Amazon recently opened a warehouse for their own delivery service that is about 1 mile from my house. I thought that'd turn out to be pretty great and I'd get stuff first thing in the morning for the stuff they use Prime to ship - but after a couple months of watching this, it unfortunately appears that my house is at the very end of someone's route and not the beginning. They must loop around town in the other direction! Booooo!
Oh well. Not that this is much different than UPS or FedEx. It's just that.... come on! I can SEE the warehouse, dammit!
@bigzaphod in a similar vein, I live in a rural area and Internet speeds aren’t amazing. There was a public works project to improve speeds for areas remoter than us, and it brought them gigabit FTTP. Which is awesome for them.
The fibre cables to get to those areas run past my house - there are three poles they could tap from and bring me gigabits speeds, but because my speed (60Mbps) is considered adequate, they won’t do it.
It’s right there. Visible from my desk. Every day.
@mo I'm in a similar internet situation. There's fiber across the street (the end point which I can see) but the company won't come to me because I'm "just one house." The cable company has a line buried *across my driveway*. They won't tap it for me for anything less than $5k and I'm pretty sure that number was just tossed out there to get me to go away. I'm stuck with a wireless ISP and max speeds around 45mbps on a good day. The house I grew up in 15 miles from the city has fiber.
@mo I'm not a fan of the idea of giving Musk any more money, but I'm toying with trying out Starlink. I've seen some people posting speeds in the hundreds of mpbs which would be a huge improvement.
@bigzaphod it’s amazing how we’ve managed to make high speeds the baseline in a short period of time. We had 5mbps in this house, and were doing Netflix happily. When we got 60mbps it seemed like luxury, but we’re quickly saturating it as the kids have grown up and become big consumers of bandwidth!
@bigzaphod I can still tell when we got the 5 -> 60 upgrade because that’s when I stopped downloading purchased movies from iTunes and just watched them streaming. And I used to download them in work where I had a decent connection!
@mo yep same here. 3 kids watching YouTube while we try to watch 4K on the TV or something is pretty brutal sometimes. And then if there's a giant game downloading an update at the same time... ugh.