It's fair to critique this article not covering this, but I also think this is largely a red herring. The vast majority of the issue in the US is suburban, where density isn't really a problem. The US has a lot of rural areas, but they represent a tiny fraction of the population.

As a comparison, Australia has roughly the same land-mass as the contiguous states, but with less than a tenth of the population. It has its fair share of ISP and telecoms issues, but not as the US for the most part. Most people live in cities with good internet infra, most of the rest live in towns with at least some choice. Not perfect, a long way to go, but better than the collection of monopolies the US has.

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cogman10 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Rural and suburban line burial isn't a hard problem to solve. It's easier to put in lines in rural and suburban locations than it is to put lines in urban areas.

You don't have to, for example, shut down a road when putting in rural lines.

It's a mistake to think that population density has anything to do with the difficulty of getting high speed internet. It's nearly completely unrelated.

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rootusrootus 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It's easier to put in lines in rural and suburban locations than it is to put lines in urban areas

This is backwards in my experience, but I probably have a different definition of urban from you. In my area, the suburban area has mostly underground lines that pre-date fiber, and getting fiber is probably not ever happening. Comcast is all we got. But if I drive 15 minutes into the city, there are fiber lines on every pole, and I could choose from a couple different providers.

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cogman10 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It'll depend on the area. From what I've seen, it appears that a lot of cities are eliminating utility poles and are burying all their lines (except for high voltage power).

An urban buried line will be harder than a suburban or rural buried line. Pole access is easier in both situations.

Utilities like buried lines because people will cut and strip overhead lines looking for copper.

	▲	rootusrootus 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah that sounds like just a regional definition of what constitutes urban :). My city is old only by western US standards, approaching 200 years old, and nobody seems to have any intention of burying the existing wired utilities. Probably not enough tax funding or voter enthusiasm to pull it off is my guess. The one upside is that poles are cheap to put new infrastructure on. But it would be so much prettier without all the wires criss-crossing everywhere. I hope someday we do it.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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