If you Believe that the High Speed Broadband you have in American Cities is too Slow, you should try a Small Town
To people who live in densely-populated urban areas, on-demand connectivity to the Internet is so taken for granted that if a YouTube video is a bit slow to load, it can seem like their Internet service providers have totally failed them. If a Netflix movie streamed on their broadband connection at home takes a couple of minutes to start playing, they wonder what America is doing when every school kid in Korea has an 8Mbps high speed broadband connection on demand.
Move slightly away from the major urban centers in America, say to anyone of the several small towns or villages in Massachusetts or Alabama, and you will discover that practically no one even has an Internet connection. Those who do, crawl along at speeds that urban cityfolk managed with possibly 12 years ago on technology called dial-up. When they really need to use the Internet for information or something, they either go to the public library to use the computers on a broadband connection there, or drive tens of miles to a friend or relative in a city nearby where they do have a broadband connection. As a matter of fact, in a country where cityfolk have grown spoiled on the kind of access to the latest computers and phones that their children have, small-town folk in America knew that their children will probably never see a computer outside of their high schools. There are statistics that claim that one-third of America has never used the Internet at all. And in the rural parts of America, only two-thirds of all homes have high speed broadband.
The thing is, high speed broadband is not just a luxury.
It isn’t just about watching YouTube. It’s about being able to participate in the country’s democracy. It is about finding magazines to read. It’s about sharing opinions on the social networks. And of course, people need to do things like buy stuff, arrange for an online doctor’s visit, and do their banking. They could also get work from home jobs and study for online degrees. Wouldn’t it be far cheaper for people to just get satellite broadband rather than a hardwired connection? A satellite connection Is not practical in lots of rural areas though. There are just too many trees. And anyway, in places like these were people on the average may perhaps $28,000 a year to a household, all these options that cost something like $80 a month would just be overly expensive.
One of the problems that the Internet service providers have been expanding coverage to rural areas is that people, here are so unaware of all that the Internet can make possible for them, that when they are polled by the service providers who want to know if there will be enough paying customers for them if they bring their service in, they just say no. 20% of America just doesn’t use the Internet. Because they feel that the Internet is unsuitable for them. Once that changes, the Internet service providers could be tempted into expanding high speed broadband access all over.
