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You're presuming not only that there is competition, but that there is any company willing to supply at all.

In rural areas such as Canada, the initial logistical expense means that buying the service from a truly free market would be unaffordable.

Discriminating against rural areas is as unacceptable as discriminating against, say, hispanic areas or native american areas. Now that isn't a problem for corporations who only want to make profit, but it is a problem for governments who want to be re-elected.

The standard way to get around this is to set minimum levels of availability, typically as part of a company's licence to trade.

For instance, I live here (as my wife points out) in the Cotswolds.

There is NO WAY any teleco is going to be able to supply my house with digital comms for a profit for less than, I'd imagine, US$500 a month.

Yet I have unmetered dual channel ISDN for US$90 a month (plus ISP fees of US$35).

This is because British Telecom is forced to supply ISDN to my house as part of their licence to trade across the UK.

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The one I use is the Jenoptic JD11 (aka Praktica D500).

Pros:

• Dirt cheap- £80/$120
• 640x480 resolution fine for web work
• Picture quality fine in sunlight
• Flash works well provided subject is within 3 metres (9 feet).
• 2xAA batteries last forever
• Takes standard compact flash memory cards- 28 JPGs in 2Mb
• Quick transfer to Win95 via serial cable
• Dead simple to use; point and shoot button, delete last picture button, mode button (timer, exposure), on/off switch, macro switch, that's about it.
• Very small, compact size, surprisingly well built, comes with belt case.

Cons:

• No LCD viewer
• No zoom
• 640x480 resolution to small for printing
• Picture quality poor in low light
• Flash results poor if subject more than 3 metres (9 ft) away.
• No Mac/Linux drivers (to my knowledge, I'm after Linux drivers please)

For the price it is a superb camera, although it can't compete with models costing more than twice it's price. It's a case of knowing what it can do, and staying within it's limitations, then you get good results.

Samples: www.custodian.com/album

Manufacturer's page: www.jenoptik-camera. com/english/products/jd11/main.html

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Sort of. I have an old 1980's Sony RGB computer monitor plugged into my VCR instead of a TV, and I have a barely functional old black and white TV sitting under my dusty Atari ST monitor.

Does the bed of your truck bed four?

I'm British. We have smaller cars. I own a Daihatsu Terios 4x4. It beds two- me and my wife, both 190cm.

Are you humming a song at this moment about someone doin' someone else wrong?

Does Nine Inch Nails "Starfuckers" count?

Are there also Oakies, hillbillies and rubes in the sticks? Are there even sticks?

I used the word "redneck" 'cos I was writing to an American audience. I would normally have said "yokels" as in "local yokels".

But oh yes, there are sticks.

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Close. Gloucestershire.

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For anyone thinking of applying to GCHQ, here are some more links about the Cheltenham / Cotswolds area.

Cheltenham Borough Council
Gloucestershire County Council
Gloucestershire Tourist Board
Echo and Citizen local newspapers
Cotswolds Hyperguide
Alderton Parish Website

It's quite a nice area. The towns are human in scale but large enough for decent facilities, and the countryside is breathtaking. I like living here. If you need any more info (about the area, not about GCHQ), email me evilandi@cimmerii.demon.co.uk.

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We live out in the sticks and aren't likely to see cable anytime soon- and with local planning laws we can't have a satellite dish (can't have the tourists thinking us quaint old rural folk have technology now, can we?). Thus I was originally worried that OnDigital would be pants because I had no other choice for multichannel TV.

The answer is far from it. OnDigital ROCKS. Super sharp picture, digital now/next programme guide, loads of GOOD channels including loads of British and American programming.

It costs twelve quid (US$18) a month for 30 regular channels, and premium stuff such as new movies and football start at an extra seven quid (US$11) a month.

Nice thing about the receiver set top box is that it is BIOS flash upgradable over the airwaves. You just tell it to download the latest upgrade and off it goes. There are new features added every couple of months. Picture-in-picture teletext was the last upgrade; email is coming soon.

I just can't imagine life anymore without Cartoon Network.

