Showing posts with label exurbs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label exurbs. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 08, 2022

Just a few miles outside of town: Falling through the cracks with outdated 1950 view of U.S. residential settlement

A good problem to have: Managing the ARPA windfall in a small NC county - Carolina Public Press:
Having more GREAT grant money to expand broadband is a point of interest for Madison County, where census data shows 72.4% of residents have a broadband internet connection — significantly less than the state’s 83.4% average.

“The grants that have been awarded — other grants not connected to this — over the years have been to reach the far outstretched parts of rural counties,” Young said. “What’s left is the people close to town that weren’t close enough. The outskirts of the county have some internet, but those a few miles outside of town are still living in 1991.”

This is a basic problem in how the U.S. subsidizes advanced telecom infrastructure. It takes a binary view of residential settlement patterns as if it were still 1950 and people either lived in town or on farms while overlooking the edges of metro areas and exurbs. Housing density in these areas is higher than rural but lower than the suburbs. But it's too low for investor owned infrastructure to be profitably built and operated. As a result, they fall through the cracks and are overlooked by both the private and public sectors.

Friday, August 20, 2021

Knowledge workers relocating to exurbs will encounter suboptimal advanced telecom infrastructure

Fringe outlying communities of major metropolitan regions were prized for their extreme privacy or more affordable housing before the pandemic, but were typically much less wealthy than the denser cities and affluent suburbs they surrounded.

The Great Reshuffling will likely make these far-flung exurbs richer and denser. The median household income across U.S. exurbs was $74,573 as of 2019, according to data from The American Communities Project. That likely ticked up over the last year as city dwellers in major job centers such as San Francisco and New York relocated to exurbs for the same or similar salaries.

The ‘Great Reshuffling’ Is Shifting Wealth to the Exurbs - WSJ

This population shift has implications for advanced telecommunications infrastructure that's often spotty in the exurbs. Knowledge workers relocating to the exurbs will often be in for a shock over the lack of fiber to the home connections where exurbanites are forced to get by with first generation DSL over aging copper phone lines or wireless connectivity.

Wednesday, May 12, 2021

Biden admin telecom infrastructure policy: Rural vs. urban not just a false choice. It's a false dichotomy.

For now, at least, the debate over the Biden broadband plan has mostly broken down along party lines, with familiar divisions emerging between those working to close the broadband availability gap in rural America and those working to close the access and affordability gap in cities. To Jonathan Chambers, a partner with the rural fiber-connectivity company Conexon, the Biden plan risks diverting funding to cities, when it ought to go toward building out networks in rural America, where it's more costly to build and where a sparse population makes it harder to recover costs through subscription fees. "I'm in favor of spending money on infrastructure, but unless you identify the problem first and target the money toward the problem, you're just going to perpetuate the problem," said Chambers, who previously worked for both the Senate and the FCC. Chambers worried that the Biden plan is motivated by "the folks in the Biden administration want[ing] to support their constituency, which are cities." Proponents of the Biden plan view the rural-urban divide as a false choice. "We have a real challenge in connecting both rural and urban populations," said Mitchell. "To the extent that we have to choose between them, I think we're doing something wrong." (Emphasis added)

https://www.protocol.com/policy/biden-broadband-plan

Mitchell's right. Not only is this a false choice, it's a false dichotomy. When it comes to telecommunications infrastructure policy, too many discuss the issue as if it were still 1950 and there were largely two Americas, one urban and one rural. 

Today, it's not as binary. Americans have also settled in suburbs, small towns and expanding exurbs at the edges of metropolitan areas. Advanced telecom infrastructure deployment is very unevenly deployed in these areas, where people have moved to escape congested and costly urban areas. The public health restrictions of the past year or so have accelerated that trend. The Biden administration's American Jobs Plan that would allocate $100 billion to building public option open access fiber to the home advanced telecom infrastructure offers a substantial start to meet this need.

Saturday, August 22, 2020

Exurban growth has major implications for advanced telecom infrastructure policy, planning

Editorial: California fires’ cruel cycle of natural and human disaster - SFChronicle.com: While the population of California and most of the Bay Area grew little in 2019, and Los Angeles County lost residents for the second year running, according to the state Department of Finance, most of the fastest-growing cities and counties were on the metropolitan edges. San Joaquin and San Benito counties, both in the outer orbit of the Bay Area, were alone in the region in experiencing more than a percentage point of growth, much of it due to housing production. Excluding rebuilding to compensate for earlier wildfire losses, the cities that saw the greatest housing-related population growth were also on the outskirts of the Bay Area — including Lathrop in San Joaquin County and Rio Vista in Solano County — or within an extreme commute of Los Angeles. This continues a long-term trend. Six of the nation’s 25 fastest-growing cities over the past two decades were in California, according to one analysis of census data, and all were on the sprawling boundaries of cities and metropolises.


Big implications here for current advanced telecom infrastructure policy and planning. The reason is these areas on the edges of metro areas while nominally exurban have been regarded by telephone and cable companies as rural and thus suffer from spotty advanced telecom infrastructure.

The return on investment doesn't come fast enough under their business models to justify investment and current federal and state subsidy programs don't offer sufficient incentive to build. Cable companies remain in their confined franchise 1970s "footprints." Telephone companies allow decades old copper lines to rot on the poles instead of modernizing them to fiber to the premise, with only some customers served by limited range and throughput first generation ADSL over copper.

While frustrating to many exurbanites before the public health restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic that has turned homes into workplaces, schools and medical clinics, deficient advanced telecom infrastructure has taken on a new degree of urgency in the exurbs.

