
The Worst Internet in America - nafizh
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-worst-internet-in-america/
======
birdman3131
I used to live in Saguache County as a kid. We left in 2000 but this article
does not surprise me. it is hard to adequately get across how desolate it was
up there but i'll try.

We had 40 acres of land and were considered city slickers because 40 acres was
enough for 1-2 cows. We were friends with people with 25k acres.

The ground was sand. 10 foot down was sand. You could water plants 3 times a
day and they would still run out of water. (My mom fixed this with lots of
silca gel for her garden.)

We lived on a county road and the postal service would not deliver mail closer
that 2 miles away. We never did put up a mailbox and instead just had a PO box
in Moffat which was about 8 miles of gravel roads away.

Annual rainfall is less than the Sahara dessert and temps would hit -40F in
the winter. Some days would see 70F difference between day and night.

Walmart was 40 miles away (Alamosa in one direction and Salida in the other.)

In parts there are no trees for miles. We had ~30 trees by our house. The next
ones were at another house 1/4 mile away and I believe the next were 2 miles
away.

Our phone system used an antenna that looked like the old tv arials and was
solar with a battery on it. (96/97 era.) We had that for about a year before
the phone company decided they needed the system more in alaska and would lay
phone line for free rather than charging us $6k to run the lines half a mile.
Then they waited a year to come get out system. The battery on it would
routinely run out in the middle of a call.

~~~
manmal
Wow that sounds hard. Have you ever considered founding a utilities company
yourself and lay those lines for you and your neighbors? I have no idea how
easy or hard that would have been.

~~~
sgt101
You need access to capital to do that, and if you have access to capital you
probably aren't in a place that considers 2 cows as wealthy.

~~~
Ensorceled
They were "city slickers" because they _only_ had _two_ cows (or, more likely,
only had enough land for two) where as everybody else had many, many more.

City slicker isn't an insult that means "rich" by the way, it means from the
city and hence not willing do a hard day's work, dresses too nice and is not
trustworthy.

~~~
birdman3131
For us it was not really an insult. It was poking fun at us but it was not
meant in a bad way. Not to say it could not be meant as one though.

~~~
Ensorceled
I know what you mean, my family calls me a city slicker and that's how they
intend it as well.

I hope ...

------
i_feel_great
That page shows the worst use of the internet in the world. 15.88 MB in size
according to Firefox. And unintuitive gimmick navigation to boot. How does
doing something like that help convey the message?

~~~
zkms
This seems like an extraneous tetchy comment but I don't think it is. Extant
slow internet connections would be a lot more usable if websites weren't full
of video/audio adverts, trackers, and JS being used for stuff (displaying
text/images or doing some awful and slow scrolling) that browsers do well
natively.

Try using the internet (beyond HN or gmail or pinboard) on a mediocre internet
connection without any adblocker or noscript-equivalent. It gets nasty very
fast.

To be fair, this isn't a justification for not building out better last-mile
links -- just like, the miserable state of residential internet connections in
the US is made a lot worse by awful bloated websites. [https://danluu.com/web-
bloat/](https://danluu.com/web-bloat/) and
[http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)
are good reads on this.

~~~
Tenshiri
I may be wrong, but wouldn't the full "suite" of privacy tools, like uBlock,
Privacy Badger, etc actually speed up these connections based on this?

------
Smaug123
That page has a bad case of terrible website design. When I scroll down, I
expect bits of image not to zoom in from the left. I nearly closed the page
before even getting to the headline. They've also somehow made space bar not
scroll as far as it does on other websites (in Safari), so every time I scroll
down I spend a second searching for where I ended up.

At least there's only two locations of awful design during the adventure that
is scrolling. Once you reach the headline, there's only one really unintuitive
bit further down the page (a map of the USA), and that bit is short.

~~~
drxzcl
I could not read it on my iPad in landscape mode. Worked fine in portrait
orientation. I don't know why.

~~~
macintux
I switched to Reader. Looked like landscape could work if you were patient
enough, but it was painful.

------
randyrand
> if a household wants a download speed of 12 Mbps with an upload speed of 2
> Mbps, they can expect to pay a whopping $90.

This is the worst internet in america? Wow. That is amazing! I'm incredibly
impressed at how fast the worst place for internet in america is.

In highschool (Class of 2011) I dealt with 5 mbps just because my parents
didn't want to pay for more. It was tolerable as long as you didn't want to
watch youtube in HD. Honestly, I have little sympathy for people with 12mbps.

