The general state of Internet broadband [2022] *spawn*

Maybe you could get a cellular repeater and improve that particular situation. Since you at least have some reception.
 
swaaye said:
Maybe you could get a cellular repeater and improve that particular situation. Since you at least have some reception.
Click to expand...

It's good enough for my father and one of my cousins from Hawai'i who recently moved out there. Not good enough for me. I'm not yet ready to trust mobile broadband for my needs. Hence not living out there. It's mostly a handy example to explain why some in the US only have access to low speed broadband or none at all, outside of satellite internet. Unfortunately for them, it's only available as part of a mobile phone plan as Verizon's high speed wireless broadband service is unavailable there. I believe we're limited to 4g out there. I think they finally upgraded that area to 4g from 3g last year.

It basically boils down to a cost versus returns issue for any company looking to provide service. Is there enough customers to offset the cost of running internet out 10's or 100's of miles to a small community (10's or 100's) with maybe single digit households willing to pay for internet as well as the regular maintenance and support that service would require for any hardware infrastructure required. Any potential upgrade to the service (speed or otherwise) would depend entirely on whether or not the company has recouped the cost of bringing internet out to that area and whether there were sufficient subscribers to warrant the expenditure.

And if it's just to a lone household, no internet company is going to want to do that unless the household is willing to bear the cost of bringing the internet out there as well as paying for the any technicians to come out for a service outage (usually part of an insurance fee or additional service contract) or regular maintenance. Upgrades that require changes to hardware would be entirely on the home owner as well in that case.

That's where something like Elon Musk's Starlink could be a godsend as it's incredibly cheap compared to anything of a similar speed (other satellite service providers aren't nearly as good or fast). It actually brings relatively cheap broadband to any household as long as they can power the equipment and are within an area the satellites cover.

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
It's good enough for my father and one of my cousins from Hawai'i who recently moved out there. Not good enough for me. I'm not yet ready to trust mobile broadband for my needs. Hence not living out there. It's mostly a handy example to explain why some in the US only have access to low speed broadband or none at all, outside of satellite internet. Unfortunately for them, it's only available as part of a mobile phone plan as Verizon's high speed wireless broadband service is unavailable there. I believe we're limited to 4g out there. I think they finally upgraded that area to 4g from 3g last year.

It basically boils down to a cost versus returns issue for any company looking to provide service. Is there enough customers to offset the cost of running internet out 10's or 100's of miles to a small community (10's or 100's) with maybe single digit households willing to pay for internet as well as the regular maintenance and support that service would require for any hardware infrastructure required. Any potential upgrade to the service (speed or otherwise) would depend entirely on whether or not the company has recouped the cost of bringing internet out to that area and whether there were sufficient subscribers to warrant the expenditure.

And if it's just to a lone household, no internet company is going to want to do that unless the household is willing to bear the cost of bringing the internet out there as well as paying for the any technicians to come out for a service outage (usually part of an insurance fee or additional service contract) or regular maintenance. Upgrades that require changes to hardware would be entirely on the home owner as well in that case.

That's where something like Elon Musk's Starlink could be a godsend as it's incredibly cheap compared to anything of a similar speed (other satellite service providers aren't nearly as good or fast). It actually brings relatively cheap broadband to any household as long as they can power the equipment and are within an area the satellites cover.

Regards,
SB
Click to expand...

Yeah rural internet is an interesting topic. My parents are in the UP of MI buried away in the forest behind a lake, miles away from the little nearby-ish towns, with Ottawa forest on the other side of them, and at least managed to get DSL. Cell service is not available unless you are out in the clear on the lake. There is a highway tower that reaches to that point.

There are some small towns on the way up there that have 5G service now. I've heard that upgrading from LTE to a level of 5G is not a major ordeal though.
 
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It's not just connection and latency speeds but data caps as well. Cellular and satellite, especially the latter, aren't very useful for providing a home Internet access for a family.
 
Silent_Buddha said:
We have high wind conditions depending on the time of year. High enough that they can blow over trees if the trees aren't healthy. We'd obviously be able to dig our own trenches for a conduit but once it gets to a public road, it's a bit of a windy path from there as outside of the public roads most of the land around that area is privately owned or federally managed forests where our government prevents access to any sort of development (like infrastructure) outside of some corridors for high power electric transmission cables.
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And this is the disconnect for me, why does not the government (federal and local) fix this. Give access and create a backbone and each community or ranch could be responsible for putting in place the needed infrastructure on their own property.
This is being done other places in the world, why not in your country? :)

I also remember having a conversation with a german once about FTTH, he said people did not want it, because nobody wanted their gardens destroyed :)

/edit

The population density in Norway is 15 per Km2 (38 people per mi2)
Our largest city is about 650k people and its the size of 454 Km2
While Norway is 385 207 km², so it's not that we have people living close to each other here either.
And the fun part is, FTTH was readily available outside the cities before it came to the cities, due to lower cost of deployment and vDSL/Cable worked okaish on the shorter links in the cities
 
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Malo said:
It's not just connection and latency speeds but data caps as well. Cellular and satellite, especially the latter, aren't very useful for providing a home Internet access for a family.
Click to expand...

