Massachusetts created a program to provide middle-mile connectivity in the rural western part of the state and then towns hooked up the last mile. A lot of them already had municipal electric companies who did it or they partnered with a small company for the last mile stuff. It's not cheap, but it's definitely reasonably priced. It's $75/mo for gigabit with a 2Gbps backhaul to the wider internet serving around 500-600 homes in my friend's town. And that's not some intro rate where it skyrockets once the promo expires so it's actually reasonable.
The town has a much higher broadband adoption rate than the US as a whole despite being sparsely populated (under 100 people per square mile). It's also not a rich area with per-capita income under $32k. In the US, 71% of households have wired broadband, 89% in Massachusetts, and 93% in his town. So I'd say it's a pretty great success.
Since the article talks about South Carolina, I'll note that SC is the 7th lowest for households with broadband at 83% (that includes wired, wireless, and satellite). AL, WV, LA, AR, NM, MS round out the bottom 7 (MS being bottom). Massachusetts is the 9th highest with the top 8 being WA, CO, UT, CA, NJ, NH, OR, MD (WA highest).
Yeah 3mbit/household doesn’t really sound great here unless your other options are even more limited. I don’t know what typical over subscription rates look like, but 20% of the homes watching Netflix at once saturating the entire town’s link sounds… high.
I’m in the boonies and the DSL connection I had as a redundancy for a time was 7mbit down, and that’s by far the slowest of the options available to me.
I suspect that's a bit low to cover evening streaming usage, but my main issue isn't so much the available bandwidth as selling it as 1 gbps. There should be some statutory minimum sla or something to limit the ISP's bullshit of selling you an ULTRASPEED™ GIGABIT* 1† Gbps‡ plan that reliably drops to about 0.5% of the advertised performance every night.
3 Mbps/household is enough for evening streaming, statistical multiplexing kicks in as the number of subscribers grow. It's a bit naff, but not overly so.
Averaging 3 Mbps of usage does not mean the gigabit connection drops down to 0.5% nightly. The key here is for the ISP to have enough excess backhaul to account for the occasional burst above the 3 Mbps average. As long as there is sufficient headroom, nobody will notice the oversubscription.
This is 500 houses so oversubscribed that 1 user using their nominal bandwidth would consume 50% of the total backhaul. There isn't sufficient headroom for no one to notice.
The town has a much higher broadband adoption rate than the US as a whole despite being sparsely populated (under 100 people per square mile). It's also not a rich area with per-capita income under $32k. In the US, 71% of households have wired broadband, 89% in Massachusetts, and 93% in his town. So I'd say it's a pretty great success.
Since the article talks about South Carolina, I'll note that SC is the 7th lowest for households with broadband at 83% (that includes wired, wireless, and satellite). AL, WV, LA, AR, NM, MS round out the bottom 7 (MS being bottom). Massachusetts is the 9th highest with the top 8 being WA, CO, UT, CA, NJ, NH, OR, MD (WA highest).