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AOL to discontinue dial-up internet service after 34 years (www.techspot.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 12 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Every rural house gets a phone line, just like they all get roads and mail

It's not profitable, but that didn't matter because it was a utility

With Broadband, it's a "luxury" so to get it out to a clump of rural users, they all need to pay for it, or wait and hope someone else pays to get it closer.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    The government gave them $400 Billion dollars (that were paid from our taxes) to do it and they pocketed the money.

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Not anymore. Now the cell phone company just puts up a tower and runs one fiber line to it and everybody has high speed internet or a rich billionaire launches some satellites into space on his rockets.

    Laying one fiber line to a cell phone tower is much cheaper than laying a bunch of fiber lines to each individual household.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    We may have different standards for "rural areas"....

    I did Google for starlink because I'm not up to date on their coverage, and there's still a lot of dead ones up north.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    That is possible. I was basing my comment on some information from an FCC report that said that there was no place in the continental United States that was not able to be covered by Starlink.

    There was this program called Bead that was going to prioritize places with no internet access whatsoever or dial up for the first people to get funding, and they say they found that there wasn't any, so they had to go for the next thing which was slow internet.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    And there's lots of valid reasons to not want starlink. So it really doesn't matter if that's the only option.

    But...

    The American taxpayers have paid telecom companies billions of dollars on at least two separate occasions years apart to roll out broadband to everyone. But they just keep taking money and not doing it, and then a decade later lobby for the money again.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, you do make a good point there. I've seen that happen. Where a company takes money and doesnt do it. Those companies should be made to repay the money with interest for not doing what they said they would. But I've also seen companies that actually do the job and get high-speed internet out to those who wouldn't have otherwise had it. So I think it really just depends on the company.

    The two companies I'm thinking of right off the top of my head are AT&T and T-Mobile. AT&T took money to roll out broadband and never did so, and T-Mobile merged with Sprint, and said they would roll out high-speed broadband to very rural areas, and actually did do it, and I ended up benefiting from T-Mobile's home internet rollout.

    I lived in a pretty rural area for a while that had 10 MBPS wired internet or satellite and then T-Mobile came around and with their home internet you could get 70 MBPS so that was a no-brainer

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