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In short, power is easy to send over Very Long Distances without making it useless. High speed data is harder to send over long distances.
ROFL

Afaict to get power more than a kilometer or so without crippling losses or insane cable costs you have to run at voltages in the kilovolts, that means either very heavilly insulated cables or tall poles with ceramic insulators on them holding bare wires then lots of small transformers dotted arround (more in the US than europe because the US uses a lower voltage for final distribution to properties)

Data could easilly use a similar system. You install a box that is designed to be pole or outdoor cabinet mounted that terminates a fiber run and distributes services to local houses over DSL.

The trouble is the incumbent telcos can't be bothered doing this because there isn't much money in it and when some locals want to do it theselves they can have problems working with the telco to use the final distribution subloops

take a look at http://www.rric.net/ , a lot of the detail seems to have dissapeared now but IIRC they started off using SDSL over dedicated distribution subloops, then qwest tripled the price of those so they had little choice but to move to shared distrbution subloops (requiring complete new equipment), then iirc qwest for a while took away the ability for them to provision new shared subloops forcing them back to dedicated subloops. I consider that some serious messing arround.

Or, have a non-profit coop own the lines: http://www.rric.net/

http://www.rric.net/

Here is a good example of a co-op broadband outfit. They've been going for quite a few years now, I believe.

I remember reading an article about DIY DSL here on slashdot a long time ago. I did a simple google search and found an article about a neighbourhood in colorado. verizon wouldn't give them DSL, so they did it themselves.

here's an article about them

and this is the Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative

i know there's also software that can do DSL with nothing but an old soundcard and two copper wires. i don't know where it is, or if it's still maintained though.

cheers, and good luck.

A while back the FCC made a decision that has removed the availability of unbundled DSL service. This is one of many reason's why. Of course I understand the Baby Bell's position, you want me to not charge for the line?

Ahem.

The FCC never required that the phone company allow you to get a line for free. What they repealed was the set of laws that said that they had to offer just DSL without telephone service.

Have a look at your phone bill. (If you have DSL, look at a friend's instead, but the author i'm replying to says he doesn't.) You already pay for the line and for phone service seperately. That's something the bells fought to be allowed to do. Then, the FCC turned around and said "hey, you're charging for the line and service seperately; now that you're offering this new version of ISDN that goes over POTS, you're not allowed to sell them the line then require phone service to run other services."

People which got unbundled DSL weren't getting free phone lines. They were not being forced to pay redundantly for phone service. That's for people which live on their cell phone, or who have alternate voice like a PBX system.

I say that they get to wholesale it, and frankly that the Baby Bell's should be like power companies, you get a contract to maintain the lines for X years, you get paid Y dollars, and have to maintain Z services.

That's exactly how it works right now, except that instead of X years, it's X months.

On top of that you get to call them "your" lines, except you have to wholesale (wholesale purchases get to pay taxes just like you do, but they just get a circuit.) At that point states/localaties get to choose competition.

You seem to be confusing the bells with AT&T. Utility companies are granted federal monopolies to prevent infrastructure redundancy. The reason you don't have an alternative to Bell Wherever (though they've all changed their names now) is that there's only one phone network.

As far as selecting competition, again, this is exactly how it currently works. The easiest example is your long distance, which didn't work that way until the early sixties. You didn't used to be able to choose between AT&T, Sprint, MCI, et cetera. That said, you can actually do this with your local line service, too. Everywhere I've lived in the united states, there's some company which advertises in beeper stores, dollar outlets and check cashing places that they'll turn your phone service on without requiring you to pay off your existing bill to someone else. They're just gambling on a high-risk crowd; anyone can, in fact, open that loop for you. It's just that the amount of leverage Bell has by putting the bulk of the cost into the loop prevents anyone from competing on economic terms; the only companies which can are the ones which can afford to charge higher rates, like risk group service providers, commercial bulk providers and high-end providers.

If I remember correctly this is the way Power lines/companies are handled in Chicago, but I could be wrong.

This is the way they're handled in about half of the country. Many states don't allow deregulated grids fearing that cost cutting will cause unacceptable risk, which was recently rubbed in our face in the northeast. It's much more common for the other utilities: water, gas, and refuse.

That or I convince everyone in the neighborhood to by in, and I set it up.

