4 ms·

It's popular in rural areas where people don't have fast enough Internet to stream movies. And/or, they can't afford Internet speeds that fast. Not a demographi

It's popular in rural areas where people don't have fast enough Internet to stream movies. And/or, they can't afford Internet speeds that fast. Not a demographic you're going to see represented on HN much, but a lot of the US (by geography, not population) doesn't have fast-enough Internet for Netflix without it being choppy. Tried to show my Dad a funny Youtube video when I visited him on his farm and it was so choppy it was basically unwatchable

CPLX 2y ago
Probably a little more accurate to say that they can’t afford internet at all, due to poor credit or a long prior stream of unpaid bills with the internet provider.
- remlov 2y ago
  That's a nonsensical reach. The United States, especially in rural areas have internet access that is considered laughable and has nothing to do with their financial situation.
  - CPLX 2y ago
    I have observed this effect directly in real life. If life circumstances get away from you and you get to the point where the one provider wired to your area, like spectrum say, gets turned off for non payment after months of ignored bills, you may well find yourself without any plausible path to have the resources to turn it back on. All it takes is a life based on something like shift or manual work and a medical or family crisis. People really have no idea what life is actually like in most of this country it seems.
    - caustic-view 2y ago
      [flagged]
- datavirtue 2y ago
  Way off base.
- genewitch 2y ago
  And now i get to diatribe, even though i laughed at your other comment. I have at&t fixed wireless. Until tomorrow - at&t is discontinuing it; as they discontinued copper ADSL, as they discontinued pre-paid ipad SIM cards, they now discontinue wireless uverse. The replacement product "isn't available in my area" and probably won't ever be, there's just not enough towers to support the speed metric they want. I have starlink, but i live in the middle of a national forest and there's no place to put the dish where it doesn't have service interruptions. It's great for downloading things, but awful at nearly everything else, such as realtime communication, quickly looking things up via a series of browser tabs, and online gaming. My only other option is hughesnet; and i don't consider 1500ms ping times and severe 2000s era bandwidth caps and speeds to really be an option. T-mo doesn't have penetration for "wireless home internet", nor verizon, i have tried both. There's 3+ fiber runs along the highway near my house (highway in name only!). One is a backhaul for centurylink - no consumer access. Another is Suddenlink - they got a tax benefit for running fiber to public schools, and are not tapping the lines for any consumers. at&t has the third line, but they want $15,000 for a loop, and at the time i was researching it, at&t wanted ~$1,200/mo for 1gbit and $8900 for 10gbit. Fortunately Optimum is currently running a fourth fiber line down the same highway, and my understanding is they charge $155 for 1gbit service. Currently, for the garbage internet service i have here, i am paying over $300/month. thankfully that gets reduced tomorrow, as i won't be able to get service from at&t even if i wanted to. As someone who could 40% utilize a gbit connection 24/7 at-will, this is extremely frustrating. The tradeoff is i live in a rainforest and 90% of the time there's no indication that other humans exist around here. ymmv, my FICO is available upon triplicate request.
  - m3047 2y ago
