There are several comments here noting that small towns are pretty well wired. I’m fortunate to have just purchased a vacation home in rural Wisconsin (close to family). In DC, I have 100Mbps fiber, a free upgrade from FiOS from the 25Mbps I ordered, with the option to get a gigabit. At my other house, I have a 6Mbps DSL that only delivers 1.5Mbps at best, with a couple hundred Kbps upload. There’s a cell tower only a mile away, but hills and trees obscure the signal; still with two bars I can get 20Mbps on my iPhone. Can I get a reasonable data plan? No. All the data plans cost a lot for a little, and throttle you to 2G after a hundred GB or so of download per month.
My hope is to spend a good portion of every summer working remotely in Wisconsin. I’ll be hard-pressed to make video conferences and pairing sessions work, and I sure won’t be streaming many shows for entertainment in the evenings.
Different locations have different issues, but I think your potential for great and affordable seasonal broadband is actually excellent. Conferencing, pairing, and streaming are going to be just fine. You're a techie --- you can solve this. Since I'm fond of rural Wisconsin, and have solved similar cellular problems elsewhere, allow me to make some suggestions.
If the tower you are able to hit with 2 bars is AT&T, buy a used/refurbished MR1100 cellular router for less than $150 from Ebay, buy a high gain 4G MIMO antenna and cables for about $100 (try to learn what frequency your tower is on first), and pay $50 a month for an unlimited AT&T data sim (I've used this guy: https://www.ebay.com/itm/4G-LTE-ATT-Unlimited-HOTSPOT-Data-5...).
If your closest tower is not AT&T, there's probably something comparable. There's probably not a great price advantage to the SIM card resellers, but they do make it easier to try things out. I'm currently using an excellent local provider instead of AT&T (VTelWireless), and a speed test just confirmed I'm at a delightfully usable 50/25 Mbit/s.
Why didn’t you buy a vacation home in a place that’s better wired? We stayed at an AirBnB is Putnam County, NY recently that had very solid 100 Mbps cable. You can get 100 Mbps cable throughout Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Easton, a town of 15,000, is upgrading its municipal cable system to gigabit.
What does it say about the importance of high-speed broadband access as a differentiating factor that even someone in the tech industry will move somewhere without it? Is that a compelling fact for towns like Easton who believe that investing in municipal broadband will attract more residents?
Your question comes across as a bit rude. To answer it, because after half a year of looking, it was far closer to the ideal across a range of factors than anything else we’d found. I didn’t really notice how terrible the DSL was until after we purchased.
The Eastern Shore in Maryland can be pretty rural, but it’s still Maryland. Euston is 15,000; my place is between two villages, one of 900 and the other of 1600. In town, Internet access _is_ pretty decent. But the countryside is another matter.
Cities are economic powerhouses because they have network effects. My career has benefited from those network effects, and I think it would be a personal mistake for me to convert to a 100% remote position. But I can leverage a bit of that career capital to be remote sometime and take advantage of the vast cost differences between a coastal city and the rural Midwest, and get some lifestyle advantages from it (most importantly having my children see their extended family members far more frequently). I am going to have to invest a decent amount in equipment and services (e.g., MiFi, antenna, a router that’ll support line sharing with the cell, VPS, etc.) to make it work. That’s not to say “poor me,” far from it, but simply to point out that rural broadband can really suck in some places. And I’m lucky in that the cell signal exists; lots of places it doesn’t.
I'm trying to tease out what you value, in an economic sense. Khanna is proposing to spend a bunch of taxpayer money building fiber in rural areas, in hopes that it helps economically revitalize these places. But you're someone who already works in tech, and judges a house to be "closer to the ideal across a range of factors" even though it has nothing faster than DSL. If someone who already has a need for fast connectivity won't use connectivity as a dispositive factor in deciding where to buy a house, how valuable can fiber access really be? If people won't pick Town A over Town B because Town A has much better connectivity, what does that say about the value of Town A spending a bunch of tax dollars to build a fiber network?
I think this is an important point, because we shouldn't make policy based on platitudes. If fiber really has the value the platitudes ascribe to it, we would see places with fiber being measurably more desirable than places without it.
I'm probably in the minority but I don't really understand the obsession with fiber. I have about a 25 Mbit connection at home and that's fine for remote work most of the time. My cable is sometimes a little wonky on video calls but that's not the end of the world. [And TBH people calling in from our offices have their own problems off and on as well.]
Marginal DSL like my dad has--maybe 1 Mbit--is indeed something of an issue for my working from his house. (Also marginal cell coverage.) On the other hand, I know someone who works remotely from home who just has a satellite connection.
Yes, having an internet connection is important. But I'm far less convinced of the incremental value of high-speed fiber.
Well, for me, it isn’t about living there full-time, so the best possible connectivity wasn’t the biggest consideration; advertised DSL goes up to 18Mbps or more, and discounting that ideal to, say, 8-10 Mbps would still leave me in okay shape. The other factors were things like: size of property (35+ acres), quality of property (trails, garden space, places for kids to play outside, natural beauty, conservation), the house, and a balanced location between different families as well as airports. I will admit that I was surprised my DSL was _so bad_, considering we weren’t that far from town and not far away from a state highway.
I agree with you that spending tax money on fiber won’t be a silver bullet for a rural community in terms of encouraging economic growth from the tech sector. It does help counteract the monopolistic rent-seeking behaviors of local telecom companies, however.
I’m semi-optimistic about fixed wireless in the coming years. We’ll see about the Sprint/T-Mobile deal.
I might be a bit pessimistic because WiMAX ended up being such a bust. OTOH, it seems as if consumer bandwidth needs are probably plateauing to a certain degree so another generation of wireless can possibly get things to a good enough point for many purposes.
My hope is to spend a good portion of every summer working remotely in Wisconsin. I’ll be hard-pressed to make video conferences and pairing sessions work, and I sure won’t be streaming many shows for entertainment in the evenings.