The article is unclear about mobile phone internet use. Most poor people I know have (at most times) cell phones with a data plan. This is sufficient for most basic internet needs (eg billing, applying for jobs, gov’t assistance).
Whether or not a wire goes to the house is less important.
I wouldn't bet on the availability of a data plan.
I regularly drive through Alabama on the way to Florida (from Atlanta). One time, I took a wrong turn and ended up in a small town with absolutely no cell signal and closed roads everywhere. We stopped and asked a local for directions. This was SE of Dothan, AL, I think.
And several times, Google Maps has routed me through areas where I no longer have a signal (south-central AL). Once when this happened, the road it wanted me to go on was closed and it couldn't download an update. I handled this one by just driving northish, knowing that I'd hit Montgomery eventually.
In the Alabama Black Belt, there's usually cell signal along major roads and in its towns. On the numbered county roads, you might get a bar or two in some lucky spot. But mostly not. Usually there's just a lonesome line of small power poles out to the last homestead. Then nothing until the other side of the tree farm.
The rural poverty of the Black Belt isn't an equitable thing with easy pay bills, computer using jobs, and government assistance. All those things are hard to do by design. The Black Belt was 1/2 shares share cropping when slavery was banned. And the cropping was cotton. You can't eat cotton. To get food you got to sell it to the only buyer around. And the buyers were the people who figured half of all your family produced was fair exchange for a tar paper shack and a loaned mule to make you more productive. Or rather you and your family. Mom pop and the little ones working the field year round.
Given that the majority of the people they’re talking about are poor or in poverty and most services they need, if not require it, at least are easier to obtain with internet access, this is tragic.
We should hold companies like AT&T accountable for the billions they have given to investors that was supposed to supply internet to rural areas for a start.
And why are you attacking me? I vote for candidates who I think will help. I am a foster parent so I have opened my home to the children displaced. Sure I could do more. But some don’t do anything. At all.
It doesn't, but being explicit about whether the vacuous "we" is the big G Government or we the private company forming classes would have saved quite a few bits on PGs server.
Not always. Certain services, electricity for example, are “natural monopolies”. Once someone is in there, it makes no economic sense for others to compete, this is where government regulated monopolies are the optimal solution.
Oh? How's PG&Es monopoly working for California? I'm of the opinion that much smaller grids with high volume solar would do a lot better of a job.
Sure the monopoly made sense when it was issued, but once tech catches up to the point of making it obsolete, the incumbent rarely goes down without a fight, delaying the deployment of new technologies, ultimately hurting consumers.
For-profit government granted monopolies are a terrible idea. They should be government-run, or watched, and should not choose between providing a service to customers or money to shareholders.
I'm not in California, but sounds to me like PG&E maximized profits by reducing maintenance, then when they were really far behind and running into issues, they begged for more money from taxpayers because they could not afford to make up for years of maximizing shareholder and senior management profits... I.e. corporate welfare.. they made lots of profit knowing this would bite them in the rear end, and then want the government to bail them out. It's nearly always win-win when you're that large of a company to pull these shenanigans
PG&E's problems are due to a change in liability laws combined with decades of poor maintenance.
A non-profit government-run utility wouldn't have a profit incentive to skimp on equipment maintenance for decades. It would have other, more interesting problems.
The US military skips on maintenance all the damn time.
They were running bootleg copies of Windows as recently as 2015 because they don't have the resources or incentives to upgrade.
Every office of the executive executive branch is in theory non/not-for-profit but they still manage to waste as much money if not more than a comparable private sector firm.
China disproves your theory. Over 90% have access to broadband fiber at affordable rates. Sure it's heavily censored and a tool for state propaganda. But the US looks like a third world country in comparison. I agree with the original post, we as Americans should do better.
You're conflating issues. The question was whether or not government investment in internet infrastructure was possible or sustainable. China proves that it is, even over a huge country with a huge rural population. And they did it within the past decade! The US could do the same, presumably without killing millions of people. And I do mean cheap in terms of local standard of living. 1 year of high speed broadband fiber costs less than $100USD.
The "lifeline" program [0] has existed since 1985. Granted, it's not perfect. It has often been used by ILECs to harass CLECs. Still, it seems to work. It has already been extended from landline POTS to mobile, mobile "broadband", and fixed "broadband". It may be worth investigating why more Alabamians aren't using this program.
Are you sure about that? Even accounting for the historical contribution of the US DOD and public sector to the genesis of the Silicon Valley in the first place?
>Not sustainable. "Government money" (money taken from it's citizenry) eventually runs out.
Okay? That doesn't seem to be happening in Europe for example. Everything runs fine. There's internet access in rural areas. The world didn't collapse.
>Plus granting a firm a government monopoly on a region is always a bad idea that ultimately hinders the development and deployment of new solutions.
It's an auction. And others can choose to deploy afterwards.
