|
|
|
|
|
|
by toast0
1668 days ago
|
|
|
Is your dad's place in a city? If so, your city may have a franchise agreement with local telecom providers that compel them to service any residential address in the city. If he's not in a city, there may be a county franchise agreement, although those are less likely to compel service at every address. When you say the community he's living in, if that's an apartment community or some senior living community or condominum etc, those may be setup with a company or group ownership of the land and some of the structures, in which case it's really up to that management as to what telecom companies they accept and can get to provide services and under what terms. But no, there's no general compulsory universal service for internet. You're closer to that for telephone and electricity. I don't think there are any areas in the US where there's competitive residential telephone wiring and there are few places with competitive cable wiring; it's capital intensive to network an area and it's hard to get a return on investment unless it attracts a lot of customers and it's hard to get people to switch if their current service is ok (or will be updated to be ok in response to another network overbuilding) Depending on the size and composition of the community, it might be sensible to get a commercial internet connection and share it within the community, but that's probably a sizable effort as well. |
|
|
The Universal Service Fund has been supplying funds for broadband deployment for decades. However, ISPs have a long history of pocketing those funds without the promised deployments (eg:Frontier@WV,Verizon@PA) - usually w/o meaningful consequences, due to regulatory capture.