Slashdot Mirror
Community Sets Up Their Own DSL
Thrazzle Throne writes "The folks in rural Ruby Ranch got tired of lame dial-up server. They fought the phone company for use of their un-used lines and installed
their own Dsl service. Very cool read."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
This is a VERY old story. Nonetheless, it is still quite amazing that a small town banded together to set up their own dsl server, DSLAM, servers, routers and all. I only wish that my neighborhood had done that. Of course, I am too lazy to organize.
--Ryv
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/09/124226 &mode=thread&tid=95
Deja Vu
There was a small town out in the panhandle of Nebraska that decided they needed good internet to keep all the young people from moving away. They setup DSLAMs out in the country to within a couple miles of every house in the county. They didn't have to fight phone company but they did have to run a lot of fiber.
That satelite still would have been cheaper for them and no i'm not talking about starband/direcpc type home user setup, I mean the buisness setups which are much nore reliable.
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
What is the big deal here ? I don't see what is so impressive about this. I am also surprised the phone company would give amateurs access to its facitlities. I hope they vetted these people first to ensure they were not terrorists!
Right now they're slashdotted down :)
Here's the google cache: linky linky
This *is* cool because it's geeky, but what makes it even cooler is that the people behind the scenes walk you through what they did to make it happen.
In their working against Qwest they had to settle a couple of issues. The include the forms and paperwork they used to make it happen and these can be used as a template.
What pushes this over the cool mode into the must read are the accompanying technical documents. They have network diagrams, monitoring statuses and more. It's amazing.
The best part of their site is a list of other communities have done the same thing.
The site is dynamite and is full of information! One of the best articles I have seen on Slashdot in a long time.
...that gets together and shows that they have a commercial or non-commercial project that is viable by the sheer weight of their numbers will win.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
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...
Click here or here.
Based on my current experience with a few ISP's, I hope the nature of this lends itself to more accessible technical abilities. I think too often communication goes from sales to support to the techs, and often even advanced users feel put upon because the chain of communication breaks down. Keep it for the people!
// -- http://www.BRAD-X.com/ --
This is almost as redundant as the 10 posts complaining that this topic has already appeared. Of course, while I'm writing to call attention to this 3 other people probably are as well, so this message is also redundant. Sorry to waste your time!
later,
Jess
I am programmed for etiquette, not destruction!
Ruby Ranch sets up the DSL, Slashdot effect takes it down...
I leave that tech-y stuff to the professionals.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
is the fact that it is slashdotted already. :)
Better pen up the cattle boys, I can see a slashdot brewin' up on the horizon.
I suddenly find myself wondering if this is the first barn slashdot has ever taken down...
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
And for one last dig on Qwest, here's an often-heard Coloradoan joke: What's the difference between Qwest and Enron? About six more months.
--Chag
Do-it-yourself DSL is no pipe dreamb uz z.html
http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2002/0408net
It's even better than DSL on DL speeds. Though maybe more expensive in total for all the houses. But to say they had no choice other than 28.8 is probably a bit of hyperbole...
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I also remember reading about these folks who made their own neighborhood 100 Mbps fiber network. The screenshot of the FTP download speed is just plain silly. The creator of the page even mentions "and 25-40 Mbps is possible most of the time - that means it is their single hard disk limiting the speed!". :)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
Funny how this server doesn't seem to have held up as well as the iPAQ :-)
That standoff with the ATF (and its eerie similarity to the situation at Waco) hurt this community badly.
Old news or no, I'm still glad that someone stuck it to Qwest. I live in CO to and I don't know how well their service is in other states under their tyranny, but where I live 10 Miles outside of Colorado Springs you can't get anything from anyone outside of satellite. No isdn, no sat., no cable (*they* can barely deliver a clear picture) no nothing for any price. Qwest hasn't really expanded their DSL network much in about 3-4 years. I think I read somewhere that Qwest was considered the worst local telco in USA... =(
This'll be quite the barn burning ..
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?
It's dirt cheap. I've done it. Just look at these pics of my neighborhood area network. Currently 10 neighbors share the cost of an internet connection. We also share stuff we've grabbed from kazza, we have a intranet that announces the happenings and events on our street. Very cool stuff. Basically each house has a switch, and we daisy chain houses so we don't run into the 600' Ethernet limit.
I can give a rat's ass about the AUP of my ISP because the question of packet ownership has to be asked. At what point do I own that packet? When I request a document from the web? When it hits my router? When it is on my copper?
People can do this themselves, it's not hard. In a rural area you just replace the AC transformer brick on the switch with a battery/solar panel combo every 600', or you could something that has a bit more distance to it like token ring. Yeah maybe this all sounds silly, but we're doing it out here in silicon valley and it's been working for the last year.
