This thing where the government funds R&D for private corporations and then the corporations get to keep all the profits because tHey tAkE AlL tHe RiSk is pretty amazing. I'm a stockholder in several fortune 50 companies except my stock is non-voting, doesn't pay dividends, I don't get to pick which stock I buy and I don't ever get to sell it or borrow against it.
As I understand it the US government is why every American home- from the deserts in Nevada to the mountains in Virginia- has electricity. And that investment has paid for itself a million times over.
Every is a bit of an overstatement. Generators in some places are a thing. (And so are fairly large areas without houses.) But generally, yes, also subject to the caveats in another comment.
Satellite broadband does seem to be the "hack" for making locations that don't have broadband or really usable cell coverage in many cases practical.
Sorry but it's not satellite broadband, it's the same rural electrification that is the "hack".
My electric cooperative rolled out fiber to every address in the 3-county region it covers. It did so within a year. How? They already run poles everywhere, so they asked "why should we bury fiber?" As it turns out, it's easier to scale out on the pole!
The csuites who will vote themselves golden parachutes, the stockholders who got paid dividends this whole time and then will file for bankruptcy and settle their debts for whatever the company happens to own right now, or the people that lose their salary and house?
The neighborhood I live in has basically three choices for Internet service: Xfinity cable, AT&T DSL, and Starlink. AT&T ran fiber directly past our neighborhood to reach new housing developments adjacent to us. As far as I can tell, they have no plans to to give us access to their GPON service, even though our development has a couple of hundred houses that are, essentially in three rows with wide and easy to access utility easements along the back of every row.
So, in other words, my neighbors and I have two viable choices for Internet service: Xfinity and Starlink.
My top desire is that the FCC go back and do what Congress actually asked for in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, to make fiber and hybrid loops part of the require unbundled network elements offerings.
This infrastructure is so heavily subsidized. The FCC in 2002/2003, with some prompting from the courts, allowed fiber to be effectively an monopoly offering. Contrary to the law that Congress had passed!
> Elimination of ILEC unbundling obligation for new fiber-to-the-home loops. In order to encourage ILECs to invest in new broadband-capable facilities—fiber to the home in particular—the FCC ruled that ILECs need not provide such facilities on an unbundled basis to competitors.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't oppose anything at this point that hurt AT&T, purely out of spite, since I'm from California, where their allergy to capex (besides Wireless) has allowed our cable companies (mainly Comcast, Spectrum, and Cox) to simply set prices, bandwidth caps, and service levels for Internet at whatever they feel like. But anyway, I think if you wanted to force AT&T to compete by offering FTTP more widely, mandating that they have to sell access wholesale to others, like they do with DSL, would not be the way to do it. They've deployed basically no fiber in the past decade, and they'd deploy zero if they thought it likely their competitors would exploit the infra they built instead of them gaining retail customers.
Even if they were taken over tomorrow by leadership that weren't crooks, they're already in a terrible position to compete as it is -- in the 20 years since they did anything, Comcast and the others have gone from the ~10Mbps connections they once offered, to 1 and even 2Gbps in many places, so I assume in nearly all the areas AT&T doesn't serve with fiber, the incumbent cable co has about 95% market share already. Tough to break into that. even though customers hate the cable companies, they know AT&T is just as slimy -- and nobody wants to set aside a day to wait for an internet installer.
In a non-totalitarian state, fining them for the funds is how we force them to do it.
It's not like we're going to start locking up executives for misappropriating public funds and defrauding the government, that's not a crime anyone cares about in this country.
no, the term you're looking for is specific performance. Having to abide by the terms of a contract is not "totalitarian". Doubly so when we're talking about a corporation (ie a government creation) and not individuals.
What this tells me is that industries with limited growth potential and who are focused on incremental rather than transformative technology do not respond to government carrots, and to the extent that they do anything, it is to arrange scenarios where they privatize the carrots and socialize the costs.
There is no return on investment for investments in rural fiber. Infrastructure needs a high density of users to be profitable.
If we really think that the speed and reliability of fiber service is important for rural users, we should directly subsidize it - like we do for Amtrak in the Great Plains states - and stop pretending like we care by paying off the corporations and their shareholders.
Problem is that we live in an environment where a company like AT&T can lobby for basically anything they want, and have basically no accountability when they don't meet their obligations.
You even have people telling stories where they could get fiber service, but the provider just doesn't want to.
