Broadband in the Boonies 2021

When we last met to discuss broadband in rural areas, AT&T had jerked back its leased circuit from my then-current ISP and taken its sweet time providing its own service. After weeks of calls and promised-but-not-delivered truck rolls, the correct modem lights finally lit up and I was back on the Internet. In the two years since, we’ve had (are having) a pandemic, life has shifted to home, and each of us has grown to appreciate just how important a reliable broadband connection is.

Lately, some of us are appreciating—as in understanding rather than enjoying—how expensive and frustrating that connection can be.

I’m a Twitter Guy, and every so often I see other Twitter Guys whinging about how their broadband speeds have been temporarily reduced to double digits. I mean, hell, you’re paying like 60, 70 bucks a month to stream 4K video and you’re only getting HD? Complain on, Macduff. Complain. On.

Meanwhile, here in the boonies, if we’re lucky we’re living on DSL connections that top out at 5mb down and 512k up—when we can get that. More often than not, if you have device +1 accessing the Internet, you’re getting far less.

“But surely there are other options,” you kindly but mistakenly suggest. No, we have no cellular service. No, cable companies treat us like plague carriers. No, valleys and hills make line-of-sight connections impossible. What we have is even-more-terrible-than-DSL satellite service and the very slim and expensive pickings offered by outfits like AT&T.

But okay, we made the choice to live in a sparsely populated and lovely area—albeit, 20 years ago—and we should be sympathetic to conglomerates being unwilling to pungle up for the infrastructure necessary to service such areas. So yes, when it’s time to stream Netflix, I go to my router’s configuration page and turn everything off—no phone, no pool, no pets, just Apple TV. And even then, there are times when I peer at my TV like an art lover planted four inches from a Seurat painting, hoping to interpret blotches of color as animal, vegetable, or mineral.

But.

When I was first granted DSL, I made sure that my carrier was not AT&T. I’d heard horror stories about its service and I’d preferred to not be caught up in it. And that was possible because this same AT&T leased its circuits to third parties. Sure, you’d get the same cramped speeds, but these third parties managed to keep the service going more reliably than AT&T, had no data caps, and, in regard to tech support, were actually responsive.

But.

AT&T wants out of the DSL business. So. Badly. DSL is slow (though AT&T could make it faster), it’s outdated, and it’s creaky and requires routine servicing. You can see why the company wants to move its customers to fiber. That desire, however, doesn’t extend to actually providing fiber to the rural hayseeds.

And they’re doing it by revoking third-party access to their DSL circuits, forcing those customers into the AT&T family because they rarely have any other option, and then charging outrageous prices for lousy speeds.

Case in point: During much of the pandemic, ISPs stopped enforcing data caps—not so much to be responsible corporate citizens, but because lawmakers were cocking the steely gaze of regulation at them. Now that the pandemic is over—hey, multiple Covid variants, I said it was over!—data caps are once again the order of the day—if they can be gotten away with. Comcast was primed to impose a data cap on those using more than 1.2TB of data a month until customers hissed and fitted to the point where the company backed off.

Because Comcast has a boatload of customers. And many of them have other options. Their customers have some clout.

Not so the lowly DSL customer.

AT&T’s DSL service caps out at 150GB—yes, gigabytes. Go over that limit and you pay $10 per 50GB, up to a limit of $200 per month (in excess of your regular service fee). If you want the kind of data available to fiber users for around $60, you’ll pay around $260 a month and you’ll get that data at about 1/50th of the speed. This is not an insignificant amount of money. And, when you’re still working at home, going over this puny data cap is pretty much unavoidable.

Those west of the Rockies may find this analogy helpful: We live in an ongoing broadband drought (largely courtesy of the ISPs). With our tongues hanging out, AT&T is currently willing to sell us water for ten bucks a swallow.

So, what to do?

If you’re me, you file a complaint with the FCC. Just tell it like it is—your ISP has eliminated competition and charges usurious prices because it really wants you to go away so it can claim that no one wants what they have to offer.

To the extent that you like talking to people who probably hate their jobs, you’ll get a case number and someone from AT&T’s Office of the President contacts you to talk it over. They do or don’t do something along the lines of throwing a hundred bucks at you, tell the FCC that you had a very nice chat, and call it a day. The next bill rolls in, eats that hundred bucks (and more), and the month after that, you’re back to a Really Big Bill. And, of course, the same really slow connection.

And, because you have to, you take it and maintain a tiny shred of gratitude that you have something. And you pray that maybe Elon Musk will get this Starlink thing right enough that you can finally get away from DSL (which, again, would thrill AT&T). But you also know that filling the sky with small satellites isn’t cool, there are trees around here so it may not work at all, and that Elon Musk is exactly the kind of asshole you’d rather not give money to.

Or you could direct those prayers at our Democratic legislative and executive branches, hoping that they might consider including rural broadband in their infrastructure plans.

Or you could, just as effectively, hope that pigs sprout wings.

And they bring you fast and cheap broadband.

And bacon.