635
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
635 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59081 readers
3415 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Technically the Telecommunications Act of 1996 allocated a ton of money for fiber infrastructure, but telecom providers rolled it out in dense urban areas with a lot of customers, bought each other up and then pocketed the extra cash.
Fiber to the premise in rural areas is insanely expensive but I see it like a modern version of the post office. If you want to be able to write a letter to anyone and have it be delivered you need to set the price so that rural customers aren't paying costs that are orders of magnitude higher.
Let me fix that;
I mean if the feds just toss money at these providers they'll use it how they please. It should be a matter of government doing what it is necessary to deploy service as widely as possible. Without oversight it's just giving them free money.
I suppose now that the cell network is able to provide "hotspot" service that could be an out for subsidy, but it sure won't make a 100Mbps standard. On 4G the best my phone can do is 50Mbps when close to a tower, less when signal strength is lower. You can get much higher speeds on 5G, but it's even more affected by tower distance. You're not going to get that in a rural area, same infrastructure problem.