What's most tragic is how cheap lobbying is, or more accurately, how great the ROI is. A company like AT&T, or a defense contractor, or an oil company, spends low millions on lobbying, not billions, and as a result reaps enormous windfalls in the tens of billions. I don't have any idea how to fix "money in politics" because first amendment is so tied up in it once you try to do anything, and they've mastered indirection so well that any restrictions are easily worked around by astroturf PACs.
Sure, because a community likely has more to gain from this than a big telecom corporation. A community benefits when its members can reliably attend telemedicine visits, even if the community broadband is provided at cost. They care about what you can do with the connection, not the connection itself.
A telecom corporation doesn't have a way of profiting from such community benefits.
It only benefits if it can somehow charge a transaction tax on those benefits in the form of Internet connection fees high enough to turn a profit.
This is no surprise and is not new. I live in a rural area and long, long ago gave up any hope of the AT&T DSL ever being better then 3mbps. I switched to LTE in 2015 and have not looked back. Since then I have been through a few different providers, but have been generally content with T-Mobile Home Internet for the last few years.
Starlink is tempting, but its $165/month versus the $50/month I pay to T-Mobile.
If anyone thinks AT&T or any service provider is going to run fiber to these communities, you are dreaming. It makes dramatically more profit for them to sell LTE/5G home internet options, even if it is not optimal for then end user.
They ran fiber down the street connecting to the street my grandparents are on, but didn’t go down theirs. But of course they’ll gladly charge more for “up to” 50mbit when it’s only 25 on a good day. They’re all criminal.
To be completely fair, Biden has done f*k all to hold AT&T to account in the past four years. I doubt a second term of Democrats would be different. Both parties are failures in most areas, and telecom regulation is something neither party cares one whit about.
I don't understand AT&Ts strategy here. I assume the vast majority of AT&Ts network is overhead, and it is not expensive in the scheme of things to run PON fibre on the poles.
They are effectively giving away ~50% of their footprint to competitors, forever to avoid a one time capex cost.
Obviously there is going to be a portion of their network which is completely uneconomic to serve (requiring huge fibre runs for a handful of customers). But I do not think that is 50% of their userbase. Just checking a handful of 10-20k pop towns in some states they 'cover' and no FTTH is available.
I'm no fan of AT&T. Their contract terms are garbage, and I feel lucky to love somewhere with options. But the article hasn't done a great job of explaining this headline. It makes it sound like these subsidies were designed to encourage AT&T to build out more fiber. But when I follow the links, they're about things like general tax cuts that were followed by layoffs or misrepresenting figures to benefit from a COVID program. Maybe I missed the part where there's something about building more fiber.
That's always been ATT's corporate messaging around anything financially beneficial to them -- we need this money because it will help us deliver better service to more people.
So it's not unjust to call bullshit when it turns out they aren't doing that, but are still keeping the money.
Yeah that's the vibe I got. More accurate headline: "ATT has been beneficiary of government action. ATT says it won't build new fiber to some dsl customers."
'not quite' doesn't cut it. The point is don't split up the discussion, which is over there. This one doesn't add as much to the arstechnica article. Share Karl's weird obtuse link-heavy writing style over there if need be.
> This one doesn't add as much to the arstechnica article.
Karl's backlinks help complete (and provide further evidence of) the narrative about AT&Ts long, long history of gross unethical behavior and consumer mistreatment.
The links are the backstory that belong in ~every article about bad telecom behaviors (but are usually missing). Evidencing assertions is part of stellar journalism.
My first thought is "ok well then give the cash to a company that is actually willing to do it". IMO Starlink would be the best option for these rural areas, simply based off the fact that they have a track record of providing broadband to very rural areas + they don't have to run any fiber to connect a new location. Starlink is very expensive though which is where I would expect a govt subsidy to step in and bring the cost down to around the cost of existing DSL for consumers.
EDIT: My comment failed to account for congestion on the Starlink network which other commenters have pointed out. Honestly after reading that I've concluded this is just a shit situation, fiber is expensive as hell to lay and Starlink poses congestion issues both for customers and up in space.
Starlink has about 4 million customers right now, but considering that Starlink is struggling with congestion in the US, there will be a gap of millions of rural US households who would be best served by fiber. And regardless, fiber is the best long-term internet access medium, because whatever latency problems fiber has now can be improved by changing the devices sending data through the fibers without replacing the fibers themselves.