~~~
ajmurmann
As others have pointed out websites have gotten much larger for no good
reason. The article we all just read is apparently over 18MB. My internet also
used to be much slower than what people in that town can have. However, the
internet was optimised for that.

~~~
randyrand
Huge article even by today's standards. So the article would load in ~10
seconds under 12mbps, and thats assuming they don't have asynchronous
progressive loading of larger images and such. - which i think they do.

Not really a big inconvenience IMO.

------
EliRivers
Serious question from someone who flinches at living more than ten minutes'
walk from a train station and won't rent anything that doesn't have a
crackerjack shower with painfully hot water and enough pressure to bruise, and
an internet connection that sees less than a few minutes degraded service a
year (although for speed, I actually don't demand that much - I'm happy with a
couple of megabytes per second); why do people live there?

That's a genuine question; not "why" as said to imply that there is no reason.
There must be reasons. I just don't know what they are.

Not generalities, please. I'm interested in first-hand information from people
who actually live or lived there. Did you move to such a place? Why? What's
the economy based on? Does it generate enough money to be self-sustaining, or
does it exist through inertia? In areas with such low density of people, what
jobs exist? Is it all farming or other such? How many people living there
might actually like to move, but can't?

~~~
darkstar999
Farming and ranching. Case closed.

Also, the rural population has quite a different culture than what you are
used to. They don't _crave_ internet. Some of them likely ask the same thing
about your culture. Why do you like living so close to each other? Everything
is so fast and overwhelming.

~~~
EliRivers
"Farming and ranching. Case closed."

Is it? Are you a farmer or rancher? Why's it necessary to live so remotely? Is
it not possible for a town to support farming and ranching? Is it necessary
for everyone involved to live so remotely? Given the huge areas involved,
living on the farm/ranch makes you local to one small part of it but still
remote from all the rest, so why the need to live there?

"Why do you like living so close to each other?"

I don't, but it's the cost of having the things I do want. I want fast,
reliable, cheap internet. I want my other utilities to be reliable as well. I
want to be able to walk ten minutes to a mainline train station - it gives me
a lot of opportunities very easily, needing nothing more than train fare. The
density of people creates a lot of other opportunities; things that are wildly
uneconomical in low-density communities become viable. Range of jobs, range of
businesses for me to patronise, leisure opportunities. It's really about all
those opportunities, and the people that make them. When I want to learn
something, I just find a local class. If there isn't a local class, it's an
hour from my door on foot and by train to central London (and I don't even
live in a county adjacent to London), and there the opportunities increase by
another order of magnitude.

We don't (necessarily) like living close to each other; we like all the
opportunities that are created by that - economic and self-development - and
we like the many things that become economical in doing so (cheap, reliable
utilities and infrastructure and niche businesses and all the rest that I
mentioned above).

~~~
Aloha
Both Farming and Ranching require a sizable amount of land to be viable. It's
much more viable to live on the land you farm (or ranch on), than it is to
live in town. Beyond that, cities create higher land values that tend to make
farming or ranching non-viable.

That said, even rural towns are very underserved in the US.

------
Andrenid
I live in Melbourne, AU.. 4km from city centre, in a brand new high-rise
building. I pay AUD$80/mth for 8mbps down and 0.5mbps up over shitty copper
that dies every time it rains.

Pings are so bad lots of services like Netflix, YouTube, etc think I can't
connect and just give me "Check your internet" errors when I load, until I
refresh multiple times and get it to load.

Funnily enough, our rural areas have better net than us here. I own a farm in
the absolute middle of nowhere (region population of around 500) and it gets
solid 24/4 and some farms nearby who face a better direction for fixed
wireless get 50/8 (or something like that).

~~~
protomyth
My buddy outside Valley City ND (calling it a city was wildly optimistic) gets
1 gigabyte up 256mb down for USD$90. As you’ve said, it’s a bit more than a
rural / urban problem.

------
mrbill
My mother lives in rural Oklahoma, and her Internet connection (2-3Mbps/1Mbps
for $60 a month) is a WiMax antenna on the roof of her house, pointed at
another antenna on the water tower of the next town over.

It's not great, but it's the only option she has other than satellite
providers, and works well enough for Facebook, email, and online shopping.

