Cable and farms don't get along well. There are some places better served wirelessly, which, in the case of premium broadcast delivery, probably means satellite. Actually, once the DTV transition takes over, the DTV channels could run premium and specialty (cable channel) streams on their subchannels, giving many more off-the-air options, but they still won't offer as much as satellite.
One problem is simply that coaxial cable has a lot of attenuation, so you can't go very far. Attenuation rises with frequency, so a 550 MHz (early HFC, obsolete by today's standards) system goes farther than a 750 MHz system, etc. Fatter coax has less attenuation but costs more per foot. So when you get to places where subscribers are spread out, you end up needing to bring fiber all the hell over the place, and the total cost/subscriber is just too high. Another way of putting it is that cable plant has a cost per mile, not per subscriber, so farms just don't have enough subs/mile to be worth passing.
High-speed rural Internet is a fine application of higher-powered point-to-multipoint radio. A 3G cell tower can serve several miles' radius, as can other licensed-power data radios. Of course the FCC has locked up pretty much all of the frequencies, assigning rural areas to the same licenses as urban areas, so the licensees concentrate on the most profitable urban areas, which accounted for most of the auctioned value. Their licensing policies are almost perfectly calculated to keep rural areas from being served.
Rural ILECs, on the other hand, get huge subsidies from the FCC, as well as enforced monopolies, so they end up with the whole pie. And it's paid for by the rest of us, regardless of newer technologies that would be lower-cost options if made available. |
