Back when we had the AT&T monopoly the government forced them to serve rural customers. It was subsided by a small fee on every phone bill. That carried over to the baby Bells because they were local monopolies. The problem is, no one has land lines anymore and no companies are willing to take on the last mile problem without a hefty incentive. Being the broadband monopoly is part of that incentive.
I argued for years that the AT&T breakup was done in the stupidest way possible. Put the natural monopoly - the last mile - on its own and regulate the hell out of it like we did AT&T. Then allow competition to run the service on top of those connections. We started in that direction but lost our way somewhere.
But to get back to the original topic, I was referring specifically to the local monopolies that so many cities have granted to cable companies which exclude not just other cable companies but certain types of internet services as well. I was specifically not talking about rural areas, where that’s not a problem. Not many cities out there in the countryside.
If you want to see fiber installed everywhere, make the FCC annul all of the local monopolies and speed up all of the local permitting processes. Just have the FCC rule that no local permitting process for installing internet service in existing conduits or on existing poles may take longer than a fixed period of time (I dunno, a month or two should suffice), otherwise the permits are automatically granted. If the permit applications don’t meet your local rules then you need to identify the problem and reject the application quickly, not drag things out for years. Something along those lines.
Subsidies to speed up rural deployment of real broadband are a separate topic.
I’m all for getting rid of local monopolies that aren’t municipally owned.
> The US is massive and full of sparsely populated rural areas, all of which will ignored by capitalists. Starlink is then their only option.
Ironically, Elon Musk is a capitalist who is making bank by serving the sparsely populated rural areas. He is certainly not ignoring them. You can get Starlink service in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and if there is any more sparsely populated place on Earth then I don’t know about it.
At least have a coherent argument before you complain that competition can’t solve a problem.
The US population is fairly concentrated. Various metrics to make the point: 40% of the US population lives in coastal counties:
* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html
About two-thirds of the population lives with-in 100 miles of the border:
* https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
The top 143 counties (out of 3244) contain half the population:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_(United_States)
Hitting the most populous 10% of counties will get you a good way towards universal coverage (LA county alone as >9M people, which would rank #12 as a state population).
Japan has a population density that is 8 times higher than the lower 48 states.