Even a town I used to live in with Donald voters, more than half the town couldn’t get speed over 5 Mbps - they had to use Satellite. And the other half? We had over 800 Mbps. 2 years after Covid, the other town finally has it. Ridiculous.
Rural voters overwhelmingly voted for this. I have no sympathy. I’m downloading shit fast as fuck. And I’m using my symetric fiber to seed 24/7 the following torrents: CDC data removed from gov websites, data leak from Patriot Front (a local fascist movement in USA), and war crimes committed by IDF in Gaza. Plus a lot of porn.
Cheers, shitbags! You got what you voted for.
Frontier trounced all over Xfinity here because of this program. I now have fiber vs 300mbps (400 plan). So many blue dots around WV but the koolaid is in the water.
Could u rephrase this in a language normal people can understand?
Frontier new kid in town, big company out money as people switch. Faster internet. Republicans dominate the state but not everyone is mindless and few leftists/centrists dot the state.
The funniest part is that it’s his voters lol
The news will probably never reach them.
And if it does, they’ll thank him for helping them to disconnect.
Not at broadband speeds, that’s for sure.
Funds allocated throughout the years have NEVER actually gone to providing/increasing broadband in rural areas.
Not true, just got 2Gb fiber in rural WI through a federal grant allocated 2 years ago.
Not entirely, my ISP is a family owned regional cable company and they took the grant and have rolled out fiber across multiple counties.
I get what you’re saying about the mega corps, yeah they just pocket a lot of the money. But the smaller ISPs are being smart and investing in their infrastructure to be able to complete.
Frontier took the money and said, “Watch us trounce the big boy monopoly here”
Never say never. There are actually several areas where I’ve seen fiber build out from government grants.
That said, they are EXCEPTIONALLY rare and typically scumbag ISPs pocket the money with no consequences, since nobody who writes these laws sets up consequences for failing to deliver.
To be fair, this federal program was a cluster eff since they started it in about 2010. It passed a bunch of grant money through to the states, which all did different “things” with it. Most held semi-public meetings and planning sessions for 5-10 years or wrote detailed planning documents but never delivered any physical infrastructure (actual results to the residents).
Some states / towns hired ISPs who just pocketed the money with no consequences. Some towns even got fed up with no progress and started their own ISPs only to get sued by said corrupt ISP. Looking at you Verizon FiOS.
I’m confused. The article is talking about “BEAD” which wasn’t passed until 2021. You must be talking about a different program.
Yea he is, but it’s probably the same telecom handout bullshit like the other program.
Trump is a piece of shit, but every program he cuts is not necessarily wrong. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Still no justification for this money to be funneled to felon musk.
I’m sure that there are examples of actually wasted money, but just putting it out there that planning is fucking important. There have been several high profile projects, like Texas high speed rail, where planning was the hard part and the project got canceled as they were ready to break ground because “there was no progress”. Cue* Republicans “the government does nothing” after they stopped anything from happening. Infrastructure cannot operate on election cycle timelines.
Digging in the ground and integrating with existing infrastructure isn’t just a plug and play operation. Leases and liens need to be sorted out. Estimates of current and future demand needs to be sorted out so you don’t install useless networks. Fiber isn’t that heavy, but “can the existing conduits under bridges/roads/etc support it and/or do they have room to without a complete replacement” isn’t a trivial question for backbone lines.
Winging it just causes more problems as you find things you didn’t anticipate and cause delays while having to continue paying contracts so work can resume once the delay is cleared. If you don’t, the contractor is on to their next job and unavailable for an effectively random amount of time. While everyone is mad at you that “no work is being done”.
It could be done faster, but it would cost more. Because planning is really important to keep multi-million/billion dollar projects accountable and on track.
Speak for yourself.
My city is rolling out fiber.
I’m in Wyoming and fiber started rolling out in multiple cities with multiple different providers in each city two years ago. They got to my house earlier this year so I now have a 2Gb/s connection.
“America First” is one of his biggest lies
It was always a damn lie with the Republicans. “wE nEeD to HeLP OuR CiViLiANs FiRST.” They mean rob them first.
chanted by the same people flying “Don’t tread on me” flags. what a joke.
“They say America first, but what they mean is America next!”
What they mean was America first for the rich.
https://genius.com/Woody-guthrie-lindbergh-lyrics
“America First” was a slogan used by US fascists (like Charles Lindbergh) before WW2. The more things change, eh?