Personally I think 5g is the way to go. Free more spectrum from the old TV channels (DVB-T is a lot more efficient in terms of spectrum use), this will cover rural use.
10 years ago I would never think I would say that, but I'm happy with LTE at 50MB down, 15up. The problem? No new lte equipment manufactured in western countries. You want cat 16+ modems? ZTE and Huawei are the only ones to sell you one. And their software not only spies for the Chinese Communist Party. It is also shit (I know, I bought a zte modem to marvel at my 100MB down speeds, o ly to rip it out 2 days later in discust after all my voice calls sounded as if I was on half a Meg if I didn't restart the thing daily (no, it only has automated restart as a weekly option in software). So my old tp-link was installed back in its box on the mast.
So we need more work done here to make 5g happen. Chinese will no do it for us (especially now that their economy is failing).
5G networks need wired infrastructure to send internet data to towers within a few miles of the customer; fiber is the best option for those wires. And for the last few miles, fiber still has throughput and latency advantages over 5G [1].
This seems like a terrible idea. Satellite internet doesn't just cost money; having all those satellites in orbit have real non-monetary costs. They have a huge impact on astronomy, and they increase the probability of accidents which cause space debris.
Fair point though I would make a counterargument that with or without those subsidies, those satellites are still going up to space so wouldn't it be better to offer the service to as many folks as possible so that the most people get the benefit of satellites and we while we wouldn't offset the costs of putting sats up in space, at least we can offset the per-capita cost.
So for the space debris argument, is humanity just not supposed to have satellites? Like should we phase out the entire concept? Do we expect to solve the issue somehow and then open up space?
Are some satellites okay and it's just a value judgment of the clear worth of one more satellite against the unquantifiable risk of possible downside?
We should recognize space in orbit as precious and make intelligent decisions about how to best make use of it. That means we don't waste a ton of it just because the government can't get AT&T to build what they're paid to build.
I'm of the opinion that commercial satellites should be required to be painted as dark as possible. If that requires extra engineering to dissipate heat, so be it.
It's reasonable that satellites should mitigate the impact on astronomy as much as possible. But it's not reasonable that we should seriously constrain the use of satellites because some astronomers using land-based optical telescopes are inconvenienced.
How would painting a satellite black 'seriously constrain' them? Why do we let corporations foist externalities on science and the general public? Either you can engineer a solution, or you can't, and if you can't, you don't belong in space.
Painting a satellite black wouldn't solve the problem that they would still block the stars behind them when passing overhead. Instead of light streaks, you now have dark streaks across a region of the sky.
These "dark streaks" would be way less of an issue. The reason you get light streaks is that exposure is really long and the satellites move quickly. The fraction of time a satellite is covering any given portion of the picture is really small. If you use, say, a 30 minute exposure, these "dark streaks" will be parts of the picture which only got, say, 29 minutes and 55 seconds. That's not a big deal.
The problem with painted satellites is instead that they're not black enough; they still produce light streaks since they're still somewhat reflective. I don't know if it's possible to make them non-reflective enough to make this a non-issue.
I mean that's like saying that a star's brightness isn't a problem when searching for exo planets, and they only block you from seeing the objects behind them. Obviously that's not true. Light pollution from orbital satellites is a real thing.
I don't design satellites so I don't know. As I wrote, if there are reasonable measures that can be taken to reduce the effect of satellites on astronomers (or potentially creating space debris) they should be taken. However, there's a clear trend towards more (cheaper) satellites that serve useful purposes. And I very much doubt the public cares much about any inconveniences it presents to academics in this case.
Except the satellites are already up and functioning, the service is available today. We will look crazy for burying thousands of miles of wires to residential in the future.
It's not an issue of what companies to trust. The issue is trusting them at all.
Ideally this sort of thing should be a public work. Operators can be private but shared infrastructure should be publicly owned seeing as we're paying for it.
But if markets have to be involved...If we're willing to pay $X per customer we should give the tax subsidy to them. The market can sort out who is actually willing to get the work done and service customers to get the subsidy.
Yes, I have no idea how, in 2024, internet service is not considered a basic utility like power and water, and regulated as such.
My parents paid ~ $65 / mo for 6mb dsl for ages. They had constant outages, and ATT always stonewalled the repairs. Talking to the repair guy, he admitted that ATT basically hated supporting that DSL, and wished all their rural customers would go elsewhere. He even told them that if they canceled, ATT would not offer internet service to them again, they'd just decommission the service down their street.
