Internet providers have left rural Americans behind. One county is fighting back

[LearnedHand]

Congress is spending $65bn to connect the rural US to the world. Orangeburg, South Carolina, knows the stakes better than anywhere (The Guardian)

Orangeburg, South Carolina, is not the middle of nowhere.

It’s an hour south of Columbia. It’s an hour and 15 minutes north of Charleston. It’s an hour and a half away from Augusta. It’s just country enough to be out of the way but tantalizingly close to somewhere.

But distance in the digital age isn’t measured in miles. It’s measured in latency and bandwidth. With enough broadband speed, anywhere is close to everywhere. By that metric, Orangeburg county may as well be in the middle of a desert.

Like hundreds of rural counties across the US, Orangeburg is ignored by commercial broadband service providers who think it’s not profitable to lay fiber optic lines in the area.

I REALLY hope someone tackles the issue of the monopoly providers successfully lobbying against community broadband.

[erronis]

1. Unfortunately, according to that article, Orangeburg and other rural communities are losing

It sounds like entrenched ISPs and lobbyists and paid-for legislators are fighting this effort fairly well - so far.

The Biden administration is working on solving these obstacles.

The law was written to encourage new entrants, said Bring of the NTIA. “The law says that they can’t exclude municipal government from applying for grants, and making them ineligible for the grant. As part of our rules, we ask for states to either avoid passing new laws that restrict municipal broadband networks, or grant or waive some of those laws.”

South Carolina is no exception. Stritzinger’s initial plan plainly laid out the barriers for the small towns and rural counties that don’t have Orangeburg’s baked-in exemption.

It warns legislators that the broadband office may raise concerns with the South Carolina legislature “if existing state laws … limit the participation of nontraditional applicants and to disclose any unsuccessful applications for grant funding that may have been impacted by such laws”.

That’s a warning shot. The money goes away if municipalities are shut out.

[LearnedHand]

2. How much I loathe people having to beg the monopolies

For the freedom to not engage with the monopoly.

[Demsrule86]

3. You can run internet on electrical lines...so no excuse.

[Marthe48]

4. Way back Al Gore was a senator

He was fighting for wider communication opportunities. This was back in the early 1980s. We bought one of the huge dish antennas and got it set up. We learned how to turn it and home in on satellites transmitting signals. We scratched a mark on the stem of the dish, so that any of us could select a satellite. One of the satellites transmitted whatever the Army offered for entertainment. We found HBO, Showtime, Canadian satellites, and they were ALL FREE. At least for a year or so. The big networks said that piracy was bankrupting them. Out of the other side of their mouths, they said there weren't enough customers in rural areas to string cable. So they got to block the signals and get subscriptions set up to make dish owners pay. In the late 1980s, we got cable strung to our house 4 miles from town.

We moved to Marietta. We bought a house about 2 miles from Marietta, and it took the only cable company almost 3 weeks to get us hooked up to their existing system. The Internet became available in the mid 90s. We got a cable modem, a 32,500 bps. Excitement! I remember the exchange student we hosted in 1995 could email her family. The only cable company in Marietta started stringing Internet cable probably close to 2000. I got a jib working from home, and the 32,500 bps modem was inadequate to say the least. My husband persistently called the cable company over and over and we finally got cable Internet, probably 2002. The struggle is long and constant. The little guy against the corporate giants.

In the last couple of years, we finally got another Internet cable provider. I'm thinking about changing. I don't want dish or ATT. But still on the fence.

[LearnedHand]

5. Oof I feel ya!

Where I live the only wired internet is 1.5 mbps DSL. Unacceptable for working from home much less streaming TV and internet stuff. Wireless and satellite is available though, but this is only on the past 2 years. I'm less than 10 miles from town.

[LearnedHand]

6. Forgot to say I have Starlink internet

Fuck that guy, but Starlink has saved my bacon.

[jmowreader]

7. They had the same problem in Grant County, WA

Grant County is a sparsely-populated, spread-out area in the middle of Washington State. No private company would bring anything faster than DSL in and you could only get that if you lived in Moses Lake or Ephrata, so the government-owned power company Grant Public Utilities District ran fiber over the entire county in parallel with their power lines. At one point it was the fastest internet service in the United States, and it's still pretty damned quick.