Congratulations! The US Is 32nd Worldwide on Broadband Affordability
I see the problem like this.<p>As an engineer my take is we should make a plan to solve the problem and execute it.  Basically that means fiber everywhere,  probably the electric company should just run a fiber that is installed and maintained next to your electric feed,  I&#x27;ll explain why in a minute.<p>This would have an eye-popping bill but it would be done.<p>Instead the Democrats allocate some arbitrary amount of money,  say $20 billion,  they build out some broadband,  but not enough.  Then they go out and spend $30 billion and then another time they spend $40 billion but those of us not lucky to get broadband are saying &quot;they are spending all this money but we still don&#x27;t have broadband&quot;,  there is this mental disconnect though because for many Democrats the fact that they spent $X billion is a reason to celebrate and that&#x27;s the problem,  the endpoint is spending $X billion,  it is not the product of people having broadband.  And they wonder why people vote Republican.<p>(e.g. the Republicans are not on board w&#x2F; solving the problem at all but the Democrats really don&#x27;t get how repeated failure in public erodes the legitimacy of institutions,  particularly when they are celebrating failures as if they were successes.  They see any resistance to this as mindless partisan negativism unfortunately.)<p>Here&#x27;s my situation.<p>I live on a farm that is rather hard to serve because my power lines go through a beaver swamp.  My phone line is mostly buried from the nearby crossroads to my house.<p>I used to get ADSL from Frontier which came all the way from the nearest town,  the distance was near the absolute limit of ADSL but they had some analog hardware that boosted the signal so towards the end of that era I had two 2 Mbps connections.<p>More recently they ran fiber to the crossroads and now I am just past the VDSL limit and I have two 20 Mbps ADSL connections which are load balanced,  it is fine for most purposes...  I remote login a lot to my big desktop PC and the slow uplink makes waiting for windows to open painful but once I have them open I can get stuff done.  I am paying around $250 a month for that and two phone lines and that is an astronomical cost compared to people who get cable just two miles down the road.<p>The same people who have a party because they spend $X billion are &quot;technology agnostic&quot; and believe DSL is a good technology for rural areas are completely wrong,  you can wire up Koreans who live in huge apartment blogs with VDSL but the limited range of DSL does not work for rural America.<p>I don&#x27;t blame anybody who doesn&#x27;t want to go into my swamp,  but...<p>Every 10 years or so the power company sends some huge machine into my swamp (sometimes gets stuck) to limb up trees around the power line,  when they do that another crew should follow them and add fiber.  Doing it that way would be as cheap as you could make it,  and we really need an approach to the problem that finds those kind of economies and gets the job done.