Ulmo
join:2005-09-22
San Jose, CA
 ·Comcast
 ·SONIC.NET
| reply to tiger72
Re: People in rural areas aren't getting screwed
said by tiger72  :They chose to live out there where it costs far more to deliver EVERYTHING: food, fuel, and broadband. Why does it come as some surprise every time a company says "it just doesn't make financial sense to deliver to sparsely populated, rural markets"? Urbanites pay more for dense-based rent, so they can pay less for services, and rural people pay more for services, so they can pay less for spacious rent. The Kingdom will let them have more space for less if they only pay more for their services.
Geographically, financially, and fairly, it makes perfect sense, and I don't want to circumvent that with income redistribution of any sort.
However, one place it doesn't make sense is technologically: radios in dense areas go less far because of congestion, and in rural areas go further because of lack of congestion. What is a cell phone to an urbanite could be a high bandwidth long distance backhaul to a ruralite. Those rural people could go ahead and build their own radio tower at their own house, and eventually use technology to link their home radio network to their neighbors so they could roam, and make their own cell networks and such. So, technologically, those ruralites could have a nice network if they wanted to. Probably never at the great efficiencies of the urbanites, though; to every ruralite who wants equal cost data service to what the urbanites pay, I tell them to pay the per-square-foot cost of what the urbanites pay for all of their space and all the other higher costs of urban dwelling (allow criminals to steal at the same rates, pay the same taxes for city social services, etc. etc. etc.). And if not that, make them fully subsidize urban dwelling to the point it costs as little per square foot as rural dwelling, as part of the plan to bring them the same cost data service as the urban people. THEN let's see what they have to say about the broadband penetration cost of rural America. |
