Comment on AOL to discontinue dial-up internet service after 34 years
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 2 days agoEvery rural house gets a phone line, just like they all get roads and mail
It’s not profitable, but that didn’t matter because it was a utility
With Broadband, it’s a “luxury” so to get it out to a clump of rural users, they all need to pay for it, or wait and hope someone else pays to get it closer.
Not anymore. Now the cell phone company just puts up a tower and runs one fiber line to it and everybody has high speed internet or a rich billionaire launches some satellites into space on his rockets.
Laying one fiber line to a cell phone tower is much cheaper than laying a bunch of fiber lines to each individual household.
We may have different standards for “rural areas”…
I did Google for starlink because I’m not up to date on their coverage, and there’s still a lot of dead ones up north.
That is possible. I was basing my comment on some information from an FCC report that said that there was no place in the continental United States that was not able to be covered by Starlink.
There was this program called Bead that was going to prioritize places with no internet access whatsoever or dial up for the first people to get funding, and they say they found that there wasn’t any, so they had to go for the next thing which was slow internet.
And there’s lots of valid reasons to not want starlink. So it really doesn’t matter if that’s the only option.
But…
The American taxpayers have paid telecom companies billions of dollars on at least two separate occasions years apart to roll out broadband to everyone. But they just keep taking money and not doing it, and then a decade later lobby for the money again.
BD89@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
The government gave them $400 Billion dollars to do it and they pocketed the money.
huffpost.com/…/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_583939…
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Biden just did it in 2024 again, I think that was “just” 5 billion tho
Pretty sure there was more than just those two