[msandford]

I guess part of it is that there's the idea here in the US that everyone should have access to certain things like power, water, telephone, etc. There are a lot of universal service laws about these utilities and the internet is fast becoming another utility.

Worse is that with the internet you have to be hooked up to the central grid or else it's useless. A farmer in a rural part of Kansas who's tired of not getting enough electricity from the electricity company (not a fast enough connection) and paying power overages (bandwidth caps) has alternatives like solar, or buying a generator or whatever.

But when your internet isn't fast enough you can't just install 10gig copper in your house and solve the problem. Install your 10gig until you've got terabits of bandwidth all over your farm; you still can't use it in what most people would call a meaningful way to interact with the rest of the world.

The idea that some states have good broadband and others have terrible broadband and that this is acceptable is an oft-argued point especially once you take population density into account. And it's not a bad argument. The economics are completely real.

But once you try and make an analogy to power or water or telephone it gets a little easier to see why some folks might be up in arms.

[harryh]

Without power or water your basic standard of living drops significantly. Without high speed internet you....don't get netflix?

I don't really see why lumping all these things together in the same category makes sense.

[tehwalrus]

Without the internet you cannot function well in the economy - many many deals (including those for utility companies as well as retailers) are only available either online, or if you found them online and then mentioned them in the shop/on the phone.

The internet is an information network that gives consumers nearly perfect information about price; which translates to a much more ideal market (in economic jargon,) which is much more efficient. It is essentially a utility, if people without it are at a significant economic disadvantage like that.

[harryh]

You conveniently left out the words "high speed." Everything you talk about can be done just fine even on the mediocre broadband speeds that people in this thread are complaining about.

[scrollaway]

"high speed" can be swapped out for "high quality" in this context.

Spotty connectivity, packet loss, frequent disconnects - all things that come with shoddy internet infrastructure. High speed generally means higher quality.

And let's not forget that even just for work the internet is not only used to send plaintext emails. We video chat, we work with crappy bandwidth-hungry web apps, and those are just the smaller of the hungrier things we can do. At my work I have to download tens of gigabytes of foreign data every few days.

And as someone who works at home and manages a work-entertainment schedule to keep sane, it's pretty pathetic to see people try to squeeze out an "Admit it! You just want a faster netflix!" from others. So what if they do? If you compare internet access to access to drinking water, then high speed internet access is drinking water that doesn't taste like piss. Just because you can live off it doesn't mean it's pleasant.

[jedberg]

I can make a living with my water off. I can't with my internet off.

[harryh]

How fast does your internet have to be for you to do your job?

[nitrogen]

Naturally, at least as fast as the other guy or gal competing for the same job.

[harryh]

If all you're doing is moving text around then faster internet isn't going to help any. Unless you're streaming video or doing a few other high bandwidth activities then even really shitty broadband is going to service your needs just fine.

[raarts]

Nobody is only moving text around, occasionally (how often depends on the type of work) you need to move a lot of data. In that case a low speed connection stops you in your tracks.

[Roboprog]

So you've not had to do a big code pull from source control or something like Maven or the "Go-lang" builder?

Being done in a few seconds is much more fun (and productive) than being done in a few minutes.

[nitrogen]

But who just moves text around? Work frequently requires the use of Hangouts, Skype, GoToMeeting, Dropbox, etc. If you have to work through a VPN, the latency added by poor service is a serious drain on productivity.