Rage intensifies.
My question is that if the FCC can just willy-nilly reclassify things, doesn’t that mean that if and when Democrats regain control, they can just flip everything back?
In theory, but it is harder to impose a regulatory system once those chains are off. Also it would take political capital to do so, so in not sure it would be a priority for them, sadly.
It sure as shit would be if I had my say.
I can see that, but I also see it as an issue that would drive millennials to the polls
Once again I have to wonder, are people who live in rural areas going to be stupid enough to accept this?
Absolutely. There would be a way to drive enthusiasm and younger voters if they made it a part of the platform. It would be smart, politically, since it would be a way to gain enthusiasm and votes without alienating moderates and independents. Hell, it may even help to gain some.
I just have skepticism that they would put it as a priority item. But we’ll see. If the next generation of Dems can start to take the reigns of the party, I could see it.
Abortion, guns and mexicans. As long as the GOP stays with their rural base on those issues, they can probably get away with damn near anything.
At least, that appears to be the bet they have made.
I think it will depend on the candidate - if it is another boomer type like Hillary, then I don’t see it as prioritized. If it a younger, more in-touch candidate, then I can see them being wise enough to make hay with it. Anyway, good insight. Thanks
Well yes, of course they will. Because who has wireless coverage in rural areas? Verizon. And with the repeal of Net Neutrality, they control what these rural areas can see. So they’ll only see what Verizon wants them to see (ie., Fox News, etc.). Which will of course spin this as something amazing, and definitely in their favor. Plus, rural areas are already mostly (completely?) red areas, so their work is already mostly done for them.
Pai makes light of everything about Verizon and his place in the FCC as being some grand conspiracy. Yet, this well crafted series of steps really makes you wonder.
They just won’t understand it.
The effect here is that they won’t get new infrastructure, which they need, but which they never had before. They won’t really realize that they were supposed to get it and didn’t.
In other words, keeping the rural hillbillies exactly they way they are: disconnected and ignorant.
I used to sell Charter, and we’d get calls quite often from rural people desperate for broadband. They’re not stupid hillbillies. They know fast internet is out there and they want it. They are like everyone else – they want to watch Netflix, etc.
The problem is how do you deliver it? Who is going to pay to lay the cable or string the high-speed fiber? So many people live so far out of town and with so much distance between neighbors, it’s not cost-effective to build the infrastructure out.
That was part of the thing that the FCC was supposed to provide. Government funding to extend broadband into those areas. But now they don’t need to, because they can say they already have broadband.
If cell phone providers get reclassified as broadband providers will they gain access to any funds, tax breaks, or incentives meant for rural net access?
We already paid for it. They just didn’t deliver it.
My husband and I recently moved to Maine. We chose Maine because my parents live here, and I wanted to be near them as they are getting older. We are both self employed, doing things that can be done anywhere, so here we are.
However, we did require high speed internet, which is not easy to come by in Maine. Number one priority while house searching was that it had to have access to high speed internet - minimum 100Mbps, but preferably higher - and we did lots of research to narrow down the area to look in. When we settled on a place, we had a contingency put into the purchase and sale agreement that HSI had to be installed (at our expense) before we would close - because we didn’t trust Comcast (of course it’s Comcast) when they said “yes, we can get you Gigabit speeds there!”. We didn’t want to end up like this guy.
So we do actually have gigabit internet, in Maine, for about $70 per month… and with no data caps. However, we’re outliers. We live a little north of Portland, and yes, HSI is available in Portland and the towns around it, but even then often the highest speeds are only 30Mbps (I realize this may be screaming fast for many people).
My parents, however, live about an hour and a half northwest-ish of here. It’s much more rural where they are. They live on top of a very long, steep hill that has an absolutely gorgeous view, but the fastest internet they can get is… 3.0Mbps. And my dad pays something like $35 per month for the privilege of this crap connection.
It’s not uncommon. Fast internet is just not something that Maine has, and as someone said above, they don’t really know they’re missing it. They just don’t know any different, or else they’ve just accepted it. But it’s amazing to us how little commerce is done online here, when we previously lived in the Boston area, and then the Seattle area after that. Very few businesses have websites and settle for only having a Facebook page (which usually has very little activity on it). Some of the providers we’ve hired (rubbish removal, snow plowing) will bill us on paper and we’ll need to send them a check. I think I’ve written maybe a total of fifteen checks in the past ten years.
I had read an article from a couple of years ago about Maine lawmakers wanting to improve Maine’s sorry state of broadband, but I haven’t heard a thing about it recently. It’s going to get a lot more difficult when suddenly Maine’s broadband service numbers are boosted thanks to dodgy inflated numbers created by cell phone data classification.
Of course we all knew as much.
One of the problems with rural broadband is that the “last mile” is not economically viable. (Last mile being the distance between the core network and the customer which could be a block or ten miles but the priciple is the same.)
You can build a fiber network to ring the state of Vermont (which is not a very big state) for somewhere in the neighborhood of $75-100 million. That’s a large investment and that’s just to build the network to back haul and transport all of that traffic. If you have a business that is on the same street as this network and you can reach them with an aerial cable, that’s a relatively inexpensive affair. If that same business is a block away, costs escalate quickly. Space on the poles needs to be leased from the pole owners (usually the utilities) and before you can attach you have to be licensed for each pole and before you can be licensed there needs to be a survey of the pole to make sure it’s safe to attach and typically there is some make ready work that needs to be done to ensure it’s all done to code. (And there are good reasons for these codes so this is not a case of government or the utilities standing in the way of progress.) That make ready work can be a matter of other attachees moving up or down to make room for you (relatively cheap) or it could be a pole replacement (not at all cheap). The cost of running fiber a block can be anywhere from $10,000 to $60,000. You’re not going to make that investment back anytime soon selling residential service.
This is why cable companies are the most common residential broadband providers – They’ve already got plant running to most of the residences. For utilities in urban areas, residential fiber can be economically viable but only because they own the poles and the population density means a decent return on the investment.
They is no economically viable model for a third party to expand broadband down rural roads to serve rural residential customers. It would take a massive publicly funded project to accomplish that.
This money was already set aside.
And getting rid of Title 2 regulation of broadband was a rerequisite for reclassifying wireless as broadband, because they certainly weren’t going to accept tiTitle 2 on wireless.
Just a giant, giant giveaway to the telecoms.