fiber deployment is a meaningless number what people care about is connection speeds.
Average connection speed is also meaningless as it's minimum speeds that matter. (From you link %Above 25 Mbps Pennsylvania 26%) 1 Gbit conneciton does not make up for 40 1mbps connections. 2 county's have less than 30% access to 25MBPS connections, and no the few 1Gbps connections in no way make up for this deficit.
PS: Though I agree PA has solid internet access. I just disagree with how you are measuring it.
I strongly disagree that it's minimum connection speeds that matter. In a heavily-rural state like Pennsylvania, there will always be a lot of people living in places where it makes no sense to deploy fast wired broadband.[1] If you optimize the regulatory regime for bringing up that floor, you're going to compromise on the average and top end.
[1] I think in a developed society, people have the right to lots of different services, including maybe even internet connectivity. I strongly disagree they have the right to get it wherever they want to live. The government shouldn't be in the business of creating incentives to live in places that are expensive to build infrastructure to, at the cost of everyone else.
I don't think we should just find the single house with the worst connection speeds and measure that. But, I am willing to pay a lot more to go from 5-10Mbps than 50-55Mbps. Because connection speed has diminishing marginal utility. If you take the log of connection speeds and average that you IMO get closer to what people care about.
Further, if netflix wants to roll out 4k service they don't really care about max bandwidth just percentage of households over a given threshold.
The same idea is why the broadband report you linked cares about % over some threshold not simply averages.
PS: Internet connections are surprisingly cheap to deploy, we have roads to 'everyone's' house. Fiber is fairly cheap, companies simply have no incentive to build it vs. say they will build it.
In a large metro area with a strong tech company presence, we only recently got an available bump from our monopolistic overlords.
Prior we were maxed with "minimum speeds" of 25/5. With 4 people doing streaming and games, the service barely became useful. That's WITH an ISP that plays nice with Netflix peering setup.
The government should be in the business of meeting the needs of the people that put government officials in office. Full stop.
I mean are some towers that can be upgraded with 4G, 5G, etc going to break that bank compared to all the boon-doggles out there? It would be fair, IMO, to be concerned over the rollout becoming a boon-doggle.
Is spending on ubiquitous access everywhere really a line in the sand for you?
Focus on preventing charter schools from using taxes to peddle sky wizard philosophy or just outright fraud. SOMETHING that truly prevents a bad outcome. This just feels very arbitrary.
> The government should be in the business of meeting the needs of the people that put government officials in office. Full stop.
If the government wants to have fiber in rural Pennsylvania, it should build it. If voters won't countenance raising taxes enough to pay for that, well that's your answer. What it shouldn't do is try to end-run around the market, e.g. by forcing some customers to subsidize other customers, or imposing industry-specific taxes, or trying to get companies to build infrastructure by fiat. That just robs Peter to pay Paul.
Example: Verizon wanted to come into Baltimore to build fiber in competition with Comcast. Unlike D.C., Baltimore would not permit it to go neighborhood-by-neighborhood--the city demanded universal coverage. Baltimore doesn't have the money to build a network itself, and nobody else, including Google, would answer its pleas to build a fiber network on those terms. Baltimore is now stuck with a de facto Comcast monopoly. Meanwhile, almost everywhere else in Maryland has fiber. Who is served by that result?
> Is spending on ubiquitous access everywhere really a line in the sand for you?
The focus on ubiquitous infrastructure, rather than good infrastructure, is an anchor around the neck of America. E.g. it's why we have shitty train service everywhere, instead of decent train service along important routes.
Average connection speed is also meaningless as it's minimum speeds that matter. (From you link %Above 25 Mbps Pennsylvania 26%) 1 Gbit conneciton does not make up for 40 1mbps connections. 2 county's have less than 30% access to 25MBPS connections, and no the few 1Gbps connections in no way make up for this deficit.
PS: Though I agree PA has solid internet access. I just disagree with how you are measuring it.