Fairpoint was not providing more than half a megabit
July 27, 2017 10:57 AM   Subscribe

Welcome to Saguache County, Colorado. Home of the worst internet service in America.
posted by Chrysostom (29 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm amused that my terrible internet connection can't handle the data-intensive presentation of this story.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:20 AM on July 27, 2017 [6 favorites]


FCC: See, you don't need Net Neutrality!

Everyone else: Uh, this actually says the opposite.

FCC: Exactly, you don't need Net Neutrality.
posted by tommasz at 11:30 AM on July 27, 2017 [6 favorites]


Man who has never left the place where he was born and raised offers commentary on places he's never been or experienced:
yet over and over he expressed trepidation about what he called our “consumable world where everything is throwaway.”
TCP/IP works different here:
Well, if the FCC would give funding to the small local people who know how to do it
One of the things that absolutely dominates politics here (full disclosure, I live 40 miles from Saguage county - was just backpacking there a few days ago) is this absolutely unshakeable belief that you are smarter and better than anyone else anywhere ever. They are right that if the FCC or whomever gives money to CenturyLink or Charter those companies will take the money and never deliver the service - that's been amply demonstrated. However, the idea that things are different where you live just because is really a form of NIH in practice and intent. And it's a sort of backwards navel gazing that really holds these communities back.

Here in Mesa County, a ballot initiative for community broadband passed 78/22 and the (R) county commissioners have asserted that the question wasn't understood and have ignored making progress on it. It is sort of astounding that they can just ignore the will of people like that, but as Trump has demonstrated IOKIYAR is the only unassailable Conservative principle there is.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 12:02 PM on July 27, 2017 [18 favorites]


I thought to myself, "you know, this Ubiquiti gear I've been working with can work miracles with fixed wireless, I wonder if they can use it to deliver commercial services over unlicensed spectrum to under-served communities?"

Lo and behold, Colorado Central Telecom seems to be doing exactly that.

This gear is getting so cheap that someone with a little bit of startup capital could probably start a WISP if they had decent backhaul to the town already.
posted by Talez at 12:04 PM on July 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yay, I'm from the next county over!

Didn't have the internet back then, but we also didn't have a telephone until I was 12, and hauled water the whole time. Mom had to pay to put in 17 electric poles to the lot. We rented a TV every once in a while.

Can confirm that internet also sucks in Huerfano county.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:10 PM on July 27, 2017 [6 favorites]


if they had decent backhaul to the town already

That's a big if, unfortunately. There are quite a few projects on hold in rural Colorado for lack of backhaul.
posted by asperity at 12:17 PM on July 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


That's a big if, unfortunately. There are quite a few projects on hold in rural Colorado for lack of backhaul.

Run PtP from the next town over that does? If there's Verizon coverage or DSL you gotta have some fiber backhaul within 20 miles.
posted by Talez at 12:21 PM on July 27, 2017


I just drove through that county and on the way through the tiny town of Moffat, saw a cute coffee shop that advertised wireless internet on their sign. I idly wondered to myself just what kind of connection they have, and how fast it would be, and that it was surprising they could have any kind of decent connection given the sheer remoteness of everything in that region.
posted by zsazsa at 12:22 PM on July 27, 2017


My mom lives in rural Oklahoma, and gets her internet via a WiMax antenna on her roof pointed at another antenna on the water tower of the next town over... $60/month for 3Mbps down / 1Mbps up on a good day... but it works good enough for her.
posted by mrbill at 12:39 PM on July 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


Run PtP from the next town over that does? If there's Verizon coverage or DSL you gotta have some fiber backhaul within 20 miles.

Don't take this wrong, but HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA.

The towns in Saguache county might have a cell tower to two, but the backhaul will often be swamped if many (read more than 4) users are active. Data service outside of larger towns (Gunnison, Leadville, Montrose) in smaller places like Silverton or Ouray is spotty and inconsistent at best. You do better in the ski towns (Telluride, Crested Butte, Aspen) where the money is - but they are often hell and gone from where regular people live. It's not distance, it's terrain and weather.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 12:52 PM on July 27, 2017 [3 favorites]


Some would argue that the social contract has changed and that fast internet isn’t just a luxury — it’s a right of all 21st-century Americans.

Unfortunately, the people who currently hold political power argue that healthcare and drinkable water, among other things, are luxuries that people shouldn't just expect to have access to. Fast internet? That would just encourage them to waste their money on iPhones and such.
posted by TedW at 1:26 PM on July 27, 2017 [9 favorites]


My guess is residents will be able to tell about six months in advance of an announcement of a real project which will bring in broadband, because land prices will suddenly shoot up.
posted by jamjam at 1:28 PM on July 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


