Honestly, I live in rural Alabama. When the neighbors that I can't even see get too suffocating I ride through Mississippi and drive at 70mph down their four lane highways and go minutes if not several minutes between seeing houses.
MS has some population centers, but at least the majority of the state I've been through are sparsely populated. Makes *any* Internet service hard to maintain and just break even. I can make a few dollars above expenses in rural Alabama and we're looking at expanding into rural MS, but even wireless is prohibitively expensive per sub in most places there. There are several stretches around Starkville, which he mentioned in the article, where there are 3+ miles between houses, seriously heavy trees. Fiber would be ridiculously expensive to run, aDSL can't cover the distances, wireless can't go through the trees. The article seems to be all about the problem and attempting to turn it into a race thing with no practical suggestions on how to fix it. I don't have an answer. Been looking at the situation and I've actually worked some numbers. Tower rental or putting one up with an AP where you can only pick up 3 subs? I've got some like that here, by the time the equipment is paid for lightning has killed it. I actually had one neighborhood start to sabotage my AP over "free" service for the Volunteer Fire Dept because it was too slow. They had a meeting I wasn't invited to discussing throwing me off the tower. I spoke to the chief, wrote a letter crunching the numbers on a per tower basis, finding that to date it has cost me $800+ to serve these people free Internet in a neighborhood that swore they'd all connect as soon as I brought it to them. Three subs, 40+ freeloaders. The VFD power bill averaged $15 a month before I offered free service for meetings, classes, etc. Everyone in the community has a key, so their light bill is $200+ now and my heaviest user in an entire county is a free service. That slowed down my expansion into the seriously rural areas, which were my intended locations for service in the first place. ----- Original Message ----- From: Eric Kuhnke To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, November 09, 2015 4:12 AM Subject: [AFMUG] Unsurprising news: Rural Mississippi broadband sucks http://www.wired.com/2015/11/the-land-that-the-internet-forgot/ yeah you're not going to get a lot of subscribers in a county where 90% of the children qualify for free school lunches... no matter what the population is, hard finding a sufficient number of people to pay $50/mo.
