IT Professionals

Broadband Adoption Rises, Matt Snores At Provided Numbers

Posted by on Jul 3, 2007 | 12 Comments

It’s the year 2007 and you will still find many rural areas continue to get the shaft with regard to broadband access. So you’ll excuse me when I yawn in response to lame articles like this one stating the same old industry nonsense. We see regulation restricting any kind of grassroots efforts to bring in community based wifi to rural areas where ISPs choose not to spend the money for expanded service. It’s lame and frankly, the previous article would have been a more worthwhile read had this been more closely examined. What really kills me is how countries like India are managing to out-pace our rural efforts at an alarming speed. Great for that region, but as a first world nation, our true broadband reach is actually quite pathetic.

On the upside, if you do some searching, it appears that things are improving. Then again, we still have a ways to go. What’s sad is that when you are being told that DSL is available in your area, its availability is a crap shoot dependent on your actual location.

Do you live in a ‘rural’ area? If so, how readily available is broadband in your neighborhood? Hit the comments section and tell us about it.

[tags]broadband,internet[/tags]

  • Louie

    I live in Prescott AZ. The area is considered rural. The broadband carrier is Commspeed and it’s at a guess 99% available. The area has mountains at about 7000 ft and they use microwave towers to link from the home to the network. Realiabilty has been 98%.

  • Robert Francis

    Matt, I live just 10 miles from the first American,” Electronic Village”,
    Blacksburg, VA.

    I have NO access to high speed service, short of Satellite, which I consider to be too expensive.

    My dial-up service is lucky to provide a connection of 28800, that’s on a good day. It’s usually 26400.

    What really makes me mad is, if I lived in Baghdad, (god forbid), I would have, provided by my tax money, high speed service.

    Bob

  • David Jordan

    Hello Matt,
    You are not alone. The UK has the same problem as a lot of our telephone infrastructure is still based on copper. I am yet to get ADSL2 at our local exchange, but an upgrade late last year did give me a 4MB dowload and 512KB upload pipe, so things are gradually improving.
    However, no more than 5 miles away one of my friends is limited to a 512Kb connection, admittedly better than the dial he used to use, but not quite up to the 1MB minimum to every home that has been promised!!
    By the way I live in rural Somerset in England.

  • Josh

    I live in rural Virginia, about 50 miles south of Washington, DC. Where I live, broadband is simply not available. It’s either 28k8 dialup or satellite. My satellite connection, while only high speed, not broadband, actually costs less then dialup plus a 2nd phone line did and is 20 times faster.

    DSL may be available if you live close enough to the Verizon’s central office and your phone line happens to support it and there is a cable modem service available in limited selected parts of the county but over 90% of the county is stuck with dialup.

    We may eventually, within a few years, have a microwave wireless connection available, but it won’t be any faster than satellite and costs the same ($50/month for 500k down/50-100k up).

  • John Clark

    I’ve had DSL from AT&T for about 3 years…however I live 2 1/2 miles from the phone office so my speed is half of what I am paying for. I checked on satellite but it’s about $20 per month too high. There is also a wireless internet provider in our area but he’s about $20 too high for the speed he provides. Sooo I will have to go cable which is about $7.50 per month higher than the DSL connection I have now. When will the satellite providers wake up that they could reduce their prices by $20 per month and double their customers?

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/microface Steven C. leach

    I live ina rather rural area of the foothills of california about 1 hr from sacramento. While the main town has had wireless, and wired 1 megabyte/sec for the last 7 years, I have just been able to get DSL for only 3 years, after PACBell was forced to put in a new exchange when teh area where I live 20 minutes from the town kept growing and outpaced the exchange point. However there are people who live no more than 5 minutes from me in the same development who still have no DSL !!! I now several people who subsit on ISDN, because their companies must have internet access, and most of the phone lines around here provide no better than 40 Kbitd/sec, that’s how bad the phone lines are.
    The cable option is also non existant, since COMCAST bought the cable provider they have raised prices every year, and have still not provided any cable options in this local development that is about 40 minutes from a large city with massive malls called Roseville.
    So no matter what the telcos, and cable providers tell anyone , my response is always they never provide anything unless they are forced to, or unless there is a lot of money involved.
    I keep asking my congress person John Doolittle to force, mandate, whatever they want to call it, to force these money grubbing companies to provide service, but no response for the last 3 years, for my friends who live only 5 minutes away. But alas there are only 300 – 500 famalies, so who knows how long they will have to wait.

