On Substack's The Mad Net Memo, there's an interesting two-part story about one person's quest for Broadband Internet Access in a rural town in Massachusetts.
Thin Pipe, Part I - My Strange, Slow, Twenty-Year Quest for Broadband
The author details his progression through dialup, hybrid GEO satellite (satellite downlink, dialup uplink), trying for DSL and cable and failing (his house is too rural) and GEO satellite.
Favorite quote:
I remember once having the signal go out on a clear blue day, and calling tech support to see what was going on. I suspected some sort of maintenance thing that they also tended to schedule at inconvenient times. I told the support staff I couldn’t find anything wrong on my side since it was clear weather.
They told me “Oh, it’s raining in Galveston Texas pretty hard.”
“Galveston Texas?” I asked.
“Yes this is where our uplink dishes are, and its causing a brief outage of service.”
The author's town eventually deployed a BWIA system that was apparently a distribution system that put a high-capacity system on a close mountain, which fed 902-928 MHz distribution nodes in the (heavily treed) community. The distribution nodes became oversubscribed (easy to do with a 902-928 MHz system) and he was able to connect directly to the mountaintop node by a friendly neighbor installing that radio 80 feet up on a tree.
Eventually that system aged out from a combination of factors, and he started using Broadband Internet via cellular, which was even more maddening than all the other broadband options he'd tried previously.
Then... there was the possibility of a municipal fiber system. But first, there were "some politics".
Thin Pipe, Part 2 - What would you do for faster internet? The author risks being exiled from town to get it.
Part 1 was a fairly straightforward (but amusing) recital of bad Broadband Internet options. Part 2 gets really interesting, because it involves politics... hyper-local politics and the role those politics played in getting a solution. Things seemed to go well... until they didn't.
In the end, the author ends up with reasonable Broadband Internet Access, but how he ultimately ended up getting is an interesting tale.
In a nutshell, Thin Pipe, Part 2 explains why a lot of municipal Internet Access systems don't get built, and if they do, why some don't result in the nirvana of widely available, reliable, fast Broadband Internet Access at reasonable rates. Remember that the author did, at one time, actually have decent (for the time) Internet access provided by a municipal system. But with no commercial motivations to upgrade and expand it, that system eventually saturated and aged out and the original (capable) personnel were long gone. After reading Part 2, you'll might (like I did) shake your head at the close call of having this particular municipality actually attempting tobuild a municipal fiber network.
This bolsters my view of (previous article) Why Starlink Will Win Rural Broadband. Fast forward a few months to 2022. Someone like the author wants to move to a rural area and needs Broadband Internet Access but it's not available at their new home. (Realistically, in 2022, "needs Broadband Internet Access" describes nearly anyone who wants to participate in society, work, education, or increasingly, healthcare.)
To get Broadband Internet Access, do you "fight the good fight" to drag a municipal fiber system into your rural area, fighting bitterly against those that do not (ever) want to pay for it? You might think the naysayers are shortsighted - you'd be right. But then you've probably never lived in a rural area where this issue is very, very real (as the author explains so well).
Or do you just pragmatically go to Starlink.com and sign up? A few weeks later, your own Dishy McFlatface shows up that you install yourself. A few minutes after setting it up and plugging it in, and a few taps on the Starlink app later and Presto! you're online with Broadband Internet Access with no politics, no months or years-long wait. Not to mention no worries that your local municipality will remain competent to maintain the system.
It's a valid discussion about how much is lost when individuals can get reasonable Internet via Starlink without having to band together to force the issue of developing community-wide Broadband Internet Access (wireless, or fiber), with nearly everyone in the community benefitting once it's in place. I don't know the answer, other than those of us in rural areas that have been waiting for Broadband to catch up with us... can get it (in 2022), pretty much on demand.
Thanks for reading!
Steve Stroh
Bellingham, Washington, USA
2021-05-12
Copyright © 2021 by Steven K. Stroh