[whistl034]

I think solving the "last mile" problem in the US is our greatest problem, especially in rural areas. Too many state and local governments have been paid off by lobbyists to pass laws to block any competition from offering cheaper and better options.

Too many people are stuck with slow, expensive, and unreliable cable and/or DSL ISPs. Some have no choice whatsoever. Some others get to choose only from two equally awful options. We need legally available competition EVERYWHERE.

[jrockway]

I think it's a problem even in urban areas. A friend of mine is working on something called Flume: https://www.flumeinternet.com/ Their funding model (at least right now) is basically to serve customers where the government will pay for it. Many of their customers are getting home broadband for the first time in their life. (They remark that it's fun when their friends come over and they can give them the wifi password.) This is all happening in New York City; some people are getting Internet access for the first time in their lives, in the largest city in the richest country in the world.

I can only imagine how fucked rural America is.

[bick_nyers]

What I don't quite understand is how these rural areas got electricity. If it's so expensive to run something to a rural area, who ate the cost of providing grid access? Or is cable/fiber just significantly more expensive per mile compared to electricity?

[duped]

The federal government ate the cost. FDR passed the Rural Electrification Act in 1935 as a part of the New Deal, which gave large loans to fund electrifying rural parts of America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Utilities_Service

[richbhanover]

As another poster noted, the Feds funded a lot of the cost of electrification. There is starting to be some action on the internet front. But...

Here are the economics for a fiber optics deployment in 2021 for a rural town of ~800 premises, where about 60% got service. They charge customers about $100/month for symmetric 75/75mbps internet plus phone.

It costs about $40K per mile to run the fiber down the road on existing utility poles. It costs between $2K and $4K to run the drop from the utility pole to the home.

Those two numbers (miles of road, number of premises) get you in the ballpark of the cost of deployment in a town/county. More premises per mile obviously decreases the cost per premise - that's why utilities prefer dense areas (cities).

[withinboredom]

Many areas in the US still don’t. I remember living on a farm as a child, circa 1998, and our neighbors had no power or running water. It wasn’t lack of wanting it, “the money just ran out.” This was the mountains of Virginia, near Roanoke.

[adventured]

> Many areas in the US still don’t.

In the scale of the US, that's a blatantly false statement.

It's < 50,000 people out of 330 million. Or less than 0.02% of the population. Most of that is because they're living in quite isolated locations far from any population.

The figure is so high the WorldBank lists the US at 100% access to electricity with all the other affluent nations. Brazil is at 99.8% for reference, Vietnam is 99.4%, India is 97.8%.

[withinboredom]

Many, as in numerous.

Areas, as in places you can live.

I wasn’t saying it was whole chunks of the country. Just that there are many places, not necessarily in the same place and not necessarily enough for anyone to care about. The latter kind of being the problem…

[nopenopenopeno]

The New Deal electrified America.

[namibj]

No, fiber is actually significantly cheaper.

[sjg007]

They formed cooperatives.

[jsz0]

As a society we had a much higher tolerance for risk when the electrical grid was being built. We were perfectly fine with the idea some people would die building it and some people would get electrocuted using it. The world we live in now has much lower tolerance for risk. You can't even screw a wall mount bracket in without carrying liability insurance.

[JaimeThompson]

A major reason for needing to have so much liability insurance in the United States is the insane cost of our medical care.

[na85]

Society's risk tolerance varies with domain. Electrical power systems are well understood and thus we expect them to be as safe as practical.

Contrast that to the reaction to Tesla's autopilot that will happily drive you into an embankment at fatal speeds.

[BlueTemplar]

Electric power systems are much more dangerous than communication networks.

[na85]

... and?

[iamstupidsimple]

Unfortunately that problem space is so large (every new line of fibre has how many stakeholders?) that a single individual or organisation might not be able to have any impact here. Which I think is the root of this question.

[tbrownaw]

If there's above-ground electricity, there should be rules about getting pole access. And from what I understand those poles, and anything underground, work by getting easements rather than negotiating separately with every individual property owner.

[SuoDuanDao]

Fibre op engineer (Canadain) here - there are rules, but those are a double edged sword; the proper paperwork to get on a pole is a large part of the total cost to attach. Ever see the mess of cables in a developing country? The laxer rules that lead to those tangles substantially reduces the cost of building out internet.

[dtaht]

The director of the NTIA $70B broadband expansion program is taking questions wednesday in a fireside chat.

https://discuss.broadband.money/c/broadband-grant-events/ala...

[snarfy]

It might be our greatest problem, but it's not a technical problem.