3 ms·

F'ing poor people...

• rayiner 13y ago
  There's no free lunch. U.S. cities are geographically the most suitable for deploying things like fiber, but are for historical reasons also much poorer than the surrounding, less dense suburbs. In the U.S., "dense == poor" in a way that is just much less true in Europe. This creates not just an inhospitable geography for telecom providers, but also a very different political climate. American cities are battlegrounds for class issues, as anyone living in San Francisco knows. That makes it very hard to build infrastructure concentrated in the cities. It's not just telecom, look at passenger rail. Amtrak runs a profit in the northeast corridor, but runs at a loss everywhere else because most of the country simply isn't suitable for rail. Yet, it's politically impossible to have an objective of focusing money and effort building a modern high-speed rail network for the northeast, where it makes sense, and abandoning the networks elsewhere.