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Comment by wintermutestwin | Hacker News Reader

I live in semi-rural California. It would be a great place for SV tech to live - great schools, affordable (for CA) houses, awesome nature access, and you could drive to the Bay for a really important meeting. The problem is there are only pockets of cable internet and most places are lucky to get 2 bars of cellular. There is fiber running down the two major highways. The reasons why we are so disconnected are many and complicated, but the only real solution is that access should be driven top down as a public utility - just like power.

Oh, and while they are at it, I shouldn't have to worry about my internet utility stealing my data. They have a monopoly and so I am forced to accept whatever they put in my contract. If I could negotiate, I'd charge these leaches billions for my data...

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There is a frenzy of people buying houses in Tahoe right now so they can work from there, but many will be disappointed to find that the internet service available will not allow them to work successfully. We have a cabin in a neighborhood that ostensibly has decent DSL, but AT&T will not allow new signups and the the bandwidth drops to 500 kbps between noon and 3PM on weekdays since the Pandemic started. Oddly it is fine in the evening (when my internet often stops working in the Bay Area). I'm wondering if internet quality should be part of the real estate disclosure process.

Rural Canada is a big problem for ISPs or so they say. Vast distances and little profit. Often the people who live in rural areas do so because it's cheaper to live there. Many may not be able to afford $200 Internet or maybe even $20 is too much. I know some rural folks who live on $6,000 per year.

My province is small but even here in the rural areas ISPs balk at having to run fiber down a side road off the main highway. Even with money thrown at them from various governments over the last two decades they still won't budge.

The places that do have DSL or wireless are often stuck in the "up to" scenario. Sure it's supposed to be 1.5Mbps but it's up to 1.5Mbps.

Many people here are waiting for Starlink but I don't think that will be as good as promised. If the cost is low that will help but the dish will be a problem. Rural areas tend to have a lot of trees and here we also have snow 1/2 the year.

Absent StarLink, the higher price on rural areas sends inherent. The only way around this seems to be to subsidize it in some way. Should we really make everyone else pay so that some people can save money by living in a rural area? Why not then just straight up give them the cash and leave the rural area to nature?

My main reason would be because the people that grow the food we all eat live in rural areas.

Forget semi-rural. I'm in the middle of Silicon Valley and I had 10,000ms+ ping and 95%+ packet drops for a month during work hours at the beginning of the lockdown.

I really don't have much experience with it, but is satellite internet really that bad an option for remote work?

Access to fast reliable internet in LA is pretty poor too. It's not just rural areas that have terrible infrastructure.

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