Comment by cestith

My parents currently have four options for Internet access. One is only on their phones with no tethering. The other is to dial in over a landline at 33.6k if they can find an ISP that still offers that. There's existing satellite, which is 512k down and like 25k up for hundreds a month. Or there's a wireless 256k plan that costs $2000 to install.

There's no ISDN, no DSL, no Starlink yet, no 5G fixed, no 4G fixed, no power-line Internet. They are not watching any Netflix, and things like Social Security and Medicare are increasingly accessed through poorly performing, bloated websites. They paid taxes more than five decades of full-time work. There's fiber within two miles of them, but nobody's used it to extend what's becoming a modern necessity to their house.

If they lived on the other side of the road, they'd have the area's rural electric cooperative. Then they could get at least 10 Mbps over the power lines. However, they're on a corporate power provider that has 4 to 12 hour outages 3 to 4 times a year besides not offering similar additional services.

With the right negotiations and a few hundred thousand dollars, their moderately densely populated unincorporated area could serve hundreds of homes with broadband. The cable and phone companies were given millions upon millions of subsidies every month for decades now for rural phone and Internet access, but have not served this area. It's time something else is done in these areas to give them the same access to the modern marketplace and to government services as everyone else.