~~~
jonah
My parents had dial up until about 2 years ago. On a good day, they'd get
28.8, but typically it was more like 14.4 kbps! When it rained and water got
in the phone lines, they got nothing at all. And yes, they'd try to get the
phone company to fix the lines often to no avail. They are only 20 minutes
from town but it's too far to get DSL or cable or anything like that and the
terrain is too hilly for fixed wireless which did become available in their
county four or five years ago.

They finally broke down and got satellite internet a couple years ago but it's
slow and expensive.

~~~
mrbill
When Mom was stuck with using a modem, I bought her a (literal) stack of USR
Courier v.Everything modems (cheap, since a lot of ISPs in Austin were
ditching dialup service around that time).

She had lightning hits and storms so often that I told her "if you try to dial
up and the modem isn't working, just unplug it, toss it in the trash, and plug
in the next one off the stack." Had to do this even with surge protection
inline for both power and phone line.

Only in the past couple of years have I been able to get an LTE phone signal
at her house (only while standing on the porch, not inside the building) and
that's from a tower a few miles away...

------
mtalantikite
"For around $30 a month, New York City internet providers offer basic packages
of 100 Mbps service."

I'd love to know where in NYC this service exists. I currently pay $60/month
for 50Mbps and often get half that speed in practice. My office Internet
service is even worse, it goes out 3-5 times a day and I've had maybe a dozen
techs come out to look at both spaces. They won't even let me use my own modem
because it's business Internet, which they charge 3x the price for.

I've looked for alternatives, but have never had any other option than over-
priced terrible service from Time Warner/Spectrum for the past decade.

------
contingo
The infomap "Broadband is still foreign to much of the U.S." shows high speed
internet largely confined to urban areas, as the article discusses. But large
swathes of North Dakota are deep green. What's the reason for that?

~~~
boomboomsubban
Oil money, North Dakota is the second largest producer of oil in the US. There
was no big announced project, just a large number of grants and tax cuts to
promote infrastructure investment. And, from the looks of it, a depressing
amount of the area without access are the reservations.

~~~
bachmeier
> a depressing amount of the area without access are the reservations.

I'm from North Dakota and went to high school on the Standing Rock
reservation. They have their own institutions and legal system, so it's not
surprising that they would have different coverage.

~~~
protomyth
Standing Rock also has to deal with two state governments.

------
mtl_usr
As a Canadian, this article sums up pretty well the internet situation in most
of the country, even in "urban" areas. Due to the "Canada is different"
mentality here, foreign, more efficient companies are forbidden from making
business here, leaving the market to a few local operators that have no
incentive to make the service any better. This leads to the country being
years later in terms of broadband technology compared to other western
countries. There is no excuse for that. Canadian tech is always pretty much a
crippled version of the same product from the United States at a higher price.
Even in hardware, the same MacBook is 1,799.00 $ in the US but 2,399.00 $ in
Canada.

Saguache County is in the same situation thanks to it's remote location, but I
bet you it'll get fixed far sooner than Canada's nonsense situation in term of
internet access. I hope the ambitious infrastructure plan the US has adopted
will somewhat cover the installation of better rural internet access.

------
kome
And that's why web developer should stop using JavaScript without reason and
use pure and clean HTML, CSS and well compressed images.

------
ambrop7
Assuming the page is from America, it seems quite close to the worst
considering I had to scroll through ~3 pages equivalent of weirdly
horizontally scrolling images while all but the sky of the images was obscured
by a cookie warning spanning 1/3 of the page (uncovering an equally large
subscription request after being dismissed).