FTA:
Reverence for the past is not an uncommon feeling in Saguache. Various people over the course of my visit happily said that things were done differently in the county and in the valley as a whole. “We’re in a time warp but in a positive way,” Kevin Wilkins, executive director of the San Luis Valley Development Resources Group, told me. “This is one place that hasn’t been Californicated or Disney-fied.”
Hey, that's cool, looks like they've found a way to maintain a past way of life that doesn't come with the rampant bigotry that is associated with the rhetoric that "simpler times" entai--
Even if broadband funding and access arrive in Saguache County, there still will be cultural hurdles to overcome: the view that certain groups in the San Luis Valley don’t need a connection. Wilkins wondered if all residents needed home broadband, or just some. “You’re looking at Center School — look at the percentage of Latino, look at the percentage of farm worker. What do they need broadband for? To watch Netflix?”
Oh, there it is.
posted by zombieflanders at 2:12 PM on July 27, 2017 [24 favorites]


Colorado Fiber Network goes to Alamosa, Del Norte, Monte Vista and a couple of other points, so it looks like the southern half of the county is pretty good for fiber, unclear what the actual backhaul speed is, but even 1gb would suffice for probably suffice for all 6000 people in the county.

Getting coverage up north would be a little more challenging, but I'd honestly be a little surprised if there wasn't some sort of cable laid up to the county city and where there's a trench, there's a place to lay fiber.

Honestly, this seems more like Centurylink just not wanting to bother with those 6000 customers than any failure of infrastructure.
posted by madajb at 2:15 PM on July 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


Kevin Wilkins, executive director of the San Luis Valley Development Resources Group, told me. “This is one place that hasn’t been Californicated or Disney-fied.”

This guy really hates the Bay Area VC who bought the ranch next to him...
posted by madajb at 2:16 PM on July 27, 2017 [3 favorites]


Honestly, this seems more like Centurylink just not wanting to bother with those 6000 customers than any failure of infrastructure.

I think you just articulated one of the primary failures of network infrastructure in this country pretty well.
posted by brennen at 2:17 PM on July 27, 2017 [5 favorites]


It can't truly be the worst internet service in America, unless they have Comcast... right?
posted by caution live frogs at 2:34 PM on July 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


Unfortunately, the people who currently hold political power argue that healthcare and drinkable water, among other things, are luxuries that people shouldn't just expect to have access to. Fast internet? That would just encourage them to waste their money on iPhones and such.

It's not just that anti-tax people at the Federal level aren't throwing money at it. There are whole states that have banned, at the state level, any kind of local government-funded broadband service (Tennessee and North Carolina, for example). Because the telecom monopolies (usually a cable company and a telephone company) have tons of money to throw at lobbying legislators and they are using it to protect their position. You can't even organize your own community, even if everyone hates the incumbent provider. The problem goes deeper than anti-tax ideology; capitalism let the telecoms accumulate this power.
posted by indubitable at 2:38 PM on July 27, 2017 [11 favorites]


The other issue here is that we spend a lot of money subsidizing the rural lifestyle. Telecom, electric power, roads, all of these things are super expensive to give to people who choose to live out in the boonies.

There's an argument to be made for bringing economic and social progress to some of these places, and I'm down with that, but there's also a larger macroeconomic question of whether we're just being enablers when we subsidize this sort of a lifestyle.

One of the things that those of us in Northern California who are pretty open on immigration issues like to point out is that the undocumented workers who get here are the people who've crossed the Sonoran desert on foot in search of economic opportunity. That takes some drive and dedication. Maybe our money would be better spent helping the people in these rural areas get out, and, yeah, let the farming become largely automated and corporate, rather than continuing to fund the lifestyle of the people who aren't willing to go elsewhere for a better standard of living.
posted by straw at 2:49 PM on July 27, 2017 [4 favorites]


Let me tell you from deeply felt personal experience that if you want people in rural situations to have the option to move to some other kind of lifestyle, getting them some decent network connectivity is probably some of your better return on investment.
posted by brennen at 3:24 PM on July 27, 2017 [11 favorites]


I have a house in Grass Valley, CA, the Sierra foothills. There is no wired Internet option, even though I'm a mile out of town on a paved, well serviced road. I use fixed wireless. The WISP has been around for 5+ years now, and is more or less a bunch of Ubiquiti nodes in a mesh network. (Albeit not Ubiquiti, a more pro-market brand.)

It works OK but it has a lot of drawbacks. My max speed is 12Mbps. It's a mesh network; I have two or three wireless hops before I get to a wired backhaul. Those other hops are on customers' property and have a lot of outages because of power failures, the occasional downed tree, etc. Clear line of sight is absolutely necessary and not easy to achieve; my antenna is 50 feet up in a tree, hope the equipment never fails. There's about 40ms of latency in the WISP network before I get to the edge. (Compare: in South Korea there's 40ms of latency total, in the whole country.) And the small WISP is not entirely professional, we have a lot of 30 minute outages that seem to be because they're reconfiguring something or some failover didn't.

I get it, it's expensive to run wired service to rural areas. But somehow we solved that problem twice before.
posted by Nelson at 3:46 PM on July 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


Honestly, this seems more like Centurylink just not wanting to bother with those 6000 customers than any failure of infrastructure.

I think you just articulated one of the primary failures of network infrastructure in this country pretty well.


