(08-23-2018 11:54 AM)200yrs2late Wrote:  

(08-23-2018 11:28 AM)SuperFlyBCat Wrote:  

(08-23-2018 11:11 AM)Claw Wrote:  One thing I would support is government projects to extend high-speed data infrastructure to rural America.

This was necessary with electricity and phone lines in the early part of last century. We may need that again.

Even this cranky right-wing old man would support that.

Most rural people use their satellite (Dish Direct TV or whatever it is called) for an ISP.
Mobile phone service can get sketchy at times as cell towers are less frequent.

I'm in a rural area without access to high speed internet. I don't know about Direct, but Dish uses HughesNet for their high speed, which on good days is about a fast as a 3G signal. It's also limited, not to mention expensive. My farm is one mile off of a county road with access to high speed cable and the cable company wanted over $65,000 to run cable to the 15 houses on the farm - a total of about 2.5 miles of cable.

Cell service is spotty since I'm on a relatively un-populated area of the coast and there are very few overlapping towers. My phone spends about half the time with a weak 4G signal and the rest of the time with a decent 3G signal.

I'd like to have access to high-speed and honestly cable as well. Summer storms make Dish unreliable at best, but in the end it isn't that much of a issue.

I live just outside the suburbs of Chicago, and am four miles from a municipal area of 60,000. I am 1/2 mile off a state highway on a township road. My only internet options are Dish, or wireless broadband, which is what we have. I have an antenna on my house that points at another antenna on Farmer Fred's grain leg. That antenna hands my signal off to another where they have a fiber connection. Cell coverage at my house is spotty, so much that we can't drop the landline.

Wireless broadband is line of sight, so we have issues with it. And, it isn't that reliable.