That's the lie everyone in America likes to tell themselves - it's very easy to provide electricity and phone service to all these people, but somehow internet is not.
That's the lie everyone in America likes to tell themselves - it's very easy to provide electricity and phone service to all these people, but somehow internet is not.
America didn't achieve near-total electrification until 1960 or so. The farm my dad grew up on didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing until well into his childhood in the 50's, despite urban areas being mostly electrified in the 1920's.
The fact that I have fiber Internet service while living in a forest in a relatively rural area is pretty much a miracle by comparison.
Look up DSL.
Electricity is genuinely hard and expensive, but we've accepted it as a basic need of modern life. Lighting, fridges, HVAC, kitchen appliances... People die if the electric grid goes down for long enough, but phones and Internet are a bit more of an optimization, a luxury.
Not disagreeing with your sentiment, though, just saying the scenarios are a bit different. Electricity and phone aren't "very easy", we just accept one as difficult but required, and the other (if you mean landline service) was already there and isn't really being maintained anymore.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/att-took-283-mil...
>AT&T falsely told the US government that it met its obligation to deploy broadband at more than 133,000 locations in Mississippi, state officials say.
>Since 2015, AT&T has received over $283 million from the Federal Communications Commission’s Connect America Fund to expand its network in Mississippi. But the Mississippi Public Service Commission (PSC) said it has evidence that AT&T’s fixed-wireless broadband is not available to all the homes and businesses where AT&T claims it offers service. The PSC asked the FCC to conduct “a complete compliance audit” of AT&T’s claim that it has met its obligation
So it's that we cannot do it, it's that it's more profitable to say it's "difficult" to do it and then lie about getting it done.