    This is funnily ironic. My broadband service <<as a pipe>> is very good. I saw a comment above from someone in Redmond regarding Comcast. I'm kind of "at two" with a lot of the cloud religion; I'm intimately aware that it's a first world problem and that the cloud as we know it is a North American / Western European phenomenon. Sure, talk to anyone anywhere in the world and "the cloud is great" but it doesn't mean the same thing when the nearest cloudy datacenter is 500 miles and an international border away. Or even in Eastern Washington State. I had two internet feeds until last year. One was DSL, with two fixed IPv4 addresses; the other was broadband. The DSL had some advantages, although throughput was not one of them. A couple of years ago some meth head cut the cable head (right down to the ground! a couple pounds of copper??) out of a punchdown box by the side of the road. CenturyLink fixed it, but I think it was the beginning of the end. Last year they gave notice that copper line service could stop at any time without notice and wouldn't be restored. Luckily the local option broadband operator (who leases a /17 from the City, we'll get to that) decided to make an offer that was too good to be true at about that time: $116/mo for 500mbit and two free fixed addresses to go with it. Unfortunately Rainier Connect / Lightcurve can't competently operate reverse DNS, preferring to impersonate the lessor's /16 rather than configure 128 /24s. The PTR space is littered with defunct resolutions for customers they have lost. And the lessor, the City of Tacoma, won't accept email from their own address space so there's nobody to complain to. I've manage to shame / embarrass Lightcurve enough that they fixed some other egregious issues. For some silly reason (besides the fact that I offer a TCP table plugin for Postfix which supports nontrivial aliases) I want email-at-rest to be on computers which I own on premises I own, and proper reverse DNS is necessary for that. In conclusion, even in the first world with a cloudy datacenter virtually down the street the necessary business predicates to correct technical implementation and operation aren't universally present. If you look hard at the cloud and squint you can see it there, too.
- DangitBobby 2y ago
  From this article [1] written in 2019, I have gleaned that of the 27% of the Americans that do not pay for broadband, 50% say that cost is a factor and 21% say cost is THE factor. I can agree that the costs are ridiculous (Comcast keeps raising my prices), but that isn't exactly the same thing as "being unable to afford it". 22% say it's because service is not available (or unacceptable) and 7% say that's the only reason. I didn't have broadband until I moved out (this was long after broadband was widely available), dial-up was the only option because AT&T never bothered to install the equipment that would enable DSL for our address. Today, 15 years later, their only options aside from dial-up are cellular data plans and satellite Internet, which are sub-par, prohibitively expensive, or both. 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/06/13/mobile-technology-and-home-broadband-2019/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/06/13/mobile-techn...
smileysteve 2y ago
To the contrary it worked pretty well in the city, esp with $0.50 deals and transit commutes; I could grab a movie and groceries after work and walk my 3 blocks to my apartment. I thought it might work well in a small town, but they required 10k daily people foot traffic to qualify for a kiosk
- hash872 2y ago
  I see them in small towns all over that absolutely do not have 10k in daily people foot traffic, including the town that I grew up in. So that cannot be accurate
tomcam 2y ago
I live in a rural area known as Redmond, WA, where Comcast is unable to furnish consistent Internet access. It is also home to Microsoft, though that part of Redmond isn’t rural. I live a full 6 miles from Microsoft HQ.
datavirtue 2y ago
Also popular with rippers.
- weard_beard 2y ago
  No, sir, that is what your local public library is for. Redbox doesn't have the entire criterion collection.