Do you mean a gamer? Starlink is 100Mbps/10Mbps on average and has no data caps. Outside the service not being conducive to playing COD competitively, why is not useful for families?
 
Yeah, Starlink isn't like other pre-existing Satellite/Cellular internet providers. The earlier ones had miniscule data caps, where browsing is all you would be able to do, streaming and gaming were absolutely off the table.
 
I also have experience with rural P2P/P2MP & cellular fixed internet.
This was early-mid 00s tech, I'm not sure where the tech & price/performance is since.

The main rural area we were covering had the handy advantage of being mostly flat with a bunch of handily placed tall hills/mountains that were also being used for existing TV broadcasting & Cellular coverage so we were able to hook into existing power supply/backhaul (& maintenance tech time).
We were able to cover a pretty large area with quality connections at affordable prices.

A lot of other places with less ideal geography this setup wouldn't have worked though because a lot of houses would not have Line of Sight due to intervening hills and/or lack of prominent hills to put basestations on -> only fairly short ranges being possible etc.
I think within a limited area with handy geography, small ISPs setup in this way can probably still work nicely especially with local Govt assistance/ownership & absent Govt subsidised/large commercial competition.

In our case central Govt forced/funded/subsidised first ADSL2+ upgrades to even very small towns which also meant fibre first to the Exchange & then to Cabinets (and the equipment used supports VDSL so that also became available) -> each one bought online would strip a bunch of customers from our potential pool.
Later, Govt started funding/subsidising FTTH and a Rural 4G cellular rollout.
Fibre obviously didn't really take away users who weren't already likely to have gone to ADSL2+ first but even though they over-promised & under-delivered, the 4G was the death-knell for us, though a big part of our problem was when we had funding available, newer tech gear wasn't ready yet and by the time the newer gear was available we no longer had funding.


Regarding satellite:
Traditionally uses Geosynchronous satellites ~36,000km up.
Its a long way out there https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Comparison_satellite_navigation_orbits.svg
* 2 for the trip back = about 350ms minimum lightspeed latency (plus trigonometry for latitude/longitude difference vs the satellite & various stuff for it being radio data, plus whatever for the data to get to/from the groundstation)
At least the type we've had available here for residential users actually only used satellite for the download & needed a dialup connection for upload with all the pitfalls that entails for rural users.

Starlink (& various similar attempts before) use LEO (only a few hundred km) -> far lower latency (can never be better than surface fibre cables unless) and much lower transmitter power required.
But you need to have large numbers of satellites to provide reliable coverage & an ongoing replacement program = huge $$$ to get up & keep up -> previous attempts have failed before deployment or only been able to keep running with heavy Govt subsidies.
eg Iridium was within days of starting to de-orbit its constellation when US military stepped in with a multi-year guaranteed minimum-spend, later repeatedly renewed & they were able to wipe billions in debt from the launch program in bankruptcy.
I will be very surprised if Starlink is able to break even without being largely dependent on massive US Govt/military subsidies. (probably whats been done so far already is)

We now have FTTH rollout to pretty much all urban areas nearly complete, 300Mbit/s min speed, copper is being actively withdrawn & 4G+ cellular coverage is 95+% household coverage on both major carriers.
Doesn't leave a lot of users likely to want something like Starlink: some Muskovites (Elonatics?) will get it on principal, some urban types who can't/won't get a fibre or other type of connection for various reasons, possibly a decent chunk of properly rural users depending on how the actual price/performance is vs 4G & there are definitely some users out there in awkward valleys etc that are still stuck on old-style satellite.
Enough customers to support a small local marketing/logistics/support operation? Maybe but it'd have to be very small.
 
TalkTalk do pish fast broadband. For general browsing, yeah, it's good. But for streaming, though? Nah. I only get approximately 0.5 MB, which makes watching movies or live streams a chore. :(
 
The guys in the cherry picker were in my street just two days ago stringing fibre along the telegraph poles. We've had a flyer through the door offering up to gigabit symmetric FTTP.

I've been on Virgin for decades (since before it was Virgin) and it's been fine but their 1gig package is quite expensive and the upstream is a bit sucky. So hopefully things will improve.
 
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