a stable food supply, and politically essential to ensure stability in rural areas. Shelter, for its part, is heavily subsidized through the GSE[1] system. The GSEs underwrite mortgages, lowering interest rates for homebuyers, and stabilize the mortgage system by allowing mortgage issuing banks to offload the costs of internal failures onto the public instead of locking up the mortgage lending system. Tighter government regulation of internet availability, including public or quasi-public ownership, would be far from exceptional given the degree of government involvement in other essential economic areas including food and housing. [0] https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-data-says/ https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-sponsored_enterprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-sponsored_enterpris...
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    I said control, not support. The argument here considered is about the government controlling broadband, not giving subsidies to broadband companies. The government does not control food or housing supply and there are very few people who would advocate that they adopt that role. That is my point.
    - bleepblorp 6y ago
      I don't see a meaningful distinction between "control" and the existence of selective subsidies. The US government directs agribusiness to produce specific crops by giving the industry more money to produce those crops congress wants. This is "control." Food safety rules are also "control" of the market. As far as housing is concerned, GSE preferences (combined with additional support like the mortgage interest tax credit) distort the housing market by supporting owner-occupied housing, which is abnormal by global standards. This is deliberate shaping of the market, or "control" by most definitions. Also with regard to housing, the market is directly controlled through zoning laws and building codes. Zoning controls housing availability to artificially inflate prices, and building codes theoretically control construction quality. Food and housing are controlled markets.

NDizzle 6y ago

What? I always wonder where they get this data. I'm a software dev for two companies. I moved 1900 miles this summer. I'm currently outside of city limits using a LTE broadband connection (unlimited phone sim) and things work fine. Most people don't understand technology! Edit, looks like I read this incorrectly. I thought it said 70% said their home internet connection wasn't good enough for working from home.

turtlebits 6y ago
When they say home internet, I'm pretty sure they mean an internet connection at home. A cellular LTE connection is just that.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  If you open the page on internet providers in your area, it appears that "home" internet providers are cable, fiber, and dsl. Cellular providers are in a separate category. That doesn't prove for certain what their methodology was for the main page, but it's sufficient for NDizzle to reasonably assume they are not counting cellular as "home".
EE84M3i 6y ago
I don't understand -- how is an "LTE broadband connection" not a "home internet connection"?
- perl4ever 6y ago
  It kind of looks like they are classifying that as "Mobile (Cell) Internet Providers" rather than "Home Internet Providers" I tried the "About Our Internet Data" form and it wasn't 100% crystal clear, but the results implied they are only considering cable and dsl or whatever to be "home internet".
- throwaways885 6y ago
  LTE isn't practical for more than one person. You're getting 10-100x less speed for your money, not to mention terrible latency.

blululu 6y ago

Note that this is a survey of Americans who are currently employed. It should be '70% of all currently employed Americans require home internet'. This statistic is likely inflated by the currently high unemployment numbers in sectors that cannot work remotely, and it overlooks the large portion of the populace that is not part of the work force.

dgrin91 6y ago

This doesn't really make sense to me. Only 30% of Americans have jobs where they can't work from home? Truck drivers, factory workers, cashiers, taxi drivers, etc all make up less than 30% of America? I dont buy that. Smells like selection bias to me... are they interviewing people already at home because their work allows it? They do mention - > There are certainly some folks who work in healthcare, grocery stores, auto shops, etc., where you wouldn't think a strong home internet connection was a requirement. But I still remain skeptical that so many claim they require home internet. At the very least work email can be done on a phone.

rabuse 6y ago
Yeah, seems odd. I remember seeing that retail is still the #1 employer not too long ago, and that doesn't require internet.
- OnlyOneCannolo 6y ago
  Unless you don't clock out on your timesheet until you get home ...
- foepys 6y ago
  Switching shifts with coworkers is so much easier with the internet. I know of a large German company that has a "shift market" where employees can switch shifts as long as certain constraints are fulfilled. You can either switch with coworkers directly or "auction off" your shift by giving a timeframe where you want your new shift to be and select the most convenient from the coworkers that answered. If I were an employee there, I'd say that I need an internet connection at home.
- asdff 6y ago
  It does now. No one is going back to paper books and paper schedules.
mywittyname 6y ago
You can work as a factory worker and still require internet access for scheduling days off, getting payroll information, etc. In fact, it's likely that people not working desk jobs are those most in need of home internet access, as they might not be provided such at work.