CPLX 2y ago

Probably a little more accurate to say that they can’t afford internet at all, due to poor credit or a long prior stream of unpaid bills with the internet provider.

remlov 2y ago
That's a nonsensical reach. The United States, especially in rural areas have internet access that is considered laughable and has nothing to do with their financial situation.
- CPLX 2y ago
  I have observed this effect directly in real life. If life circumstances get away from you and you get to the point where the one provider wired to your area, like spectrum say, gets turned off for non payment after months of ignored bills, you may well find yourself without any plausible path to have the resources to turn it back on. All it takes is a life based on something like shift or manual work and a medical or family crisis. People really have no idea what life is actually like in most of this country it seems.
  - caustic-view 2y ago
    [flagged]
datavirtue 2y ago
Way off base.
genewitch 2y ago
And now i get to diatribe, even though i laughed at your other comment. I have at&t fixed wireless. Until tomorrow - at&t is discontinuing it; as they discontinued copper ADSL, as they discontinued pre-paid ipad SIM cards, they now discontinue wireless uverse. The replacement product "isn't available in my area" and probably won't ever be, there's just not enough towers to support the speed metric they want. I have starlink, but i live in the middle of a national forest and there's no place to put the dish where it doesn't have service interruptions. It's great for downloading things, but awful at nearly everything else, such as realtime communication, quickly looking things up via a series of browser tabs, and online gaming. My only other option is hughesnet; and i don't consider 1500ms ping times and severe 2000s era bandwidth caps and speeds to really be an option. T-mo doesn't have penetration for "wireless home internet", nor verizon, i have tried both. There's 3+ fiber runs along the highway near my house (highway in name only!). One is a backhaul for centurylink - no consumer access. Another is Suddenlink - they got a tax benefit for running fiber to public schools, and are not tapping the lines for any consumers. at&t has the third line, but they want $15,000 for a loop, and at the time i was researching it, at&t wanted ~$1,200/mo for 1gbit and $8900 for 10gbit. Fortunately Optimum is currently running a fourth fiber line down the same highway, and my understanding is they charge $155 for 1gbit service. Currently, for the garbage internet service i have here, i am paying over $300/month. thankfully that gets reduced tomorrow, as i won't be able to get service from at&t even if i wanted to. As someone who could 40% utilize a gbit connection 24/7 at-will, this is extremely frustrating. The tradeoff is i live in a rainforest and 90% of the time there's no indication that other humans exist around here. ymmv, my FICO is available upon triplicate request.
- m3047 2y ago
  This is funnily ironic. My broadband service <<as a pipe>> is very good. I saw a comment above from someone in Redmond regarding Comcast. I'm kind of "at two" with a lot of the cloud religion; I'm intimately aware that it's a first world problem and that the cloud as we know it is a North American / Western European phenomenon. Sure, talk to anyone anywhere in the world and "the cloud is great" but it doesn't mean the same thing when the nearest cloudy datacenter is 500 miles and an international border away. Or even in Eastern Washington State. I had two internet feeds until last year. One was DSL, with two fixed IPv4 addresses; the other was broadband. The DSL had some advantages, although throughput was not one of them. A couple of years ago some meth head cut the cable head (right down to the ground! a couple pounds of copper??) out of a punchdown box by the side of the road. CenturyLink fixed it, but I think it was the beginning of the end. Last year they gave notice that copper line service could stop at any time without notice and wouldn't be restored. Luckily the local option broadband operator (who leases a /17 from the City, we'll get to that) decided to make an offer that was too good to be true at about that time: $116/mo for 500mbit and two free fixed addresses to go with it. Unfortunately Rainier Connect / Lightcurve can't competently operate reverse DNS, preferring to impersonate the lessor's /16 rather than configure 128 /24s. The PTR space is littered with defunct resolutions for customers they have lost. And the lessor, the City of Tacoma, won't accept email from their own address space so there's nobody to complain to. I've manage to shame / embarrass Lightcurve enough that they fixed some other egregious issues. For some silly reason (besides the fact that I offer a TCP table plugin for Postfix which supports nontrivial aliases) I want email-at-rest to be on computers which I own on premises I own, and proper reverse DNS is necessary for that. In conclusion, even in the first world with a cloudy datacenter virtually down the street the necessary business predicates to correct technical implementation and operation aren't universally present. If you look hard at the cloud and squint you can see it there, too.
DangitBobby 2y ago
From this article [1] written in 2019, I have gleaned that of the 27% of the Americans that do not pay for broadband, 50% say that cost is a factor and 21% say cost is THE factor. I can agree that the costs are ridiculous (Comcast keeps raising my prices), but that isn't exactly the same thing as "being unable to afford it". 22% say it's because service is not available (or unacceptable) and 7% say that's the only reason. I didn't have broadband until I moved out (this was long after broadband was widely available), dial-up was the only option because AT&T never bothered to install the equipment that would enable DSL for our address. Today, 15 years later, their only options aside from dial-up are cellular data plans and satellite Internet, which are sub-par, prohibitively expensive, or both. 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/06/13/mobile-technology-and-home-broadband-2019/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/06/13/mobile-techn...

smileysteve 2y ago

To the contrary it worked pretty well in the city, esp with $0.50 deals and transit commutes; I could grab a movie and groceries after work and walk my 3 blocks to my apartment. I thought it might work well in a small town, but they required 10k daily people foot traffic to qualify for a kiosk

hash872 2y ago
I see them in small towns all over that absolutely do not have 10k in daily people foot traffic, including the town that I grew up in. So that cannot be accurate

tomcam 2y ago

I live in a rural area known as Redmond, WA, where Comcast is unable to furnish consistent Internet access. It is also home to Microsoft, though that part of Redmond isn’t rural. I live a full 6 miles from Microsoft HQ.

datavirtue 2y ago

Also popular with rippers.

weard_beard 2y ago
No, sir, that is what your local public library is for. Redbox doesn't have the entire criterion collection.