Well...for some of us, it's still not going to happen.
quoted from the linked article
Others questioned the lack of specified benchmarks in the plan.
"We have a lot of people arguing about speed and availability, but we don't have any way to measure success," Ford said. "We have to make rational decisions on what we can really expect and what we really need, and nobody's doing that. The policy is unguided -- it's not clear what the nation's targets are for broadband."
Ford said a reasonable target for broadband access would be 95 percent availability within five years. He also questioned the need for coverage in every corner of the country.
"Some places are just too expensive to serve," Ford said. "The idea that we're going to give [high-speed service] to a place in the middle of nowhere is a pie in the sky. You could spend all of that [$7.2 billion] trying to get the last 1 or 2 percent connected."
This George Ford character pretty much has it pinned with the above thinking.
There are certain rural areas that ARE always going to be too high of a cost to provide service to.
At the farm, I've been on dial-up for just over 10 years now. And constantly fighting with our local rural phone co-op to replace some bad copper that has been a problem with voice comms for several years longer than that. Over these 10 years, the quality of service of my dial-up has steadily gone down hill from a "very good" 42.2k to recently I've been lucky to get a consistent 14.4k connection. I couldn't even connect to the ISP's mail server to retrieve more than 5 messages without getting a time-out message.
The co-op's answer to this was the same thing they're trying to sell all of their other customers...go high-speed with the ADSL they also provide. Goes without saying that this is also at a higher cost, even the "dial-up replacement" 256k/128k package. Well...needless to say if you can't get decent voice comms or dial-up, there is no way that ADSL is gonna work on this old infrastructure! But they just had to try it.....well the 256k DSL wound up having a worse connection speed than dial-up and it would disconnect itself on the average of every 5-10min. Not bad for "always-on" DSL eh?
Option 3 is satellite service that they provide via a partnership with WildBlue. This was just installed a few days ago and I haven't been back to see how the service is. If it's like the small-dish satellite TV I had in the shop, it's dependent on the weather... I've still got my lawyer up to speed on the situation and his services may still be needed.
All of this because my local phone co-op said it wasn't feasible to plow in 10 miles of new copper for three subscribers (my folks' home, my home/shop, and one neighbor).
So...this is just another pipe-dream that has been thought up before. I vaguely remember it from several years ago too. "Everyone will have access to high-speed" Sorry, but that isn't going to happen with the technology that's currently available.
