What really bites me is another nearby phone company Altell was bought out by Windstream, within 2 years they had replaced all of their copper lines, soon followed by the addition of DSL. That same company serves half the houses near where I live in fact two of them are with 300 yards of where i live, the line it self crosses our property. What I’d give to dissoconect from Verizon to connect to windstream. If a smaller company like Windsreamt can do it what can’t a corprate giant like Verizon do it.

And for this, we pay 4x what people in the nearest town (about 10 mi) and 10x what people in the nearest major metro area (less than 30 mi). We pay $100/mo for severely limited slower then DSL unreliable as f*ck service that goes out every time it rains and produces a massive number of transport errors every other time. In the city, they pay $40/mo for 5Mbps. In town, they pay the same for 3Mbps.

I love living in the country, but GOD, I miss real broadband. And I don’t mean just for YouTube. You see, in early 2008, I lost a five-figure contract because the latency times on satellite “broadband” caused the Internet application I was supposed to document not to run at all. It cost me about $25K in business and alienated a major client.

THIS is what the result of “letting the market decide,” folks. Because out here in the sticks, it’s NOT profitable to put in real broadband. Just like it wasn’t profitable to put in phones or electrical service. Yet somehow, we have those things. You see, back in the 30′s it was deemed an economic imperative for rural people to have phone and electricity. And broadband is the 21st century version of that imperative. My kids can’t even do school projects sometimes because of the unreliable internet.

And don’t get me started on cell coverage. I get ONE bar outside my house. Often as not, I get NO bars in the house. And we have ONE carrier with any service at all: Verizon. And they are expensive and SUCK.

Save me from the free market. There is an economic imperative to seeing that rural areas–many more rural than mine–get REAL, unlimited broadband. Otherwise, we really WILL end up being a nation of haves and have-nots.

You also obviously don’t understand that when an ISP sells a connection to a residential user, it isn’t selling that user a connection that can be 100% saturated without a surcharge. If it were, a 1.5 Mbps connection would cost $300 to $600 per month — the price of a dedicated T1 line.

There’s no “bandwidth fairy,” Vahid. I don’t get it for free, and I can’t give it away for nothing.