wintermutestwin 6y ago

I live in semi-rural California. It would be a great place for SV tech to live - great schools, affordable (for CA) houses, awesome nature access, and you could drive to the Bay for a really important meeting. The problem is there are only pockets of cable internet and most places are lucky to get 2 bars of cellular. There is fiber running down the two major highways. The reasons why we are so disconnected are many and complicated, but the only real solution is that access should be driven top down as a public utility - just like power. Oh, and while they are at it, I shouldn't have to worry about my internet utility stealing my data. They have a monopoly and so I am forced to accept whatever they put in my contract. If I could negotiate, I'd charge these leaches billions for my data...

dghughes 6y ago
Rural Canada is a big problem for ISPs or so they say. Vast distances and little profit. Often the people who live in rural areas do so because it's cheaper to live there. Many may not be able to afford $200 Internet or maybe even $20 is too much. I know some rural folks who live on $6,000 per year. My province is small but even here in the rural areas ISPs balk at having to run fiber down a side road off the main highway. Even with money thrown at them from various governments over the last two decades they still won't budge. The places that do have DSL or wireless are often stuck in the "up to" scenario. Sure it's supposed to be 1.5Mbps but it's up to 1.5Mbps. Many people here are waiting for Starlink but I don't think that will be as good as promised. If the cost is low that will help but the dish will be a problem. Rural areas tend to have a lot of trees and here we also have snow 1/2 the year.
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  Absent StarLink, the higher price on rural areas sends inherent. The only way around this seems to be to subsidize it in some way. Should we really make everyone else pay so that some people can save money by living in a rural area? Why not then just straight up give them the cash and leave the rural area to nature?
  - dghughes 6y ago

djrogers 6y ago

If you take a look at their 'about us' page and some of their other articles, it becomes pretty clear that this organization is a paid lobbying/PR firm for ISPs. Kinda calls into question their methodology and intent...

znpy 6y ago

The funny thing that in the us it's easier to raise money and get permits to develop electric and autonomous cars and to start a space exploration business than to develop a business in cheap, fast and reliable internet connections.

burntoutfire 6y ago
How do you know that it's easier?
- znpy 6y ago
  I've seen that happen.
toast0 6y ago
Those other businesses have an opportunity for profits though. If you build a nice car, you can sell them at a premium price and the big automakers aren't going to compete until your unit numbers are big. If you make autonomous cars, that could certainly make money, and you get R&D tax incentives in the meantime. If you make cheaper space transport, the competition is still locked into their high cost systems. If you wire up a rural area, there's not a lot of customers and probably they won't be willing to pay premium prices. If you overbuild an existing area, you usually have to compete with the incumbent telco and cableco and both of them can use other areas to subsidize network upgrades and price drops, so you can't charge a premium price.
DeonPenny 6y ago
Because people can build private ISP from their garage now a days. Many small communities and in some cities have done that for like 20k
paxys 6y ago
Only one of those requires digging up your yard.

Someone1234 6y ago

One of the better ideas to handle "internet as a utility" is actually not to scrap private ISPs, but to give government a monopoly over the physical infrastructure in the "Last Mile" (i.e. fiber from central hub to business/home). ISPs lease the Last Mile at near cost (to pay for physical maintenance/improvements) and then are responsible for peerage agreements, subscriber management, network equipment, data budgets, plans, customer service, and other services (e.g. VoIP, TV over IP, etc). Nobody benefits from ten+ different fiber runs from data center to home or business, it is inefficient. So you have to consolidate it and then lease it, that way granting an actual competitive landscape where consumers would get many choices for their ISP (and their ISP is responsible for mediating with the government about physical issues/faults). Other countries have done this successfully. It also keeps government from being responsible for actually providing internet services, which could have civil rights problems (or politicians trying to decide winners/losers, etc).