Oh what a surprise - Centurylink. Guess who the little red zone in the middle of Pennsylvania on that coverage map is?
posted by lagomorphius at 3:47 PM on July 27, 2017


Personally, I think the greatest irony is that good internet would do more to rejuvenate rural areas than literally anything else. With good internet your ability to earn money is no longer tied to your location. You don't need to live anywhere in particular to make money as a web developer, or programmer, or etsy store owner, or patreon-supported artist, any number of other internet-facilitated jobs. Better job availability for locals means more money in the local economy, meaning the local people who are working "in town" do better, and more income means more taxes to support the local government.

Instead, telecoms drag their feet and rural America continues to wither as people migrate to cities where internet and jobs are plentiful.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:19 PM on July 27, 2017 [8 favorites]


Personally, I think the greatest irony is that good internet would do more to rejuvenate rural areas than literally anything else. With good internet your ability to earn money is no longer tied to your location.

Maybe, but large towns have more and more varied services. While remote jobs enable people to live and work anywhere internet connected, it doesn't necessarily makes sense that well compensated internet engineers would choose to live in the cheapest parts of society. It's more like you can choose which metro area you telecommute from. And its probably going to be one where you can turn that money into more goods and services, even after whatever new equilibrium would exist post rural-broadbandification.
posted by pwnguin at 5:40 PM on July 27, 2017


it doesn't necessarily makes sense that well compensated internet engineers would choose to live in the cheapest parts of society.

You sort of need to understand that rural Colorado isn't like, say, rural Indiana. Colorado is mostly populated on the front range (Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs) and those areas have the most jobs and such. Also, the most traffic, and crime and the stuff that comes with being many millions of people.

In Boulder, there are trails that are run clockwise one day, and counterclockwise the next- are hiker trails on MWF and bikers TT. If I snuck out of work in Aurora at 4 on a Friday, I could maybe make the Eisenhower tunnel by 6 and might make camp outside Frisco or something by 9.

But, just over the first mountain range, it gets considerably different. Here, it's a busy day at a trailhead if I see 10 cars. There's a big event going on if I see more than that. I can sneak out of work at 4 on Friday, and even stopping for beer and brats, will be having dinner around a fire at 11,000 feet by 6pm. For a lot of people who move to the Western Slope (as opposed to the Front Range), this is the Colorado they were promised.

The lack of good internet hinders that promise. And it's not just tech professionals - it hurts the schools and clinics and businesses because they can't attract and retain good staff. I've lived in 14 states all around the US - being a navy brat helps to see the world. There is no place in America like the West Slope of Colorado.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 6:00 PM on July 27, 2017 [10 favorites]


It would be nice if I could actually read the article. On Safari for iPad, there are flashes of text overwritten by pretty pictures.
posted by lhauser at 6:48 PM on July 27, 2017


You sort of need to understand that rural Colorado isn't like, say, rural Indiana.

I know that. It's simply my belief that the same population non-density that prohibits rural internetification also prohibits every other fucking thing from appearing. Center CO has a population 1/5th the size of Grand Junction! Broadband is just the first and most dire market good missing. You wanna see Trent Reznor live? It's just a 4 hour drive to Denver! Assuming the route isn't snowed in. And then a four hour flight out of 'flyover' country. No PAX, or ComiCon, or Country Jam or Larry the Cable Guy or any other cultural event that involves people paying to see people.

Which come to think of it, is one way of describing a school. The largest high school in Sagauche has 160 students in grades 9-12. I figure that's a graduating class of 30. You damn well need internet, because the scale isn't there to teach any techie's college bound kids any AP courses. If you can land a remote tech job working out of Center, that also seems like a decent ticket out of Center.

To say, somewhere like Corvallis, OR. Where you can hike up St Mary's, or drive for an hour to the coast, or drive for an hour to the Cascades. Or drive for an hour to Portland. Or fly out of Eugene direct to SFO/Seattle for the annual company gathering for 200 bucks.
posted by pwnguin at 10:27 PM on July 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


CenturyLink is the real problem here. My family has a house in a small Colorado mountain town. The town itself has decent internet service, but anyone who lives in the outskirts must live with DSL that peaks at 2Mbs. CenturyLink has made it clear they have no interest in improving their service, and they're a local monopoly. Many times I have dreamed of setting up an Internet co-op, but I have no idea where to start.
posted by fremen at 2:03 PM on July 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Assuming the route isn't snowed in.

That's a serious problem with building anything out there. For a lot of telecommunications sites in the mountains, there are only a few months out of the year where work can be done safely. If everything isn't ready to go (funding, design, landlord approval, permits, materials, labor, and more) before the window to build opens, it may not happen for at least another year. At which point much of the preparatory work will have to be done all over again.

Sometimes getting the necessary equipment to its destination involves building new roads in places where that's not a simple task. Or even helicopters.

I'd like to see more draft horses used where possible. Partly because it sounds like they'd be cost-effective and efficient, partly because they're adorable.
posted by asperity at 2:53 PM on July 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


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