They're now on starlink, despite being only a 1/4 mile outside of city limits, it's the best option they have.
I recall in 2005 in a major west coast city, having 6Mbps DSL service but it was very prone to disruption. The tech they would send out would be just trying different pairs from a big fat cable to see if he could find one that was not too deteriorated from age. Even two decades ago AT&T's infrastructure was falling apart, and again, this was in a major city everyone in the world has heard of. Even then, they didn't care enough to even fix their 50-year old copper (which is now 70 years old) let alone lay fiber. Meanwhile also in 2005 on the other side of the continent, FiOS was launched.
Really? It's not always the cheapest option but seems pretty competitive with land-based broadband generally.
I agree with the broader point though. In my experience, Starlink seems plenty good enough for most consumers. Once you get above a certain level where you can do things like video calls and stream a couple of movies with reasonable reliability, most people are just fine.
I'm sure standards will increase over time but I'd probably be just fine if Starlink were my only option today. Even considered getting it as a backup but Xfinity has been reliable and good enough of late where I live that didn't seem worth it.
The rural broadband subsidies would work much better if they were not available to large ISPs. The scaling effects of last mile internet installations are basically negligible.
For instance, a neighborhood of a few hundred houses in the mountains outside of Silicon Valley started their own fiber to the home ISP. It cost something like $10K per house to wire it up and monthly payments are much lower than starlink.
We need more of that. If some small rural ISPs decide they are better off expanding than getting subsidies, that’s fine. Stop paying future subsidies.
>The rural broadband subsidies would work much better if they were not available to large ISPs.
This. When you go on to the FCC website and look for good high speed internet, outside of major cities it's almost always available through some coop. The government should be supporting this, but it's not 'by the people, for the people' anymore, it's 'by the corporations, for the corporations'
Does Musk need more government charity? He's made a lot off begging, we can see whether he puts more restrictions on companies that are non-viable without government handouts but considering most of his haven't been, I can't imagine it.
rant: A few months ago I got a flyer that I can now get Verizon 5G at my home. I read that as fiber and got so excited I texted my neighbor barely a mile away that finally after all these years I can get fiber to the home just like him. Imagine my anger when I realized that's not fiber dummy that's cell wireless.
Yes, kids are the primary factor here. We moved near their school, on a house lot large enough for us to expand as they get older, on the outskirts of a wealthy neighborhood, but at a price we can afford.
A usable Internet connection is important. I certainly wouldn't move because I "only" had a reliable 50mbps connection. That's about what I have (not in Bay Area) and don't really have a complaint.
I would get dropped from video calls if my wife or kids started downloading something. I’ve managed to fix this with QoS, but there is a noticeable loss of quality.
Ultimately we switched to cable internet, but given the bandwidth I use running home servers, I expect to be forced onto a corporate plan once they notice, at $200-$500/mo. My usage is within terms of service for AT&T fiber, fwiw, but cable is a shared resource.
That sounds like a perfectly usable Internet connection but tons of reasons one might choose to move out of the Bay Area. There are various good reasons to live there (including some that have nothing to do with employment) but the idea that you must in tech is misguided.
50Mbps of a raw link is is 5MB/s, split into dedicated 4MB/s down and 1MB/s up. That’s a half hour to download a Linux ISO, and only enough upload for 1 video call. It definitely affects work.
What is now "AT&T" is the former Baby Bell RBOC SBC, plus PacBell, plus a couple of other companies, which bought AT&T wireless & long-lines. Thus, SBC acquired and assumed the AT&T name from its former parent.
Sure, but back in those days (the 50s, 60s, 70s) two things were true about the company that bore the AT&T name: 1. They invested in research that benefited the whole industry with Bell Labs, and 2. they built out and maintained the infrastructure well.
Today they're just operating with the most cynical approach, where they extract the maximum amount of value out of a network built by our grandfathers' generation, only doing capex in the most targeted areas where the ROI will be instantaneous. (new subdivisions, and specifically ones where they can get the HOA to bake in their services to the HOA fee). I used to live in a large urban tower and AT&T did finally come in with fiber, in 2017, on that condition. They'll be cash flow positive from Day 1 because 100% of the homes in that tower are customers, and they literally can't cancel their service (or more specifically their payment).
