They're in the process of pulling out 3G in some rural areas I've been to. There's even less coverage than before.
The State of Vermont did, though: https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/local/vermont...
Several rational actors with complete public information can still collaborate just by their actions alone. There's an entire category of "Hat Puzzles" [1] that involve extracting information from other players moves. The big four (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) don't need to collude to arrive at a stagnant, uncompetitive market. They have found an equalibrium that benefits all of them, and would hurt any who attempted "competition".
I wish people better understood how monopolistic power harms everybody. It results in false scarcity trade offs, for instance. But that’s abstract.
What exactly is the sign of lack of competition? In the last ten years, I can think of few pieces of tech that’s gotten better faster than cell service. When the iPhone 3GS came out, you could get peak speeds up to 2-3 Mbps. On my XR, I’ve gotten 100 Mbps+. That factor of 20-30 increase is about the same as the increase in iPhone CPU performance over that time (which itself has been a stupendous success story). Maybe GPUs have improved faster? Certainly not desktop CPUs, or mobile or desktop operating systems, or web browsers, or search.
but there's no reason that has to be true, other than "that's the way it is". The money itself is fungible.
The subsidies are only given for areas that don’t have coverage currently. One national carrier is accused of overstating coverage in rural areas to keep subsidies from being given to rural cellular carriers. To get the subsidy, you’d want to understate the coverage.
EDIT: Previously, I incorrectly stated there is no subsidy for cellular. I forgot about Obama’s Mobility Fund. Phase 1 was $300 million in 2012, and Phase 2 was planned to be about $450 million per year over the next ten years. But that’s halted at the moment. Note that annual capital expenditures by the big 4 cellular providers is $55 billion annually. You’re talking about a really tiny investment by the government in the most underserved areas, not something big enough to really influence the coverage map.
I wish 5G had addressed the data and meta-data security model for wireless communications. If that had also been targeted, it would have mitigated a lot of current concerns.
Besides, roughly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas. Why should 5G deployment wait for the rest.
Are the 20% who live in rural places not full Americans who do not deserve something simply because of their geography? I hope you don't like eating, using a computer, or living in a house because those are the people who grow your food, mine your minerals, and cut your lumber.
Why should 5G deployment wait for the rest.
No one is saying wait. They're saying that there's no need to hurry through a major deployment that delivers only minor benefits.
US has no companies selling 4g/lte/5g infrastructure for carriers, maybe the US won't have startups selling services either.
Nobody deserves 5G.
Are you under the impression that when the stork is delivering babies, it asks them where they want to live?
There is a subset of people who choose to live in rural areas. But they are not a majority. And the remainder shouldn't be condescended to as if they made a bad life decision and are being punished for not wanting to live in a city.
Nobody deserves 5G
I'm not arguing that they do. But there are an awful lot of people in this thread who are OK if 3G and 4G never finish rolling out in rural areas as long as they, themselves, get gigabit 5G connections.
i think those people are simply not making the false conclusion that we can improve rural coverage by preventing the improvement of urban coverage.
I encourage everyone to read this study: https://media.defense.gov/2019/Apr/04/2002109654/-1/-1/0/DIB...
The implications of losing the 5G race are huge and it's sad to see a serious level of misinformation and ignorance being represented here. The idea that a delayed roll out is considered acceptable is completely misunderstanding the game we are playing.
Computers used to be niche, not everyone had one. That's not how technological progression is made though.
Alternatively, use the sub-6 GHz bands. The end game by whatever means is that all the cords are cut and radio is the ubiquitous connection technology.
4G can too, but it's a very niche option and will remain so with 5G and beyond until mobile operators stop thinking of themselves as mobile operators.
Just for ongoing cost… I've been in the house for 30 years. I've had new copper pulled three times (twice for adding ISDN lines back in the day and once to bury the service). The copper lines have over the years required days of effort for the linemen to work their way back toward the switching office looking for bad connections. Every spring for a few years I used to have problems from moisture ingress to the lines. My neighborhood is older than telephones. All of the pairs on the poles were in use and they had to work their way back through the lead clad lines to repair mine instead of just switching to a good pair. Eventually in the days of DSL they lost me as a customer because they couldn't (or wouldn't) afford to give me a clean enough pair of copper for reliable service.
So from the phone company's standpoint they made a capital expenditure which was long overdue to nail up fiber to the poles, and for a 4 hour truck roll they got me back as a customer for probably a decade.
The fiber on the poles is made for easy installation. There are ports already in place for each house. The installer rolls out some bulk fiber in a black cladding with some sort of tensile element. The cross section is smaller than a copper line, so it fits anywhere the copper is. I didn't see how he terminated it after cutting, but it didn't take long.
… and my upstream speeds are now 50 times faster than the cable company could provide. Happy nerd.