Our neighborhood, Spring Lake Estates, is only about five miles from the city limits of Salem, Oregon's capital. So it isn't like we're in Outer Mongolia -- though when it comes to broadband access, we might as well be.
For one of the things I learned by my phone conversation with a guy from the Oregon Broadband Office today, is that our neighborhood is unserved by broadband according to the federal definition:
An unserved location is defined as a broadband-serviceable location that the Broadband DATA Maps show as (a) having no access to broadband service, or (b) lacking access to Reliable Broadband Service offered with - (i) a speed of not less than 25 Mbps for downloads; and (ii) a speed of not less than 3 Mbps for uploads; and (iii) latency less than or equal to 100 milliseconds (NOFO Section I.C.dd).
We definitely qualify as unserved, since the only non-cellular, non-satellite option our neighborhood has is crappy CenturyLink DSL, which at our house offered dismal speeds of 6-7 Mbps download and 1-2 Mbps upload.
Until Starlink came to our rescue when I was chosen to be a beta tester for this SpaceX satellite internet service. Currently it costs $120 a month for speeds that vary. At the moment I'm getting 104 Mbps download and 18 Mbps upload.
The Oregon Broadband Office guy I spoke with after I emailed that office with questions about their grant program for improving broadband in our state said that he has CenturyLink in Portland, I believe, and pays $30 a month for 200 Mbps download speed.
(He'll go nameless in this blog post, since I didn't take notes on our conversation, so don't want to run the risk of saying something that doesn't completely match what he told me. Which doesn't include the definition of "unserved" because I could check that out with some Googling.)
I was told that satellite internet isn't part of unserved and underserved broadband locations since it's available everywhere, for a steep price. And cellular broadband typically doesn't qualify since often the speed isn't reliably above 25 Mbps download.
It was a pleasant conversation for me because it gave me a chance to vent about our neighborhood's broadband woes. I told the guy that while I'm not religious, our talk sort of felt like my brief experience as a childhood Catholic when I'd go to confession. Except in this case I was complaining more than confessing.
For our neighborhood only had dial-up internet until late 2007, when I managed to bring DSL to our area by writing a pleading letter to the CEO of Qwest, which later became CenturyLink. I talked about that success in I'm the DSL King of the World!
This occurred after a Qwest broadband manager told me that even though our neighborhood was just a few miles from Bunker Hill Road, where DSL existed, Qwest would never bring DSL to our area because it would cost too much.
Then after the manager heard from the Qwest CEO, I got a phone call from him saying that, lo and behold, we'd be getting DSL. Now, I told the Oregon Broadband Office guy, I heard from the Marion County broadband coordinator a few years ago that CenturyLink is saying the same thing about bringing fiber optic broadband service to our area of about 150 homes. It'll never happen.
The (possible) good news is that thanks to grants from both the Trump and Biden administrations, Oregon will be getting quite a bit of money to bring broadband to unserved locations like ours. I was told that $100 million from the previous administration is arriving soon, with more to come.
I was told that companies which receive contracts to expand broadband access are expected to contribute some of their own money to the project. Which is fair, because they will be the ones getting the monthly subscription fees after broadband comes to an area.
I'm hoping this will happen sooner rather than later for our neighborhood. Starlink works well for us, but it's expensive. I'd love to have fiber optic service rather than satellite internet. What's frustrating is how poorly the free market works when no broadband providers are willing to service an area like ours.
Fast reliable broadband isn't a luxury. It's a necessity. For work, for education, for entertainment, for keeping in touch with the world.
Fairly soon, I suspect, it will be a necessity for television watching in rural area lacking cable when DirecTV and Dish go under, though they could stagger on for a while longer by merging, since they're losing customers rapidly.
With no satellite television, streaming via broadband will be the only option for many rural residents.
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