Today Condé Nast published a piece on the struggles of Silicon Valley start up SmartCar and its neighbors in their attempt to get serviceable business internet connectivity to their offices in Mountain View, California. In the town where Google keeps its headquarters, ventures in SmartCar's chosen building were made to suffer slow AT&T DSL connections as the only provider offering a contemporary standard of connectivity to their location didn't actually serve their building. The infrastructure simply isn't there. Despite all the pretense that Silicon Valley and California are places operating on some higher form of civilization, it really is just Africa all the way down.
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The counties in rural Washington (Douglas, Chelan, Grant) with the crazy-cheap hydropower ($0.04/kwh before volume discounts) that miners love also have insane fiber-optics — 100mbit/sec symmetric for $40/month, and yes you really can burst 80% of that to Seattle (i.e. any site hosted on Amazon AWS, which is most of them nowadays). And it's run by municipalities who pretty much tell the DMCA trolls to fuck off unless you're running some sort of crazy warez-mecca.
You city people are so dumb, putting up with that Comcrap/Verizon/AT&T monopoly garbage.
You're quite wrong in comparing Silicon Valley to Africa. As far as I can see (I have travelled a lot), the Internet connection can be excellent, good or poor.
It is excellent in middle-income countries (Eastern Europe, Russia, Turkey, China, Vietnam).
It is good in poor countries (Africa)
It is poor in rich countries (Western Europe, New Zealand).
I have not been to US but as US is a rich country, I suspect there might be real problems with Internet connection.
Internet is pretty good in my WE country. But that's mostly thanks to one ISP that has kept the others in check, our neighbors had a lot of shit like lying DNS, data caps, etc.
I think it bows down to:
– willingness of consumers to switch (needs people not emotionally attached to historical state monopolies and tech-savvy)
– geography (explains part of the US issues)
– ISPs with an internet culture instead of a telephony culture (probably the most overlooked criteria)
– a core group of clients who won't compromise for a lower internet quality, and will recommend their ISP to others
What's the country, if not a secret?