this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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America will do anything except lay some fucking cable to provide internet to the ruroids.
Including paying companies specifically to lay that cable then never forcing them to actually do it.
It's crazy how behind US is on that. Americans say "yeah but US is bjg and mostly empty space" so is Asia and the rest of the world yet they are not defeated by a cable. It's just cable laying - come on, we solved cable laying 50 years ago.
The US has a weird mix of big emplty spaces, really fucking expensive existing underground utilities and roadways, and private property (easements ain't free) that makes new underground utilities stupidly expensive to run.
You have to buy big easements, negotiate utility contracts with local and state governments (to use the public right-of-way), dodge existing infrastructure while repairing what you break, and lay a fuckton of cable.
I work on the municipal side, and despite Google Fiber having a utility agreement with us for years they still have yet to lay a single foot of underground fiber because we won't allow them to cut across roads that we just replaced in the last year, require their microtrenches to follow engineering standards, and they need to show existing underground water, gas, wastewater, and electrical services on their plans because they're famous for just running a trench and making it the water district's problem when they cut 7 public lines in an hour.
Same reason rural places in the US also haven't discovered electricity yet. Oh, wait…
How many big empty rural areas in Asia have fiber optics internet relative to big empty rural areas in the US? I thought starlink was heavily used by a lot of counties where people didnt have great access to internet?
Basic all rural areas have fiber/cell towers in Asia. Depends how you measure it but like 90% of populated Asia is connected and most of these stats are only being held back by Russia too.
I think China has done it for all of their rural villages (or maybe 98% it seems)
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201908/02/WS5d43f3c6a310cf3e355639b3.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1043951X22001110
It does seem like that at times. But at least in Minnesota, the ruroids often seem to have better availability of fiber than the suburbanites and exurbanites. Possibly due to state broadband grants.
This is how it was where I grew up in Washington State. We were not rural enough for our neighborhoods to qualify for grants, but not densely populated enough for it to be financially worth it to lay cable. I moved out in 2018, where the best options were still dial up or conventional sattelite.
I did discover that by voiding Cricket Wireless' TOS you could use your BYOD as a hotspot with unlimited data and you'd just have to change sims/numbers every few months when they caught on. Of course now Starlink and T-Mobile home internet exist instead and hey, maybe they laid cable in the past 8 years, it's possible.