Reply to post: Let's hope there's more than just fibre...

Let's hope there's more than just fibre...

>The wording suggests that the federal government will seek to pay companies to lay fiber networks that internet service providers can then offer their services on top of, similar to the municipal networks that have been growing across the US.

A few years ago Charter laid fiber down Highway 199 in Josephine County, Oregon all the way to Cave Junction(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Junction,_Oregon), and maybe beyond. So there is a fiber feed to the Illinois Valley; an area of about 1000 square miles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_River_(Oregon)), with lowland areas (outside the Kalmiopsis Wilderness) of around 1/3 million acres.

The valley population is under 10,000 people, approximately 4,000 home sites (perhaps less).

I live maybe 1 3/4 miles (road distance) from highway 199 and the road serves as the sole access for nine permanently occupied home sites located after the first few hundred yards. So that's 1 house for every 300yds of fiber, buried in an unmaintained, gravel, road - this is not going to happen, pretty much all of us have given up on the flakey, over-priced, telephone service and just use cellphones (mobiles).

So I use a local ISP who has wireless service covering much of the Illinois Valley. That provider keeps promising to upgrade my antenna to one capable of 5G and has a never-ending stream of reasons why it isn't happening. Google's "speed test" just told me I'm getting 1.5Mbps download and 0.4Mbps upload; if I complain it will go up, at one point after extensive complaining it was 3Mbps (what I'm paying for) with peaks at 5Mbps.

The main part of the US is very different to anywhere else in the world; it has a massive surface area and, unlike Siberia, Alaska, Canada, Australia and the Antarctic, the population is scattered throughout that area despite the enormous concentrations in cities. Fiber does not and cannot work. The only way to solve the issue is wireless, be that 5G from ground based stations with fast, maybe fiber, interconnect or some insanely massive and very fragile near-earth based infrastructure.

Some people understand this, but not the majority of the Americans who are in charge of the US.