One of the provisions of President Biden’s American Jobs Plan is to spend $100 billion bringing broadband internet services to “more than 30 million Americans” who live in rural “areas where there is no broadband infrastructure that provides minimally acceptable speeds.” That’s $3,333 per person or about $8,800 per household.
Rural home in desperate need of high-speed internet.
Who are these people who deserve such a big subsidy? Well, I’m one of them. Here in rural central Oregon, we have DSL speeds that are barely faster than dial-up. The alternative is satellite, which is pretty fast but I don’t like the idea of paying by the gigabyte. That’s just me; some of my neighbors have it and it works pretty well for them. Satellite is available everywhere, so it’s not like any rural Americans are physically deprived from broadband.
My main point, however, is that Biden either thinks, or wants us to think, that rural people are all dirt-poor farmers deprived of the benefits they could get from watching Netflix on cold winter nights. I’m sure you can find some of those, but they are far from a majority of rural residents.
Table B24050 of the American Community Survey shows the “industry by occupation” for American workers. When broken down by urban and rural, we find that just 4.6 percent of rural workers have jobs in the “agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, and mining” sectors. Almost twice as many rural workers have construction jobs and three times as many have manufacturing jobs.
Of course, every “direct” job, such as farming or mining, generates “indirect” jobs in, say, education and retail sectors. Every direct job in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting is estimated to produce 2.3 indirect jobs while mining jobs produce 3.9 indirect jobs. That means the 1.3 million rural jobs in ag, forestry, etc. produce 3.5 million indirect jobs for a total of 17 percent of all rural jobs.
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So who are the other 83 percent? A lot of them are people like me: exurbanites, meaning people with urban-like jobs who have decided to live in rural areas. This probably includes most of the 1.5 million rural people with finance and real estate jobs; the 2.4 million with professional, scientific, and management jobs; and 1.7 million with transportation jobs.
Nor are most of these people materially deprived. American Community Survey table 24021 says that rural incomes are 95 percent as high as urban incomes. In some fields, including transportation, rural incomes are considerably higher than urban incomes.
Regardless of income, exurbanites made a conscious choice to live in rural areas knowing that they would be giving up some of the benefits of living in urban areas. Ruralites have to drive further to get to a supermarket, have less convenient access to professional services, can’t go out to eat every night or frequently attend the theater, and their internet access is likely to be slower. These are trade offs they made in order to be away from crowds and closer to nature.
Moreover, even without Biden’s bill, they aren’t likely to lack access to high-speed internet much longer. According to the Federal Communications Commission, partly due to existing federal programs, the share of Americans who lacked access to high-speed internet fell from 25.5 percent in 2010 (which probably included almost everyone living in rural areas) to 6.5 percent in 2019. That’s fewer than 30 million, but no matter what the exact numbers, the trend is the same: people are getting connected, so this is a problem that is rapidly going away.
Well-off, exurban households clearly neither deserve nor need an $8,800 subsidy to get broadband service, especially when those who really need it can always get satellite service. Personally, I’d love a faster connection, but given the glacial pace of federal infrastructure construction projects, I’ll probably get it sooner through the private market than through the government even if Congress passes Biden’s proposal.
You might be interested in this article on the economics of Elon Musk’s Starlink, which is an unmetered satellite Internet service.
https://www.cringely.com/2021/04/20/starlink-is-a-global-isp-built-at-zero-cost-to-spacex-enabling-nasas-artemis-launch/
And there are many up-and-coming competitors to Starlink —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Competition_and_market_effects
— including Amazon.
This broadband access spending program is another example of government fighting the last war.
”
This broadband access spending program is another example of government fighting the last war.
” ~rovingbroker
Indeed, a glaring omission from this article is Starlink, which will make this government spending even more wasteful and unnecessary than it already is.
There’s a strong cellphone signal with good download speed on Green Ridge. Looks like there’s a tower at Hoodoo, should cover Camp Sherman? Should be faster than DSL.
Competition is desperately needed. Bend Broadband sucks, so it’s not like even if you do have broadband, you’ll like the provider, service, and pricing. Unfortunately, government grants a monopoly to broadband providers. Missouri has it right by requiring licensing only at the state level so multiple providers can operate in any municipality.
While the high-tech approach pushes the costs and energy use of the internet higher and higher, the low-tech alternatives result in much cheaper and very energy efficient networks that combine well with renewable power production and are resistant to disruptions. If we want the internet to keep working in circumstances where access to energy is more limited, we can learn important lessons from alternative network technologies. Best of all, there’s no need to wait for governments or companies to facilitate: we can build our own resilient communication infrastructure if we cooperate.
Europe has entire private, hand built networks. Long-distance WiFi links require line of sight to make a connection — in this sense, the technology resembles the 18th century optical telegraph.Long range WiFi offers high bandwidth (up to 54 Mbps) combined with very low capital costs. Because the WiFi standard enjoys widespread acceptance and has huge production volumes, off-the-shelf antennas and wireless cards can be bought for very little money.
While most low-tech networks are aimed at regions where the alternative is often no internet connection at all, their usefulness for well-connected areas cannot be overlooked. The internet as we know it in the industrialized world is a product of an abundant energy supply, a robust electricity infrastructure, and sustained economic growth, huge capital expenses. This “high-tech” internet might offer some fancy advantages over the low-tech networks, but it cannot survive if these conditions change. This makes it extremely vulnerable.
And the silicon valley titans; are they really trust worthy. “Democratize Democracy”
I’m sure that’s what the wizards behind Twitter, Facebook, and Google told themselves good would follow til they transformed into the greatest censorship, snitchery, and propaganda agents in world history. A redundant, low tech internet…..while slower is orders of magnitude more liberating.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX inks satellite connectivity deal with Google Cloud
Under a new agreement, SpaceX will plant Starlink terminals at Google Cloud’s data centers
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/13/22433982/elon-musk-spacex-internet-connectivity-deal-google-cloud
Competition is fierce between Musk’s Starlink network and the budding Kuiper Project from Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, which aims to launch more than 3,000 satellites in roughly the same orbit as Starlink to also provide global broadband internet.
[ … ]
Competition is fierce between Musk’s Starlink network and the budding Kuiper Project from Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, which aims to launch more than 3,000 satellites in roughly the same orbit as Starlink to also provide global broadband internet.
[ … ]
Microsoft, which runs another massive cloud service dubbed Azure that also competes with Amazon’s cloud, also partnered with SpaceX last year in a similar partnership.
It appears that the largest and most knowledgeable companies in the business of organizing, storing and distributing data are putting their money into a constellation of low earth orbit satellites.