> For decades, people (mostly the industry) tried to suggest the problem was because America was just so gosh darn big. But you’ll notice that China and Russia, (ranked 25th and 17th, respectively) still perform better.
Size isn't relevant to utility distribution, population distribution is.
I see this comment all the time on this topic used to justify any number of pricing inequities. It doesn't hold up here.
Yes. The US has a very widely distributed population. It has expensive internet and cellphone coverage.
Yes, Canada's population is quite dense. Basically everybody lives in ten(ish) cities near the border, plus Winnipeg. Yet it has fairly expensive internet and extremely expensive cellphone coverage.
There are still normally-priced cellphone plans in Vancouver, one of the densest cities in North America, that measure their phone plans in megabytes per month.
These two large first-world nations both have expensive coverage compared to other large nations despite having extremely different population distributions. The suggests distribution is not the cause of the expense.
Now both countries did allow oligopolies to form and control the market for data services and media and many of the richest people in each country are media moguls. Prices are kept just at the edge of affordability for the middle-class through an obviously collusive system of price-increase matching so uniform that you have to check the color of the brochure to tell which large provider has sent you junk mail.
But, you know. That probably has nothing to do with it.
I think you must have accidentally responded to the wrong comment.
I didn't say anything about what I thought access or costs should be.
I said one thing and one thing only: the criticism in the OP is fallacious, in that it compares the overall sizes of the U.S. and Canada (which aren't relevant) instead of the size of the respective service areas (which are).
I pay less in Costa Rica for 1G sync fiber than I pay for 1G up / 200 down on cable in the US. My ping time here to Miami, 1000 miles away, is about the same as my ping time to San Jose from my house in the US, a fraction of that distance.
Lots of room for improvement in the US, but perhaps part of the problem is the methodology. Just looking at percentage of monthly income doesn't adequately cover the whole picture because of the reduced marginal utility of money as one gets richer.
That is, an extra $20 for a family making $1000/mo (2%) is worth much more than $120 for a family making $6000/mo (2%).
So, Americans might pay a higher percentage of their salary on broadband, but it doesn't imply that they are experiencing any kind of increased pain associated with the payment.
Government financial support for broadband should be a single payment to a company, once symmetric gigabit is installed and measured and proven at a house.
You will nevertheless be the 1st ones to have a global broadband satellite Internet provider. The US can often turn a weakness into strength in unexpected ways.
I have an extra $100 ony cable bill this month because I went over their arbitrary limit on data transfers. Bye bye to a few days fixed income. 8(
Why? Backblaze backing up my stuff.
We should be able to provide everyone at least 10 Mbps symmetric full time internet connectivity. This would help deliver on the free speech promise of the first amendment by running their own servers.
But it's first when you take baseballbannana stats into account. And it's a huge country you really can not compare it, just because two neighborhoods with opposing political views are equally run down..
As an engineer my take is we should make a plan to solve the problem and execute it. Basically that means fiber everywhere, probably the electric company should just run a fiber that is installed and maintained next to your electric feed, I'll explain why in a minute.
This would have an eye-popping bill but it would be done.
Instead the Democrats allocate some arbitrary amount of money, say $20 billion, they build out some broadband, but not enough. Then they go out and spend $30 billion and then another time they spend $40 billion but those of us not lucky to get broadband are saying "they are spending all this money but we still don't have broadband", there is this mental disconnect though because for many Democrats the fact that they spent $X billion is a reason to celebrate and that's the problem, the endpoint is spending $X billion, it is not the product of people having broadband. And they wonder why people vote Republican.
(e.g. the Republicans are not on board w/ solving the problem at all but the Democrats really don't get how repeated failure in public erodes the legitimacy of institutions, particularly when they are celebrating failures as if they were successes. They see any resistance to this as mindless partisan negativism unfortunately.)
Here's my situation.
I live on a farm that is rather hard to serve because my power lines go through a beaver swamp. My phone line is mostly buried from the nearby crossroads to my house.
I used to get ADSL from Frontier which came all the way from the nearest town, the distance was near the absolute limit of ADSL but they had some analog hardware that boosted the signal so towards the end of that era I had two 2 Mbps connections.
More recently they ran fiber to the crossroads and now I am just past the VDSL limit and I have two 20 Mbps ADSL connections which are load balanced, it is fine for most purposes... I remote login a lot to my big desktop PC and the slow uplink makes waiting for windows to open painful but once I have them open I can get stuff done. I am paying around $250 a month for that and two phone lines and that is an astronomical cost compared to people who get cable just two miles down the road.
The same people who have a party because they spend $X billion are "technology agnostic" and believe DSL is a good technology for rural areas are completely wrong, you can wire up Koreans who live in huge apartment blogs with VDSL but the limited range of DSL does not work for rural America.
I don't blame anybody who doesn't want to go into my swamp, but...
Every 10 years or so the power company sends some huge machine into my swamp (sometimes gets stuck) to limb up trees around the power line, when they do that another crew should follow them and add fiber. Doing it that way would be as cheap as you could make it, and we really need an approach to the problem that finds those kind of economies and gets the job done.
People in urban areas have cable. They bitch about what it costs but they are paying maybe $90 a month for 20x the performance I’ve got. Yeah they bitch that the rent is too damn high also. When Uber quits giving them half price taxi rides they’ll claim transportation costs too much too.
In my town of 2000 people broadband is one of the hottest issues after zoning. The leader of the local Republican party is a coworker of mine from a long time ago, personally he will give me the usual reasons why we shouldn’t spend public money on anything but in public they will not say a word against broadband because they know they will get tarred and feathered if they do.
(Actually Trump is so toxic in my town that the Republicans ran an alternative slate in the Democratic primary to try to derail the process of getting a zoning ordinance in our town.)
I did meet an old man at the gas station in my town who lives on our local “Tobacco Road” who is indifferent to broadband, doesn’t own a computer, smartphone, tablet, any of that, can barely get a few TV stations, mostly listens to the radio. He’s an outlier.
Size isn't relevant to utility distribution, population distribution is.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/geo/popul...
https://external-preview.redd.it/wi2O5r6huRQgodhBQRebNw1--vG...
One of these things is not like the other. If the U.S. border moved just a two-hour drive north, 90% of Canadians would become Americans.