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This has done the rounds before in October 1998. Then, as now, the UK govt ruled it out because:

• whoever introduced it would never get re-elected
• unless this was EU-wide legislation, they'd have to either ban European visitors' cars (illegal under Euro free movement law) or fit all visitors' cars with the device (illegal under Euro free movement law)
• given that many European countries have areas with NO speed limit whatsoever (eg. German autobahns), and that member countries can't agree on speed limits anyway, the chances of euro-wide co-operation on this scheme are ZERO.

As for me, I live out in the sticks where the roads are so quiet you can hear a car approaching from miles away. Quite rightly, we have a speed limit of 60mph through our little village- and the police won't stop you unless you're doing over 75mph or being really stupid.

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2MByte or 2MBit, either way mobile telephone bandwidth can only help the most bandwith-starved areas of the world- the rural ones.

I live a bit out in the sticks as my wife points out ( Cotswolds, UK ). Whilst I'm only 500 metres from the telephone exchange, my 'phone line takes a 4 kilometre detour through three neighbouring villages before it gets there. Which means that ADSL and BT ISDN Highway are out of the question.

I consider myself pretty lucky to get 49.3kbps from my telephone line. People in rural parts of America, Asia or Africa will be getting far less.

Yet it is rural areas that need the Internet most. Why would townsfolk want cable TV, teleshopping, multi-user chatlines and home offices when the video shop, supermarket, pub and place of work are on their doorstep? These amenities are often not available to rural users where not only remote location, but sheer lack of numbers, make even subsidised facilities uneconomic.

It is high-bandwidth wireless services like GPRS that will lead the revolution, not cable.

If the post office has to send written data nationwide, regardless of urban or rural boundaries, for the same price, why shouldn't telecoms operators be forced to send digital data nationwide, regardless of urban or rural boundaries, for the same price?

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Look, I live in the country. I have about as much chance of getting broadband access this millenium (i.e. before 2001 because that is the millenium dammit) as Bill Gates using Linux for his house. (less, actually).

Yay, what he said!

Us net.yokels and net.rednecks demand bandwidth NOW! I mean, what's the fucking point of wiring up towns for cable TV, teleshopping, multi-user chatlines and home offices when the video shop, supermarket, pub and place of work are on their doorstep? These amenities are often not available to rural users where not only remote location, but sheer lack of numbers, make even subsidised facilities uneconomic. And yet it is us folk out in the middle of nowhere who would benefit most!

If I had a quid for every time a British Telecom operator has said "Well, if you're not happy with line quality, get ISDN or ASDL", and I've said "YOUR COMPANY WON'T GIVE ME ISDN OR ASDL YOU MORON, I LIVE OUT IN THE STICKS, IF IT WASN'T FOR GOVERNMENT REGULATION YOU GUYS WOULDN'T EVEN GIVE ME A 'PHONE LINE!!!" I would be a very rich man.

ps. 2001 is not the millenium, it's the bi-millenium, and anyway the calendar is at least 6 years out- according to our current calendar, King Herod died in 5BC, at least six years before he ordered the killing of the newborn. Now THAT's what I call a fucking miracle. Christians, eh? Can we say "necromancy", children?

score -1000 offtopic, flamebait, etc... :-)

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Sporty wrote: Am I the only one that also thinks that the population density of some areas make it quite difficult to do this?

For mobile services it is surface-travellers, not population that counts. After all, if you're talking about static population, have a static landline.

How many people actually permanently live IN Disneyworld? Not many, I suppose. But there are thousands of visitors, so these kind of areas are prime locations for mobile 'phone transmitters.

What helps in Europe is that pretty much everywhere is "on the way" to somewhere else vaguely important. For instance, I live in the rural Cotswolds, UK (you'll be familiar with it if you've ever watched an Agatha Christie movie), which has a low population but is between Birmingham, Bristol and London. Thus even though the local population is low, we have people travelling- by car and train- through our area a lot. And that's why I can get a good signal strength at home despite it being well and truly out in the sticks as my wife points out.

I'm not sure this model would work in the Americas where you're in an "east coast" and "west coast" situation with two large metropolitan areas with very little inbetween- and the "inbetween" is a vast area of thousands of kilometres usually traversed by aeroplane, not car/train.

Of course, all this would be solved by satellite 'phones. But there is no incentive for people to use these schemes in Europe and Asia when GSM works just fine, thanks. And that's not forgetting the huge start-up costs of satellites compared to groundwave TXs.

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