Friday, May 15, 2020

Exurbs often neglected for landline advanced telecom infra

A Rise in Remote Work Could Lead to a New Suburban Boom - May 13, 2020: Larger homes with more rooms and offices could draw those no longer worried about their commute out of urban cores and into the suburbs and exurbs. (Emphasis added)
Advanced landline telecom infrastructure is typically lacking in exurban areas that have population densities lower than suburban but considerably higher than rural. That's because legacy incumbent telephone and cable companies generally count occupied dwellings along rights of way when planning last mile infrastructure. When there are stretches where there are few houses, clusters of homes not far down the road are redlined.

The exurbs end up being neglected, falling through the cracks as the mainstream and info tech media adopt an incomplete, binary view of advanced landline telecom infrastructure as either urban or rural with nothing in between. Hopefully migration to the outer reaches of metro areas identified by Zillow will shine a light on this issue and result in more fiber connections being built to exurban homes and small businesses.

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Don't limit federal loans to publicly and coop owned fiber to rural areas

Opinion | Post-Pandemic, Here’s How America Rises Again - The New York Times: “Building fiber infrastructure all across heartland America ensures that high-paying jobs can take place anywhere,” explained Matt Dunne, executive director of the Center on Rural Innovation, and it makes the whole country “more resilient to future pandemics and climate change-related weather events that require children and workers to stay home.” High-speed internet basically enables anyone anywhere to get training for a better job, often at low to no cost, from online universities or YouTube instructional videos. And if you connect them, they will invent.

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What Dunne proposes is that the federal government create a new loan program, reminiscent of the Rural Electrification Act, which would offer 50-year, no-interest loans to communities and co-ops creating rural fiber broadband networks and an easing of regulations to enable public-private coalitions to build rural broadband and attach high-speed fiber to existing telephone poles.

Why limit this program to rural areas when only about a third of the nation has fiber advanced telecom infrastructure connections? The lines between urban and rural America in the early 21st century aren't as sharply drawn as they were in the early 20th century. Then, the division between those served by electric power infrastructure -- urban areas -- and unserved rural counties was distinct. The comparison to the Rural Electrification Act doesn't cleanly apply in 2020. Exurbs at the edges of large metro areas typically lack residential fiber service. Often, they lack any landline advanced telecom infrastructure whatsoever -- redlined by legacy telephone and cable companies or at best served by DSL over aging copper phone lines.

Saturday, February 10, 2018

Modernizing exurban telecom infrastructure to cut traffic congestion, long commutes

America's Other Housing Crisis: Undercrowded Suburbs - The Atlantic: The reality is that most of the housing stock and most of the land area of America’s metro areas is made up of relatively low-density suburban homes. And a great deal of it is essentially choked off from any future growth, locked in by outmoded and exclusionary land-use regulations. The end result is that most growth today takes place through sprawl. While urban density can house some people—mainly affluent and educated ones—the bulk of population and housing growth is shifted farther and farther out to the exurban fringe. That leads to more traffic and longer commutes, and the social and environmental consequences that flow from them, as this old suburban-growth model is stretched beyond its limits.

There's a disconnect between America's telecommunications infrastructure and this residential development pattern. The exurbs frequently suffer from cable company redlining and outmoded legacy telephone company copper cable plant. In addition, homes are often served solely by substandard, costly wireless services as landline providers concentrate on building fiber connections to multi-family dwellings (known as MDUs) in densely populated urban cores.

This is a point of overlap between telecommunications policy and regional planning. Modernizing telecom infrastructure at the fringes of metro areas to fiber to the premise (FTTP) can play a big role in reducing daily commute trips to urban centers by making it easier for knowledge workers to work in their residential communities.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Satellite Internet provider targets U.S. exurbs as growth market

The notion that being disconnected from the Internet is a problem largely confined to rural areas isn't true. The latest evidence comes courtesy of Arunas Slekys, vice president of corporate marketing for satellite Internet provider Hughes Network Systems.

Slekys told The Washington Post that Hughes' best growth prospects aren't necessarily deep rural America but the outer rings of metro areas where telcos and cable companies haven't built out their wireline infrastructures to provide premises Internet connections. "These aren't people sitting on a mountainside in Idaho," Slekys told The Post. "They're actually exurban. You can go 20 or 30 miles outside of D.C. and there are a lot of areas where you can't get terrestrial broadband."

Indeed. Ditto for other metro regions of the United States. Living in the exurbs often means no Internet, which won't help property values recover in despite their typically upmarket homes.

Slekys makes a excellent point about the extent of the problem in the U.S. But his company's solution is, frankly, not a solution. Even on an interim basis until terrestrial infrastructure is constructed to serve these offline areas. Satellite Internet connections are notoriously sluggish due to the high signal latency caused by the 46,000 mile round trip to the satellite and back to the Earth's surface and are prone to frequent drop outs. Then there are the dreaded FAPs, aka Fair Access Policies. This fine print in satellite providers' contracts allows them to slow your connection to dial up speed -- often for days on end -- if the connection is used too much or for applications that use a lot of bandwidth such as video.

So those of you in the offline exurbs, forget about streaming Netflix films on a satellite connection unless you want to spend some time in FAP jail with your Internet connection slowed to a crawl. And if you're an executive who lives in an upscale exurban property or a small business owner/consultant, forget about using your satellite connection to videoconference with your offices or to exchange large files. The connection isn't sufficiently robust and stable to support it.