Ruby Ranch did this some years ago at surprsingly low cost, and has maintained a working and marginally profitable (it's not meant to make money; they're setting aside a war chest for upgrades to hardware, et cetera) network at prices that were for the day dirt cheap. They have extensively detailed the process, including startup and recurring costs; it's a valuable resource for planning. Do remember that these prices are years out of date, and reflect line costs to the middle of nowhere; this is a lot easier in metropolitan areas which can't get broadband, such as condominiums with antiquated PBXes and private cable systems.

They said the same thing about electricity

And many communities (including mine) have started trying to solve it the same way... Publically funded Rural Electricity Cooperatives were the solution to the power companies not wanting to wire such areas, and community owned broadband networks such as http://www.rric.net/ may be the solution for broadband providers not wanting to serve such areas.

I personally believe the Government has no business stepping in to assure anything regarding Internet service... The market will handle itself just fine. If there is a market to sell broadband services somewhere (even if it's rural), someone will eventually pick it up. And if that doesn't happen, and the people living there still want broadband, here's a perfect example of how it can be done.
Seriously, we need the government LESS involved with our day-to-day lives, not more. If you want something done, do it yourself, don't ask the government to take money from me at gunpoint so they can do it for you for more money and a diminished result.

Here's the previous /. article. The people that did this posted a pretty detailed FAQ of how exactly they went about it - pretty interesting read. There's also some mention of their encounters with the FCC, which may be useful in helping your community project avoid legal pitfalls.

-j

This link shows the website of a community that put together a coop so they could provide DSL service to the people living in their subdivision. I think the tricky part are the government regulations involved.

Who here (or anywhere) is surprised at this?

Form a coop, lease some resellable bandwidth like a Fractional-T1, slap wireless nodes everywhere. "Mesh" networks seem to be the latest buzzword. Use them to route around the broken segment -- aka "phone company".

"People may just decide that an Internet Broadband Co-op is a good idea, form one, and snub their nose at the likes of ATT, Comcast, Rogers, Cox, and Mchsi."

The Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative Association got fed up with the poor quality of service (coming from Quest, I believe) and decided to make their own ISP.

These are all difficult questions. Ours is a coop, meaning that every cost we incur must necessarily come sooner or later out of the pockets of the subscribers. We are charged by our upstream provider according to our traffic levels. If a subscriber were to generate so much traffic that we had to pay an extra $250 per month to our provider, we would need to charge that $250 to that subscriber. There would be no other choice.

At first, we are going to throttle most of our subscriber connections down to 206K bps. Later, after we accumulate some experience and see what our traffic levels really turn out to be, we will consider raising the connection speeds.

It's not buried anywhere It's on the Front Page.

And then you have the nerve to insult me by ascribing a nervous disorder to me. If you weren't the 50th person to post a question that was 1.) already answered and 2.) on the first page of the site, I wouldn't lose my shit. Tough to tell whether you're trolling or stupid.

Boy, you're fucking dense.

I've said this many times before, why are people in this kind of situation rolling out DSL? Why not just lay down new copper in the form of CAT5?

Why not simply bury your own cable? In our neighborhood, the ground is full of rocks. This means that many ways of burying cable, such as a vibrating plow blade or a Ditch Witch, are unworkable. Pretty much the only way to bury things is with a backhoe. Backhoe work is expensive. Our neighborhood has many miles of roads, and we would likely have to spend well over a hundred thousand dollars if we were to try to bury new cable in the neighborhood.

Burying new copper under our roads is particularly frustrating to think about, given that the existing phone cables buried by Qwest were overbuilt by a factor of three or more. In other words, some two-thirds of the pairs in the cables are spares right now, spares that would never get used by Qwest for revenue service. Qwest ought to be delighted at the chance of collecting monthly revenue from us for some of these pairs.

The Coop pays for its data traffic on the T1 data line. This cost could be anywhere from $75 per month to about $450 per month, depending on traffic levels. After some months in service we will have a better sense of what this cost is turning out to be.

Does anyone know whether that "about $450 per month" is the maximum charge? I guess they are about to find out. Sometimes I feel sorry for the slashdotted victims.

Here's a link to the Ruby Ridge Internet Cooperative Association.

Or in plain text: http://www.rric.net/

It gives a lot of details on the setup and such...