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Lucky them. Since the late 1990's, the internet speed at my parent's house in Alabama has gone from 38.8kbps to... 38.8kbps. The house is in the sticks, in a bo
by simoncion 13y ago
Lucky them. Since the late 1990's, the internet speed at my parent's house in Alabama has gone from 38.8kbps to... 38.8kbps. The house is in the sticks, in a bowl, served by ancient, poorly maintained telephone and cable lines.
The future has been here for decades (see South Korea, or much of Europe, or...), it's just very unevenly distributed.
- rayiner 13y agoOne of the things that led to the current situation is municipalities granting favorable franchise agreements to get companies to serve places like that which the market wouldn't have served to begin with. I don't think we want more of that. The future is here, in the U.S. too: http://www.akamai.com/dl/documents/akamai_soti_q213.pdf?WT.mc_id=soti_Q213 http://www.akamai.com/dl/documents/akamai_soti_q213.pdf?WT.m... (see page 13). The U.S. ranks 8th in average connection speeds. It can't compete obviously with places like South Korea, where half the whole country lives in the Seoul metro area, but is better than much of Europe.
- simoncion 13y agoI agree that we don't want to provide favorable terms to companies who aren't interested in managing telecommunications infrastructure as a public utility. I've heard the population density argument, before. It's bunk. If it wasn't, we would expect to see reasonably priced 100mbit+ residential fiber service in NYC, SFO, SEA, and other densely populated metro areas. Instead, we see somewhat reasonably priced 1gbit residential service in Chattanooga, TN (1/10th SFO's population, and 1/20th NYC's), wherever Google deigns to pick a fight, and places like Sebastapol, CA (with a population just under 8,000 people).