oneplane 6y ago
We have a similar system for electrical distribution; per area a single organisation has sole responsibility for the physical infrastructure and they bill your energy company of choice. That means that on your invoice you have a fixed amount of infrastructure cost as a component, and your service/usage fee from the energy company. Same for gas. This is probably common (or at least more common than internet-infra-as-a-utility), but the concept of doing the same for data would benefit a lot of people. We had that for POTS/PSTN and Coaxical data (CATV/cable/whateveryoucallit) as well, which was privatised and now opened up again so you get your infrastructure component as a national fixed fee and you simply pay your provider of choice for the actual service.
- asploder 6y ago
  I found this terminology confusing for many years, hope this clarification is helpful: - “Coaxial” refers to the design of the physical cable (Wikipedia has a better explanation than I can offer) - CATV refers to “Community Antenna Television”, the first cable systems in the USA, which fed the signal from a shared “community antenna” to homes in areas with poor broadcast reception. - “Cable” is the generic term for pay-TV and ISP services over coaxial cable

krisgenre 6y ago

>>We asked 950 currently employed Americans.. and the title goes "70% of Americans Say" Isn't the sample size miniscule to make such a big statement?

krisgenre 6y ago
Sorry, the actual article title goes "70% of surveyed Americans" but it has been edited here.
blululu 6y ago
Well that sample size would give an 95% confidence interval of ~ 2.8%. I don't think '68% of Americans' changes the story here. The main methodological problem is that only sampled employed Americans (Labor Force participation is ~60%), so it should really read '70% of American Workers'.
asdff 6y ago
It is definitely biased.

tiny_epoch 6y ago

Forget simply "doing your job". LIFE mostly requires an internet connection if you want to take part in society.

hrktb 6y ago

It’s a bit offputting to have a site called “decisiondata” giving basically no info on their data retrieval procedure or caveats that should be applied on their methodology. We don’t know much about who they polled, when or how they polled them, and of course no sample questions. Their citation of the BBC result have more info than their own. In this day and age I would have expected most people to be fine with just their cellular connection. Heck, I had a coworker working from home at the peak of the crisis only using their 4G data.

anonu 6y ago

My gut feel is that statistic seems high. Maybe there was a sampling error (selection bias?) where they sent a survey via email or asked people to Zoom?

UncleOxidant 6y ago

Only 70%?

H8crilA 6y ago

Who is thinking of getting a second internet connection? I live in a place where I can get two connections over two different technologies (cable TV and fiber optic), and there are some cheap and lower bandwidth (~10MiB/s) options that make sense for a backup connection. I think it's better to avoid having 4G as your backup since if there's any wired connections outage your local mobile frequencies will very quickly get saturated.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Who is thinking of getting a second internet provider subscription? One of the reasons I have an unlimited mobile plan with uomited hotspot is that it is also the home internet fallback.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
snuxoll 6y ago
I have two connections, a business-class DSL connection (100/10) and a residential cable connection (1000/50). Both ISPs in my area have random issues, and I really can not afford to have my service go down for hours at a time. It costs me a pretty penny ($135+$65/mo), but I have much better reliability and can balance traffic between them when they are both up (my home lab runs off the DSL connection as it has a static IP, but will fail over to the cable connection if it goes down. My personal systems, game console, etc. are the opposite).

abigger87 6y ago

Was this data collected over the internet?

hanniabu 6y ago

What would be required to make internet a basic right?

hinkley 6y ago

Early in the epidemic, someone posted pictures of a schoolbus parked near an area with poor internet service. You see, in this school district, the buses have wifi. So they were using this to tether some of the kids with no internet access to the school. I guess they have some way of leaving the wifi on with the bus turned off, and since they weren't using the buses anyway... It is still one of the classiest things I've seen come out of the quarantine. Unfortunately.

yujanshrestha 6y ago

If you are on the house hunt then you may want to check out a tool I made to help you narrow down places by internet speed: https://gigahood.com https://gigahood.com Hope that helps somebody. It sure did help me!

axaxs 6y ago
Hey really like your site. If I could add any suggestions, it would be - 1) use of an address picker/dropdown, though honestly I haven't run into issues, it just seems cleaner. 2) link to the companies listed? I see some odd names when I searched my old address that I couldn't even find in Google. Anyhow, thanks again!
onionjake 6y ago
Where do you get your data? If you look at any UTOPIA city, e.g. Layton, Utah, it shows it as symettrical gigabit as the max speed. They actually offer 10 Gbps residential plans.

