I have 5 Gbps symmetric at home. I and my fiancee both work from home, so our backup fiber connection from another provider is 2 Gbps. We can also both tether to cell phones if necessary. We can get 5G home wireless Internet here, too, and we might ditch our 2 Gbps line in favor of that as a backup. We moved from Texas back home to Illinois last year, and one of the biggest considerations was who had service at what tiers due to remote work. Some of the houses we looked at in the same three-county area in the Chicago suburbs didn’t even have 5G home available (not from AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile anyway).
My parents have 5G wireless home as their primary connection, and that was only introduced in their area a couple of years ago. Before that, they could get dial-up, 512 kbps wireless with about a $1000 startup cost, ISDN (although the phone company really didn’t want to sell it to them), Starlink, or HughesNet. The folks across the asphalt road from them had 20 Mbps Ethernet over power lines years ago, and that’s now I think 250 Mbps. It’s a different power company, though, so they aren’t eligible.
Around 80% of the US population lives in large urban areas. The other 20% of the population range from smaller towns to living many kilometers from any town at all. There’s a lot of land in the US.
Here in dense NYC, most apartments I've lived in have but a single ISP available. It's common to hunt for apartments by searching the address on service maps.
I'm pretty sure one landlord was cut in by his ISP, as he skipped town when I tried to ask about getting fiber, and his office locked their door and drew their shades when I went there with a technician on two occasions. The final time, we got there before they opened and the woman ran into the office and slammed the door on us.
Residential ISPs don’t work financially unless you oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things right, you oversell at a level that your customers don’t actually slow down. Even today, you won’t have 100% of customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the time.
Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
We still have some repos in Subversion and most things in git. It’s still exciting for every repo we get migrated out of svn. That’s a high bar to cross if we’re talking further improvements compared to git though.
Those are mostly more traditional data centers. 20 or 30 kilovolt racks with separate cages for different tenants, some meet-me rooms, and a bunch of telecom gear are the order of the day.
Internet traffic requires routing and switching. That’s all traditional DC equipment in terms of power and cooling. They don’t require 80 or 100 kilovolt racks like something stuffed full of AI accelerators.
Festus isn’t small because it’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s right there with Arnold, Barnhart, Crystal City, and other far south suburbs of St. Louis. The metro area can build it. It’s not like Boeing brings in remote labor from around the country every time they build an F-15.
There’s a bit of a duality about perfect agreement within the voters for the party’s candidates and somewhat within the party membership itself. Yeah, there’s a lot of telling each other to piss off. There’s a lot of jockeying for the platform and the primaries. But come the general, it’s a minority of the voters who will sit it out or vote for a minor party. Sometimes it’s a large enough minority to hand things to the Republicans, though.
Specifically, the US federal government. Just like most Americans don’t hate the people of Russia or Iran any more than the folks the next town over, I’ve never met someone from Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, or pretty much anywhere else who hates all Americans. I’m sure they exist, but probably as a small minority. There’s plenty of reason to hate our government though, especially if it has threatened to destroy your entire civilization.
I don't know about the percentage of the population, but everyone who leaves Iran and learns English (or German) is much less likely to be a fan of the Iranian regime than those who never left Iran in the first place, so you'll definitely have a sampling bias.
Growing up in the Southern US, I met plenty "Let's bomb all the savages in the Middle Easy and take their oil" types. Some of them grew up to be self-proclaimed Nazis.
These people are racist against non-whites living in their own communities, whom they have spent their entire lives with. Meeting a dark-skinned stranger in a turban is a chance for them to confirm and bolster their biases, not to reduce them.
And even if they go through some kind of traumatic experience with a stranger from the Middle East and call them friend, it wouldn't stop the racism. I know plenty of racists with "black friends" who will tell you all about how "there are black people, and then there are n**rs". Some of their black friends will even parrot this kind of propaganda.
I'm not sure I agree. Given that the area in question here is the southern United States, and considering that racism is alive and well there, indeed with people groups they have met (and who speak English), I'm not convinced that exposure to non-whites speaking Farsi will somehow fix their attitude.
Yeah, buy Americans are not target of Russian aggression and violence. Russia is kinda abstract ennemy far away. Feelings get stronger when the country is actual target of bombing.
My parents have 5G wireless home as their primary connection, and that was only introduced in their area a couple of years ago. Before that, they could get dial-up, 512 kbps wireless with about a $1000 startup cost, ISDN (although the phone company really didn’t want to sell it to them), Starlink, or HughesNet. The folks across the asphalt road from them had 20 Mbps Ethernet over power lines years ago, and that’s now I think 250 Mbps. It’s a different power company, though, so they aren’t eligible.
Around 80% of the US population lives in large urban areas. The other 20% of the population range from smaller towns to living many kilometers from any town at all. There’s a lot of land in the US.
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