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Domain: vermontel.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to vermontel.com.

Comments · 4

  1. Research, yes, but by wytcld · · Score: 5, Insightful · on The US Rural Broadband Crisis

    I live less than 20 miles from Gilsum, and about a mile from a (relatively) major regional ISP with good SDSL. I did my research before moving here. But the crisis isn't someone moving to Gilsum blindly. The crisis is that there are lots of ways that solid broadband access can give advantage to a business. Good broadband is a strong advantage for economic development. So rural areas need to find ways to develop it. It can be profitable, evidently, even for the providers. The highest DSL penetration in the country is claimed by VTel in Vermont. Meanwhile the State of Vermont is looking at ways to subsidize extending wireless access to the remotest valleys - with the Republican governor's strong support.

    The crisis is that what's good for business and economic development on the whole is often not taken care of by the incumbent carriers, who have discovered ways to make more profits elsewhere without delivering particularly good or advanced services, just by squeezing customers they already have. It's not that they couldn't make real profits in rural areas, but that they'd have to do some actual work to earn them, rather than just live off the legacy of the networks they've already built.

  2. Re:Kind of a concern by ben+there... · · Score: 1 · on Landline Holders Increasingly Older, More Affluent

    Outside of, I think, NYC (where IIRC unmetered landline plans were unavailable for a long time), and those that choose metered plans, landline-to-anything is free to the landline and has been so as long as I've been alive (32 yrs and counting). The resistance in the US market was the idea of paying to call someone else locally; callee gets the benefit of being mobile with the phone, so why should caller pay for it?

    It may be rare, but most of Vermont is metered. Local calls are 0.5-2.2 cents per minute. They added per-minute charges when they expanded the local calling areas to include several additional towns.
  3. Re:Superiority of the Free Market. by glaucopis · · Score: 3, Interesting · on Internet Connectivity Outside of the United States

    And actually one of the few places in the US where you can get 24 Mbps, Vermont, has a very low population density. It probably helps that VTel is an independent telephone company. 24 Mbps isn't available everywhere in the state yet and does cost $50/mo, probably more than people in the UK are paying, but 24 Mbps DSL does exist in America. And if it hasn't arrived in your corner of Vermont yet, you can still get 8 Mbps for $35/mo while you wait.

    And when you sign up for it, you get two t-shirts featuring smug comparisons between VTel's speed and everyone else's. All of the gloating would be annoying if it weren't so justified; I just find it frustrating that all of the nice retired Vermonters down the road from my parents' place can get nearly 10x the speed of what Verizon deigns to give me where I live.

  4. Jack Bryar's email: by Duke+of+URL · · Score: 2 · on Re: The Charity Case for Red Hat

    Andover News said, "Hey, don't yell at us! Yell at Jack Bryar." So why shouldn't we send Mr. Bryar a note?

    Send your thoughtful yet polite comments to:
    bryar@vermontel.com or
    jack.bryar@newsedge.com

    I think some one should send him knarf's response.