GCA10 6y ago

I wish these sorts of insta-surveys would disclose more about how the polling was done. The cheapest way to do polling is via a pop-up notifcation on a heavily trafficked digital property, with online button-clicking to follow. But then you aren't really getting data on all Americans. You're getting data on people who happened to be hanging out on cnn.com, smokinggun.com or whatever. And that's going to skew quite severely to people who have above average digital activity. Same problem if they're using a ready-built panel of people who like to take online polls. They might be surveying differently, and spending more money. But given that the publishing organization, decisiondata.org, is in the business of guiding people on their ISP choices, I don't think this is likely to be a demographically balanced phone survey, let alone Census-grade field work. Sure, lots of us do rely on home internet to do a lot of work, especially now. But any effort to quantify this really ought to avoid big-time sampling problems.

gregors 6y ago

obligatory EPB post here - Chattanooga, TN - https://epb.com/home-store/internet https://epb.com/home-store/internet

Havoc 6y ago

Kinda hard to reconcile that with being a democracy that just killed net neutrality

astockwell 6y ago

The abysmal-yet-totally-American solution: have employers provide your home internet access. I sincerely hope we never end up there, that should be an Onion headline, but stranger (and sadder) things have happened ahem healthcare ahem.

jjcon 6y ago
With 5G it may not be all that different from employers paying employee phone bills
notassigned 6y ago
>Have employers provide your home internet access By 'have' I think you mean 'force'. We need to stop responding to everything with more regulation and required expenses for businesses. This always causes more problems than it fixes.

coding123 6y ago

This means that 70% of people are doing BS jobs (including me). Basically we've made information access and curation a full time job for 70% of the population. INFORMATION CURATION! The other 30% is doing all the hard work of keeping people fed or in support roles of transportation and construction for the information curators.

grahamas 6y ago
That quite a leap. Even ignoring other potentially beneficial jobs, do you really think that modern supply chains ("support roles of transportation” of food) can function without the internet?
Legogris 6y ago
I had to do a double take before I realized you were talking about me as well. We live in an information curation economy indeed. I wouldn't say that's inherently BS, though.

savanpatel 6y ago

Their sample size is 950 Americans. That's too low even for a county.

gregwchase 6y ago

CBS Sunday Morning did a recent segment about this issue [1]. In the video, it's mentioned the FCC estimated ~23M Americans are without broadband internet. Microsoft did another study, and estimates ~162M Americans don't have broadband internet. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hWXrHmbu-w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hWXrHmbu-w

alexfromapex 6y ago

What happens if there’s a solar event? Are governments ready?

cco 6y ago

So I had this thought the other day while talking to a friend that works at an electrical utility, the thought is naive so I'd love to hear some thoughts from people in the ISP game. My friend and I calculated that it takes about $1 worth of electricity per year to keep your smartphone charged, we have cheap power so let's say $1-3, but even on a very cheap MVNO it costs at least $360 per year to provide cell service to that same phone. There are a lot of assumptions here, I pay ~$30/month for 12GB of data, for a lot of people that's too little, for some more than enough, but its the orders of magnitude that are important, is it just the case that providing cell service is 100x to 300x harder than providing electricity? I'm curious to hear the answer from people in the field, because for my friend who works in power generation, electricity generation doesn't seem 100x easier than providing data service, no coal had to be mined or water reservoirs had to be created in order to send cat videos, his words lol.

dillonmckay 6y ago
It is not like it is a P2P mesh network. Land leases are expensive for tower placement, and they need electricity and a backup generator, to power the comm. equipment and the air conditioning. And then we can talk about HVAC maintenance.
- palijer 6y ago
  Don't the utility companies have the same issues with infrastructure placement and land though? Or is there some eminent domain thing for power utilities that doesn't apply to telecom?
  - brendawalsh 6y ago
    Well, in the US, electric and telephone have more rights and regulations, compared to cable television. So, as a telecom, it is better to go in under the guise of a CATV company and use a franchise agreement, then as a phone company that also offers TV, and internet. Also, if the poles are already there (usually phone or power), the new entrant is able to lease a portion of the pole to string infrastructure. Sometimes the municipality owns the power company. Cellular providers lease tower space from private companies that negotiate the tower placement with private land owners.

