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In a report [PDF] put together by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, investigators looked at real-world internet offerings within a 30-mile radius of Rochester in Minnesota.
Rochester provides a useful contrast in that it has a heavily built-up center with a spread-out urban space surrounding it. It also claims to have no less than 19 companies that provide residents with broadband internet access – something that its local council has boasted about – and exists in a state whose leaders have set some ambitious broadband goals: 25Mbps for everyone by 2022; and 100Mbps by 2026.
However, as the investigation revealed this month, competition is something available only to a minority of people who live in the most dense areas, and access to fast internet access above federal minimums remains a virtual monopoly.
"We have 19 local broadband providers and, of those, we have two cable providers, six DSL providers, four fiber providers, three fixed wireless providers and four mobile providers," the report quotes City Council member Ed Hruska as saying.
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/23/rochester_broadband/
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 24 2018, @04:08PM (2 children)
Download the PDF. It's only 18 pages. As a "read", it's only five minutes or less. There are more maps than anything in the PDF. Grab the PDF, read what little there is to read, then just kinda scroll up and down to see what the various maps are.
It's pretty shocking, unless you've followed this nonsense in the past.
Oh yeah. Blame the U.S. Census for a lot of this mess.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by vux984 on Friday August 24 2018, @04:47PM (1 child)
It seems the problem is the FCC
"If an ISP can provide Internet service to at least
one premise in a census block, the FCC marks that entire census
block as having access to Internet service at the speed the ISP claims
is available."
The FCC should re-define service as being available only once its available to the majority of premises; 51%, or perhaps even 75% or 90%. I wouldn't push for 100% because there's always going to be areas where some guy has a shack on an island in a lake who doesn't even WANT internet access there, and that shouldn't prevent the area from being marked as serviced. But yeah, 1 address is nonsense.
I know around here its just as bad, I just heard about a lawsuit where a town is suing the telco -- the city council put up several hundred thousand of tax payer money into funding and wanted high speed coverage to the majority of the town, including the hospital, fire department, and police station. So the telco ran fibre to the hospital, fire department, and police station. And that's it. Three buildings have fibre. The rest of the town still has ADSL 5/1. The telco is arguing that it met is obligation by servicing the 3 named buildings. I haven't seen the contract of course, and its entirely possible some small town city council signed off on a contract worded ambiguously enough for the telco to make this claim. But the telco's conduct is simply ridiculous -- there's simply no way they didn't damned well know that the town wanted fibre service to be available to as many residents as possible as part of the project.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday August 24 2018, @05:04PM
Ajit Pai is working on a directive stating that a State has sufficient broadband coverage if at least one person in the State has 5/1 access. The Twitter-in-chief will then announce that his administration has brought Broadband to all Americans, and Fox News will repeat that until the elections.