  • http://www.members.cox.net/mdn7779/rightclick/rccs.htm Mike N.

    Ironically, I don’t live in a rural area, but if you live one block out of the city limits of Manhattan, KS. you will be considered rural. I had one customer that tried and tried to get high speed access and it took almost a year to get connected to Earthlink DSL. The funny thing is (not really that funny if you think about it) cable runs right by their property. Cox cable would not connect to them without a $7,000 fee. They were furious, and do you blame them? I just could not understand their thinking, well . . . . well yes, if you thank about it, Cox wanted them to pay for some of the costs of running cable to additions further out in the country. I told them the next time they want access to their property to work on the lines, tell them you charge 7 grand per pop, and I was serious.

  • Peter K

    I live in the Niagara peninsula roughly 2 km from a fibre line which our local elementary school uses but one can’t access it unless you are leasing a T1 or something to that order. We have been promised by our local Bell that dsl would expand in our area for the fast 5 years and we do pay an expansion fee as part of our monthly phone bill too. Satellite and wireless are both available for the usual $500-2000.00 setup and installation plus $50.00-65.00 per month, two friends with a wireless offering from Millenium Data Service is a bad joke with Monday-Friday 9-5 support for their service which drops repeatedly plus they are not allowed a software firewall on their end.

    I’m looking forward to expansion from an outfit which uses the Motorola Canopy service, and another which plugs wireless subscribers into a cable service.

  • Brian James

    I live in Midlothian, TX about 25 sw of Dallas. AT&T has DSL directly across the street from me but not on my side. Dialup at best limped along at 28.8K. The local cable (Charter) indicates they have digital service to the neighborhood but doesn’t provide broadband. There are 2 wireless providers (microwave) of which I’ve tried both. One couldn’t provide reliable service, the other is somewhat better. For $50/month, I get 2 email addresses and “up to” 1.5Mb down and 512K up. It amazes me that as advanced and powerful as this country is that we can lag so far behind so many developing nations in this particular area of communication for the masses.

  • Keith Nevil

    I live in Boise, Idaho. When leaving the dial-up world over 5 yrs. ago, I was researching alternatives. I was told that DSL was not to be had in my little piece of the world, but would be available soon. I elected to go with cable and have never been happier(except for the cost). Yesterday I decided to see if DSL had finally made it here. Surprise! Not yet! But soon, it still says. Here we are, home base to Micron, big presence of HP, etc., and only 1 mile from downtown and still no DSL? WTF? Others in the neighborhood I’ve spoken with that don’t already recieve cablevision (hence the cost of cable would also require that they also have cable TV), have little choice but to go to satelite, wireless (like ClearWire) or stay with dial-up. Who is dropping the ball around here?

  • Paul V

    Matt,
    I live in a small town, in the UK. I have a choice of Cable with Branson’s Virgin, at up to 10Mb, and ASDL phone & copper based connectivity, up to 8Mb, so I can’t complain. A friend lives just 3 houses (75 metres) outside of the town boundary, in an adjacent village, and has no chance of getting Cable, for the forseeable future. Fortunately, he can get ASDL. Another friend gets only low speed ASDL, in a more remote situation.
    There is no defined development plan for getting everybody connected, in the UK. It’s a postcode lottery!

  • Benoit Davignon

    I live 30 minutes from downtown Montreal Province of Quebec in Canada. I am on the south shore of the St-Laurent river. Bell and the cable companies are not intersted in modernizing their network in the rurar area pretending that it’s not profitable for them. Forgetting that they are a public service and that the internet is becoming a must for most enterprises and individuals.