------
qq66
Most of these articles about broadband access conflate Internet access with
broadband speeds. Yes, Internet access is basically a necessity in modern
life. However, 25Mbps download (which is the definition used) is absolutely
not.

~~~
rwallace
As I understand it, while the talk is about speed, the real issue is
reliability: in rural America if you try to get broadband, some of the time
you'll get a few megabits per second, which is enough to get by, but a good
deal of the time, your nominally broadband connection won't be delivering any
data at all.

------
Tepix
This is an interesting market for the upcoming broadband satellite internet by
Boeing, SpaceX, etc. They will provide low latency because they are in low
earth orbit.

~~~
vram22
Interesting, got any links about that? And do you know if it for the whole
world or only some parts of it?

------
dispo001
I applaud the comparison with electricity. This is almost exactly how I look
at it. I would compare Internet providers with utilities providing water,
roads, sewage and even the post.

To think at one time we had telegraph data lines that were little more than a
mud battery and a pole. The wire would run up the pole, go though a relay
switched by the previous pole and continue to the next pole where it would
switch its own relay. The mud battery provided very little power, just enough
to switch a relay but the technology was good enough to bridge almost
unlimited distance.

Without comparison with other services I would be tempted to argue my ISP
provides really great services. Its 75 Euro for 300 Mbit and the package comes
with a phone line and hundreds of channels of something called television.

However, when compared honestly with similar services their service is
terrible. People working there told me the entire network is ready to provide
1 Gbit to everyone and the employees don't know why they didn't make the
switch. I can easily guess why, I'm not willing to pay much more than 75 Euro,
3 times the speed wont bring in 3 times the money. What it will do is reveal
glitches in the network that would require fixing. If I remember correctly the
people who created the ISP were very passionate about the technology but ended
up selling the business. Not sure if that was related but if I was passionate
about my business but couldn't upgrade because of a hunger for money I would
get bored fast.

Using more of this rather ignorant guess work I started to ponder how an ideal
ISP should be implemented. What would it really cost? Which type of contract
is best for the network rather than the user or the provider?

Surprisingly, in some areas where big money hungry ISPs refused to deliver
services people had to rethink and do it themselves.

Like this one here!

[http://www.buergerbreitbandnetz.de/fernsehen-ueber-
glasfaser...](http://www.buergerbreitbandnetz.de/fernsehen-ueber-glasfaser-
fuer-nur-995-e-im-monat/)

The "Glasfaser – für nur 9,95 € im Monat" translates to fiber optic for 10
Euro (?!?)

My German almost isn't but from reading around I gathered they needed 65%
adoption but got 94%, each end user had to pay 1000 Euro in advance. 900 in
the form of a lone and 100 worth of shares.

To guess some numbers with that... 7 and a half years worth of 10 Euro/month
does seem to add up to 900 Euro while profit made after that should increase
the value of the investment. IOW, if it takes 20 years to repay the debt it
would work out just fine for the investor/customer.

Some quote from speedtest: "With an average Q2-Q3 2016 download speed
comparable to that in Bulgaria and Moldova, Germany’s fixed broadband is
slower than you might expect from Europe’s largest economy. At 40.38 Mbps,
Germany ranks 29th in the world for average fixed broadband download speed and
72nd for average upload."

A different page mentions: "Expect a 35€ bill on average for a broad-brand
connection"

Most important to keep in mind, the big ISPs refused to service the area. It
makes a great proof of concept. (Assuming buergerbreitbandnetz delivers 1
Gbps) in this worse case scenario 10/35 buys 1000/40.38 times the bandwidth.
Or 29% of the cost for 2476% of the service. Or the 2 figured combined their
service is 8438% better than the conventional urban offering.

Rural UK ISP [https://b4rn.org.uk](https://b4rn.org.uk) happened when big
business "could" only provide crappy services at crazy rates. B4RN charges 30
pounds for 1 Gbps.

speedtest writes: "according to the Connected Nations 2015 report from the
UK’s communications regulator, Office of Communications (Ofcom), 48% of rural
areas don’t have access to broadband speeds of 10Mbps or higher."

Of course our germans and these brits had money to make their own ISP happen.

My Spanish and my Greek are even worse than my German but from reading around,
apparently Guifi is the worlds largest Mesh network in Greece that originally
started in Spain.

[http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet](http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet)

Trying to make sense of this document...

