Why Rural Internet Sucks

In my article on DSL, I explained that I had the technology for several years. However, it was an old and slow variant, which struggled to do basically anything except fetch emails. I wanted to start making YouTube videos, start a business, start blogging, learn more about coding, technology, and cars, but I couldn't. The bandwidth wasn't there.

Though I'm just one resident of rural upstate New York, nearly everyone in rural areas has problems with internet access. They either can't get access to or become victims of companies like Frontier, my old provider, which typically offers speeds of up to 5 or 6mbps. These speeds are four to five times slower than the FCC's standard, 25mbps, which is far too slow for an age where everything is online. So how the hell do companies like Frontier get away with substandard service?

Before continuing, yes, I'm biased against Frontier, for a good reason. They made my life a constant cycle of resetting the modem and praying that it would connect. And they charged me WAYYY too much money for their service.

Objectively Bad Policies

If we go to the FCC's broadband map (https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/) and enter my address (which is somewhere near Oneonta, New York), we get a list of providers in my area and the technology that they use. We see that Frontier is listed three times, with speeds up to 25mbps on ADSL2. We also see three geostationary satellite internet providers, advertising up to 100mbps. And just on the corner, Frontier tells a whopper, saying they have fiber in the area that can push 100mbps. All these claims are misleading.

When I had Frontier, I always asked about increasing my speed. My modem reported that I could achieve about 12mbps, but Frontier always said that they'd have to run another phone line to get me faster internet. That would raise the cost of an already astonishing $63/mo to around $100/mo for 12 measly megabits per second. No, not the 25mbps that the FCC says they offered. 12mbps only. The FCC has that information because Frontier can self-report their data. That's like asking a kid to self-report their grades. They turn F's into A's.

I find it extremely unlikely that Frontier offers residential fiber on the corner. They have a few DSLAMs there, which connect to their fiber-based backbone. I highly doubt they offer their FIOS (Frontier licenses the name from Verizon. It is an inferior product according to many reviews. They probably overprovision, just like they did with us on DSL). If they do, it's only to a select number of people who have property next to their backbone fiber, not everybody in the square-mile block the FCC shows.

Satellite providers (with the exception of Starlink and other low-earth-orbit shops) may have fast speed these days, but if you want to video chat, game, call people, and communicate without restrictions, you're screwed. They have data caps, and because your data has to travel nearly 50,000 miles from dish to satellite to dish, you have high latency and everything that depends on real-time communication crumbles.

Internet and Personal Life

For years, I had no hope. It was challenging to do homework, even harder to watch educational videos and study. And when my family sat down after dinner to relax, we spent minutes buffering through ads, until our 240p stream of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart finally decided to load. My dad had trouble doing his job when we were on the internet, trying to do ours.

Now, we're fortunate enough to have a cooperative, not a crooked corporation that doesn't seem to like investing in its infrastructure, giving us fiber-optic internet. The slowest speed we've had yet is 98mbps, according to our network security device. We no longer have outages, and we can stream anything we want and do our jobs, no hassle. And we can go up to a gigabit per second, but we'll have to get more views on this blog to make that dream happen. Unfortunately, I know some people around here that had to rent apartments in more populated places to get better internet service. A buddy of mine rented an apartment 30 minutes away from his house during the pandemic. That was the only way he was going to get useful internet. I have heard from Frontier repairmen that they've had to buy another DSL line to support their children's education and still didn't have enough bandwidth.

As urban America gets better internet and rural America lags, we get more divided. Rural areas will lack economic potential and become wastelands. Beautiful wastelands, but barren of knowledge or communication. Kids that grew up the way I did won't learn, won't have opportunities to learn, and probably become destitute and desperate.

Fighting Back

I was so happy when I went to college, plugged my computer into the wall, and saw speeds of 900mbps. That experience of relief drove me to write a paper about rural internet for my writing class, research solutions, figure out why Frontier and the others hated rural America. Here's what I found:

Corporations are money-making machines. Many don't care about the quality of their service, as long as they see big profit margins. That's why most high-speed ISPs flock to areas with many people and leave the rest of America alone. They left us hillbillies to Frontier and other ISPs who realized they could profit by giving us substandard internet at an unacceptable cost.

Now that the internet is becoming more and more of a necessity, especially during the pandemic, rural Americans feel that their connection is on the verge of total collapse. For all the bad things I've said about them, Frontier is reportedly deploying fiber in other areas of Central New York, but it seems to be going at a snail's pace. But they responded too slow: Otsego Electric beat them to the Grace household and many more throughout Otsego County, New York. You can't trust Frontier. But I trust my cooperative: they put up 700 miles of fiber in about two years, which seems like a long time, but it's swift for an underdog cooperative, fighting the multimillionaires of corporate ISPs.

We have more power to change our situation than ever before. In rural areas, it's imperative to demand better internet from your lawmakers, local and federal. If a politician says, "screw you, we want to leave you in the dark," only support them if you want to live like the Amish for the rest of your life. That's the least you can do.

If you've got more technical expertise and money, look up how to start an internet service provider. It's possible: several websites are dedicated to helping driven people start service providers. Bandwidth is getting cheaper by the day. I'd say the average cost for a gigabit per second is around $100-$150, and steadily declining. Many sites recommend wireless technology, but that can beat DSL in many cases.

Briefly, you need to find fiber from an internet reseller/enterprise ISP in your area, set up a core router, and deploy equipment. Unfortunately, such setups could cost thousands, but if you've got capital and know what you're doing, you can pull it off. Check the subreddit r/WISP.

If you've got more business knowledge and resources, or own an electric cooperative in a rural area, set up another co-op for internet service. Get your neighborhood together and buy internet, equipment, and fiber wholesale. You can probably get government funding. The process resembles starting a WISP, but you will probably need to buy IP addresses from ICANN (the nonprofit that sells IP addresses) and more transit than the average WISP. You'll probably need more capacity as well.

Lastly, there is another option. Wait. Endure seven more years of headaches. Wait for SpaceX, a sister company to Tesla, to deploy Starlink. Starlink is a satellite system, but the satellites are faster and much closer to earth so that you can game using satellite. It won't be quite as fast as a good WISP or fiber, but it can sure outrun DSL.

But don't sit around and do nothing if you've got bad internet. Research. Learn. **Fight for better internet. **

READ MORE:

The subreddit for WISP operators has tons of useful information

Newsweek about ISP ratings

The FCC Broadband map

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica on Ajit Pai, head of the FCC

Download my 10-page paper about rural internet that I wrote last semester

DISCLAIMER: ALL DESCRIPTIONS OF COMPANIES ARE MY PERSONAL OPINION FOR LEGAL REASONS.