Yeah but does Iran have nukes? Checkmate!
I DoN’t CaRe wHaT yOu sAy. NiRaN MoST DefFiNiTeLY PRoBAblY HaS NUkEs!
Well, I’m honestly not convinced they don’t. I mean, with renewables popping everywhere and providing a surplus of clean renewable non-geopolitical electricity, why would you pursue nuclear for the energy? You don’t even need to build an actual nuclear explosive, you could just make endless dirty bombs.
Iran could cover itself in solar and wind and there you go. They’d have all the electricity they need, could probably build most of the shit themselves too, and have not just plausible, but total, nuclear deniability.
If I ran had nukes, the US wouldn’t be bombing it as we speak.
Don’t think it matters when Israel’s sugar bully is always there.
All of whom voted for this. So.
Do you have any idea what you’re talking about? No.
It doesn’t matter what rural areas vote for. They’re all gerrymandered to shit just like the cities are.
The political elite on both sides have a good chunk of us fighting each other instead of them. So, congrats on falling for the same bullshit.
Do you have any idea what you’re talking about? No.
I’ve seen more than my share of “red” counties. They’re only gerrymandered when there’s an obvious threat to red state hegemony. Full of good people who fall for stupid lies every goddamn time despite the world of information available to them. The FoxNews miasma that hangs like suffocating humidity in every auto garage and bleak box store parking lot. The fist of Jesus in every lifted truck window.
Take your “both sides” bullshit to someone else.
Why do you think the Democratic party, once well known as the party of the working class, no longer holds that distinction?
Who says it doesn’t?
There’s your answer.
Election results say it doesn’t. Because they’ve alienated a huge majority of the working class. Because blue collar workers overwhelmingly vote against the Democratic party in the US.
You can call them all uneducated buffoons all you want, but in doing so, you are only proving my point that the Democratic Party has alienated them totally.
Blue collar workers overwhelmingly bought Reagans plastic coated flag-waving bullshit and started voting against their interests consistently. By the time Fox News and talk radio rolled around they were completely fucking brainwashed. Still are today.
I don’t see how calling them undereducated buffoons is an argument for or against whether the Democrats have alienated them either way.
And for the record, they were only too happy to vote for flag waving white Jesus over the future of themselves or the country. They alienated themselves.
Tell me again what the voter turnout percentage was?
The vast majority of us are so used to our voices not being heard that we don’t even bother voting. It doesn’t change anything.
You keep talking about how they voted “for” this and that, without even understanding that most people in the USA didn’t vote for anything at all.
I would think the tech bros running things would want more people to train their models on.
I would think that Muskrat would like more customers for his satellite internet business.
This is exactly what some of my extended family uses because there’s literally no other option. Not even cellular.
This isn’t even up in the mountains or something. This is just rural Alabama where kids are struggling to do homework because they just don’t have access, and it all but guarantees that their technology skills will remain woefully outdated.
I remember when they had DSL not that long ago and I would turn off updates on everything because it was a complete waste of time to attempt.
My grandparents lived in rural OK and had dial-up until 2018 when they finally were able to get a 2mbps DSL line. It really wasn’t much faster than the dial-up.
You mean it wasn’t able to be saturated?
As slow as 2MBit/s is, relatively speaking, it’s still magnitudes better than dial-up.
Yes, I mean it never hit its rated speed. Also that many modern sites didn’t work any better than they did on the dialup anyway.
Capitalism perverts all good intentions. It twists them to make a quick buck.
It’s a cancer on society.
That article has a pretty extreme example: guy on 21 acres atop a steep ridge who doesn’t have phone service or running water or probably any infrastructure. There’s going to be people you can’t reach with fiber and this may be one of them. We can argue about that when the other 99% has fast internet service
I got mine, even though it’s 1 gb down 300 mb up, but it’s still rural fiber.
taxes subsidized it and we get to pay extra https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/11/27/americans-fiber-optic-internet/
What’s an average Internet connection like in the USA? How many megs down?
10gig symmetrical for $50/month on Sonic fiber. Still too expensive but I can’t believe the rest of the US pays so much for so little, and worse thinks it’s a great deal. Typical US speeds are 30 years behind but Americans are so very, very stupid.
10 gig is amazing!