[https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...](https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://guifi.net/files/20170528InformacioAddicionalDenunciaGeneralitat_Final_signed.pdf&usg=ALkJrhjuH1IO9ufyAP6zEHXxdF1Xho6Hww)

...it seems they are actively fighting a tax per meter that guberment is
trying to inflict on their fiber optic cables. If I understood correctly they
are mainly offended by established businesses putting their cable in before
the tax was invented. It seems big business did more than seal the ground
after digging in their cables.

How different this is from the mundane consumer perspective where we all pay
some corp as much as we can for as little as we would accept. We live in a
world that is a bit like: when one asks why a carton of milk costs 200 Dollars
the answer would be that if they charge 300 USD for it they wouldn't sell
enough milk to justify the higher price.

Our entire western society works like this (I almost called it a civilization)
one delivers 12 Dollars worth of labor that is sold for 40 Dollars, etc, and
eventually it becomes 1000 dollars as part of a mortgage or infinite dollars
as part of someones rent.

If that is the mentality or indoctrination that comes over these roads, in
these letters and though this internet tube it might just be not worth having
any of it.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/4/42/20150...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/4/42/20150103143744%21Woodbridge_old_barn_raising.jpg)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CPO4R8o5M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CPO4R8o5M)

~~~
Tepix
The German page you found is for a deal where existing customers can get IP-TV
for 10€/month. The 50MBit/s plans start at 26€/month or so.

~~~
dispo001
Ah, thanks.

------
diebir
Sounds doubtful.

Worst Internet is not on the Navajo res (UT, AZ)? Not in Hanksville, UT or a
bunch of other small towns in Southern Utah? I am not even talking about
ranches in places like Robbers Roost canyon complex.

Nothing in Colorado is really remote and unpopulated. Roads and people are
everywhere. Maybe San Juans qualify for remote wilderness somewhat.

------
kronos29296
I would do anything for your so called worst speeds. Your worst is better than
my best speeds.

------
shmerl
How is SpaceX low orbit satellites ISP project progressing?

------
mrkrabo
Looking at the photos, I'm surprised there's Internet connectivity at all in
those places, other than 3G or maybe WiMAX.

I think it's not realistic to complain about this. The costs of bringing
infrastructure to a place like this are simply too high.

~~~
kalleboo
We brought electricity and phone service to these places. What makes internet
different?

~~~
birdman3131
Lived there once. (More info in my other reply.) They wanted 15k to bring
electric lines half a mile. $6k for phone. We never did have electric outside
of solar/wind/genarator. We had phone service via a device they installed that
had a solar panel and an antenna that looked like this on it.
[https://cdn.instructables.com/FNY/J38K/GXQPMTQV/FNYJ38KGXQPM...](https://cdn.instructables.com/FNY/J38K/GXQPMTQV/FNYJ38KGXQPMTQV.LARGE.jpg)

After a year or so they decided they needed it more in Alaska and they laid
the line for free. Then waited a year to collect the equipment they so
desperately needed in Alaska.

~~~
kalleboo
It's interesting that it's so expensive to get electric service these days.

I wonder how things actually looked in the heyday of the rural electrification
board.

My parents live in rural Australia (similarly 40 miles to the nearest
supermarket) so I have some idea but obviously it's very different geography
and a different a situation - they have electric and a rotten phone line
(certainly can't reach 56K), but get their internet through a rooftop antenna
connecting to 3G.

~~~
rayiner
Probably similar: [https://www.minnpost.com/mnopedia/2017/02/power-farmer-
minne...](https://www.minnpost.com/mnopedia/2017/02/power-farmer-minnesota-
and-rural-electrification-administration). The article quotes $600 per mile in
1939. That's $10,500 per mile adjusted for inflation, but the inflation metric
isn't a good one here. Inflation is calculated using consumer prices. The
inputs for electric (or telecom) infrastructure are mainly labor and
materials, which are relatively more expensive than they were back in 1940.
For example, if you scale $600 by the change in minimum wage over that time,
you get $20,500, about what's quoted.

~~~
xenadu02
It is my understanding that the REA charged a flat fee per home and ate the
cost to the extent it exceeded the fee. They also setup generating stations
and gave loans to power companies (and later rural telephone companies).

A lot of that assistance isn't available anymore.