grahamburger 6y ago

Something I've been wanting to run by the HN community - would you pay anything for a backup home Internet connection? How low do you think the price would have to be to get 50-80% of your neighbors to buy it? Would $20/mo be low enough? I've spent my career building and maintaining small, regional Internet Service providers. One of the realities of the market is that no matter how good your service is you can't get more than around 15-25% of people in an area to use your service. Most of the companies trying to do this on a large-ish scale (like Starry) are trying to break that barrier by selling wholesale contracts (like exclusive contracts to entire apartments buildings / communities) and/or by piling other services on top of the Internet service and reaching higher and higher speeds. I have a hypothesis that a company that could go the other direction and provide a really cheap, basic Internet connection (<20$/mo, 30mbps) could gain more market share in an area specifically because it would be cheap enough to be used as a secondary Internet connection. I'm thinking of three types of customer here: 1) Very price sensitive customers who just want the cheapest thing they can get that's still usable. Maybe they have Internet access at work and use satellite TV at home and are OK with very basic Internet service at home. 2) Customers who use the service as their primary connection and it saves them enough money to add tethering to their phone plan, so if the service is unreliable they can switch to tethering. 3) Customers who have cable TV and Internet and can switch over to this service when their cable Internet is slow or down. I'm thinking of two types of plans, one for $20/mo and one for 10$/mo + 1$/day that the service is used. These numbers mostly work out on paper as long as >60% of the homes in a community sign up to use the service and it's understood that support is going to be slow. Like, no phone support (email/text only), response times in 1-2 business days, and it might take a week to send someone out if your service is down (but we won't charge you for the time it was down.) Obviously this class of service only works if it's redundant with something else. I'm kind of thinking about it as the 'MagicJack' of Internet service - as home phone service started to become less essential (due to the redundancy of having a phone in your pocket) it became possible for a very low cost and not particularly reliable service to have a place in the market. They would not have had the strict geographic customer density constraint, though. The cool thing is that once you get to that 60-80% market penetration you can start offering really great plans at really great prices. Like 1gbps symmetrical for $50-60/mo, 10G symmetrical for ~$250/mo. If anyone is interested in chatting about this my email is in my profile. I'm not quite committed to pursuing it, but it's something I think about a lot and would love to get some outside perspective.

microcolonel 6y ago

100% of surveyed Americans say they can't do their job without food.

deeteecee 6y ago

"We asked 950..." Okay I closed the article and left. I guess I'm surprised people keep saying they're surprised by the percentage and whatnot.

jazzyjackson 6y ago
I mean 950 is not a bad sample size (gives a 3% margin of error for populations of millions) the trouble is they don't say where they found these 950 people. So yeah, if it was an email survey or a people-who-answer-telephone-calls-from-strangers-during-the-workday, they may have selected for information workers.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Crossing fingers that starlink enables 100% connectivity here

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tempsy 6y ago

Prediction...employers are going to have to start paying for or subsidizing home internet, with some already paying for cell phone bills. Then subsidizing home office set up/construction.

ixtli 6y ago

And yet whenever people suggest it should be a municipal utility like the telephone the response is astonishment.

tekknik 6y ago

> “ Please note that DecisionData does have a paid financial relationship with some of the providers listed. This does not impact which providers are shown, as we show all providers we have data for.” Well that’s unfortunate because I can’t believe your facts, if they are indeed facts.

Macumbapotatos 6y ago

At first I thought "How are 70% of Americans tied to the internet? What about taxis, factory workers, truckers, some brick and mortar?" Then I remembered that most of these jobs require some form of internet to gain key inputs to work. Truckers may need GPS and connection to HQ, brick&mortar is interwoven with procurement and operations, factory workers may have multiple pieces of equipment that are at least partially tied to the internet, so on and so forth.