>Cab medallions in NYC. Fixed price airline tickets. Exclusive right to trade spices west of the prime meridian.
Yes, the free market seems to work fine in this case. That's why these Alabamians have 1 Gbps fibre... oh no wait they have no access to the Internet at all. Dammit. Call Ayn Rand
This is such an unbelievably ignorant comment. Yes, Alabama is poor by American standards but it is far richer than any third world country (have you been to any?). Its GDP per capita is $38,000 which is compares favorably to almost all first world European countries.
Because watching television or going to a football match is clearly entertainment.
But you get a discount on electric installation if you sign up for your new service online.
Internet service isn't just entertainment: It is communication, banking, and lots of very basic things folks need in life. It just happens to be multi-purpose, so you get the entertainment value as well.
Many jobs require internet access to apply: Fewer and fewer take any sort of paper applications and not everywhere has kiosks to apply and test at (low paying jobs, at least). Heck, game disks are getting rarer, so you sometimes need to be online to use a PC game. Lots of research for school papers is done online.
Also, communication. Few folks send snail mail letters anymore due to email. Chat programs work well too.
If you aren't connected to the internet, you are at a disadvantage. I cannot say that about television in general or a football match - going without those sometimes means you don't have as much to talk about with folks that consume those.
Even without home internet, cell phones with data plans are cheap and ubiquitous. Even most “poor” people have at least a cheap Android phone with a prepay plan with data.
>But you get a discount on electric installation if you sign up for your new service online.
That should be illegal. It's discrimination for a basic service.
>Internet service isn't just entertainment: It is communication, banking, and lots of very basic things folks need in life.
You can still walk into the bank. Checking your account from home is cool, but hardly a vital thing.
>Many jobs require internet access to apply: Fewer and fewer take any sort of paper applications and not everywhere has kiosks to apply and test at (low paying jobs, at least). Heck, game disks are getting rarer, so you sometimes need to be online to use a PC game. Lots of research for school papers is done online.
I doubt they can pull this shit off in a place where 25% of people have no access to the Internet. Otherwise they wouldn't find applicants.
>Also, communication. Few folks send snail mail letters anymore due to email. Chat programs work well too.
> That should be illegal. It's discrimination for a basic service.
There are all kinds of things where there's a service fee tacked on for more expensive or convenient ways of accessing city or public services. I can apply for parking permit or pay parking tickets for free if I walk to the parking office, or for the cost of a stamp, envelope, and a check if I mail it, or for a 2.75% (minimum $1.50) convenience charge if I use a credit card.
Am I being discriminated against without even realizing it?
That should be illegal. It's discrimination for a basic service.
So instead of giving a discount for signing up online, they should charge everyone the same price which would be the non discounted price - how does that help?
There are many practical reasons not having Internet access is a hindrance to poor households, but let's consider Adam Smith for a moment on what constitutes a necessity:
> By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.
It's interesting you point this out, because a few philosophers and legal scholars have questioned why free speech is a "human right" rather than (their examples) "running" or "eating chips".
I hate framing things like this as "human rights". Rights are an imaginary construct that humans created. All we need to ask is: Does it create a more effective/equitable/propserous society for us if we collectively provide / subsidize this?
If yes, then let's do it. If not, then let's not. No need to argue about whether it's some ineffable "right" or not, which ultimately comes down to personal philosophy.
Even if we accept "internet access" a "human right", it still doesn't mean the internet access must be from home. Schools and public libraries can provide internet access.
I suspect most of those 25% who lack wired broadband internet have smartphones, most of which support tethering, but even without it, your smartphone is an internet-connected computer, fairly suitable for most consumption related activities.
I suspect the omission of phone stats was not an innocent oversight.
>The majority of households in four rural counties - Perry, Monroe, Conecuh and Greene - don’t have any sort of internet access
> Mississippi has the worst mark in the country. Thirty percent of households there don’t have any access to the World Wide Web.
make it clear they are talking about "ability to access the internet from their house by any means" not just a dedicated broadband connection at home. So that would also include people who don't own smartphones and/or tablets and people who have no cell phone service at home.
That’s the clear implication of the words in the article. I’m not convinced it’s accurate, given that over 81% of adult Americans (not households) own a smartphone and if they had data which included they were considering smartphones as excluded, I’d expect them to specify that for clarity.
I find many instances where a journalist reads a finding of “no internet” and interprets it for readers to say “no access to World Wide Web” and in the process making it wrong.
In a Census survey format, people who don’t have wired internet but do have a smartphone are very much liable to answer that they “don’t have internet at home”. I’m 95% sure my quite well educated parents would answer that way in that circumstance. A possible control question on the survey would be “how many smartphones are owned by your household?”
The finding is based on data from 2017 and reported on (in headline form at least) as “news”.
I’m not disputing what the text says. If it’s 100% accurate, that’s appalling, of course.
Whether or not a wire goes to the house is less important.