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> I think a policy which stops upgrading cities until a baseline is met in the rest of the country is also appropriate. What does one thing have to do with the
by thebean11 6y ago
> I think a policy which stops upgrading cities until a baseline is met in the rest of the country is also appropriate.
What does one thing have to do with the other? Cities aren't in any way preventing improvements elsewhere.
- inetknght 6y ago> Cities aren't in any way preventing improvements elsewhere. Opportunity cost. Why spend your installation technician's time in an unprofitable rural region when you can better-spend their time in a profitable city?
- hylaride 6y agoWell, these rural areas keep electing "free market" republicans, so...
- kodah 6y agoPersonally, your argument seems dubious but I'll answer you in earnest. If your argument were true this map would look much different: https://www.fcc.gov/health/maps https://www.fcc.gov/health/maps Local politicians all work just about the same way when it comes to approving an internet provider. Attracting them generally has to do with business incentives, which means if the State and/or Federal government do nothing then you'll get what you have today.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thebean11 6y agoOpportunity cost is only an argument when doing one thing prevents you from doing the other. What's the limited resource here that would prevent a cable company from hiring more technicians and laying more cable? Put another way, how does banning improvements in New York suddenly make improvements in Montana more profitable?
- inetknght 6y agoSure but what are you going to do with those technicians after they've installed the hardware in a sparse region? It takes a lot of man-hours to do the install, especially for long distances that are rural homes, but not so many man-hours to maintain
- blaser-waffle 6y agoPlus you have the ability to serve more people, at a lower cost. I can get 100 urban users up for 1/4 of the price to get 20 users in a rural sub-division. This isn't just capitalism, it's basic utilitarianism.
- onion2k 6y agoCities aren't in any way preventing improvements elsewhere. Yes they are. No one has unlimited capital for investment, so infrastructure companies will invest where they get the maximum returns. If they're left to their own devices cities would get increasing fast internet, and everywhere else would be left stagnant. That drives more people to live in cities, which in turn makes rural economies fail. Then the people in cities start running out of food. Slight reductio ad absurdum argument on my part there, but it's just to illustrate the point. For a country to operate having significantly worse infrastructure in one place damages the entire economy. Infrastructure investment has to be managed carefully.
- boringg 6y agoI hear your point but I disagree with the binary nature of it. I do think the challenge of rural internet lies in the incredible amount of infrastructure costs with limited recovery. This is the same challenge the electricity markets have (or any public infrastructure). The other challenge in the US that most european countries don't have (for anyone from Europe) is that the US has incredibly large land mass with sparse populations and challenging weather conditions (tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, etc.). This is where something like starlink et. competitors can provide a much better cost per outcome benefit. The challenge is how to bring the cost down for the benefit of rural areas on lower incomes. As it stands right now its pretty expensive for lower-mid income demographic to swallow price wise.
- saltyshake 6y agoWouldn't the Skylink latency be too high for video chat?
- thebean11 6y agoInternet providers bring in insane amounts of cash and deploy as little of it as possible. If you ban infrastructure improvements in one place I doubt they deploy that money elsewhere. If the other project were profitable they would have done both to begin with.