--toq
--Azaroth
About the Coop
The Coop offers DSL service to all homes in the Ruby Ranch neighborhood in Summit County, Colorado.
The Coop was founded in 2001 because no one offered DSL or cable modem Internet access in our neighborhood, and because the voice telephone service to the neighborhood is of such poor quality that it is not possible to get modem connections faster than about 26K bits per second. The Coop is a Colorado nonprofit corporation and is federally tax-exempt under 501(c)(12).
The Coop's History
The Coop has launched service.
By far the biggest challenge faced by the Coop, a challenge that dwarfed any of the Coop's technical and financial challenges, was gaining access to subloops from Qwest under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. (The subloops are needed to connect the DSLAM to the subscriber homes. The buried telephone cable in our neighborhood has some three times as many subloops as are actually needed for voice service, and the subloops we wish to rent are among the hundreds of spare subloops which otherwise would generate no revenue for Qwest.) The course of negotiations was such that the Coop found it necessary to file an informal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission and subsequently found it necessary to pursue arbitration before the Colorado Public Service Commission ("CoPUC"). In the arbitration, the CoPUC found that "all of [the Coop's] proposed equipment is compatible with the Qwest network," and that "Qwest is technically able to accommodate [the Coop's] proposal." The CoPUC found that the Coop is entitled to pay "wholesale" rates for the subloops rather than much higher retail rates. Finally, the CoPUC found that because the Coop will be providing only data services (not voice services) and because the Coop will be offering its services to everyone in its service area, the Coop does not need to be a CoPUC-licensed telephone company. (This is very good news, since being a licensed telephone company would impose prohibitive accounting and record-keeping burdens.) After the CoPUC's arbitration decision there were further negotiations with Qwest, and a signed Interconnect Agreement between the Coop and Qwest has been approved by the CoPUC.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Of cheap internet access. A while ago parts of the community came together to form The colorado internet co-op. In fact, if you look at the network diagram of this group, they use nettrack, which also has a connection to the co-op.
Some of the more prominant Unixers on the co-op board are Trent Hein, and Evi Nemeth (two of the authors of the USAH) was also involved. The CO-OP has played a nice part in keeping colorado up and wired.
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.
Hmm, he must be a Qwest rep to post this story with a link to the cooperative's site. Easiest and fastest way to get back at those pesky consumers: Slashdot their new service!
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
I think we're smart enough to find the google cache. Ok?
Ummm not unless you like a lot of latency. DSL is more reliable than satellite also, and its pointless to use satellite access if you are building a COMMUNITY ORIENTATED network.
r00tdeniedPlatinum Networks Hosting www.platinum-networks.com
wow, them is some sour fuckin' grapes.
If it is, 12 poor DSL subscribers have likely lost their connection for a few hours... I wonder if they even know that they are victims of the Slashdot Effect?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
25-40 Mbps is 3 - 5 MBps my hdd transfers at between 35 and 40MB per second (in bursts), thats udma 100
udma 30 is about 10MB per-second.
That's assuming your not hitting memory buffers,
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Latency yes, but all of my cable stations (and all of my neighbors' cable stations) come over satellite.
Satellite mixed with a few good lines would work nicely.
Get your Unix fortune now!
The department I work in is trying to put a bunch of "local level" government offices on the Internet. We need broadband speed connections from their offices to our data center. Getting some type of broadband installed in many of these places is absolutely horrible.
In many of these places, there is just no way to send a 50MB file once a day in a cost effective manor. We just had Iowa telecom decide not to offer flat rate ISDN to us because it would be to expensive for them. This was when we called them a week after the promised install date to see why it wasn't installed! It took us MONTHS to get to this point. Would have been nice if they had a couple months ago (before quoting us a price and delivery time) told us they wouldn't do it. We have promised our customer a price and delivery date (which is now well passed.) Iowa Telecom (or whatever their name is) has now offered us a price for ISDN which is more than our promised total price to the customer.
It is hard to believe phone companies can get away with this type of service, or lack thereof. We have now starting selling the service with a bring your own internet access spin. We have missed deadline after deadline due to the fact we cannot get tcp/ip access to these offices at reasonable prices, at the delivery time we are told. We are a "full service" provider, but there is no way we can deal with this crap. I'm sure we are not alone.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Fantastic! Thank you, sir!
A co-op for DSL! I love it. This reminds me of the Community Antenna Television co-ops that created cable TV. Too bad corporations turned that into a money grab scam. I used to get my electricity from a co-op before I moved, and service was cheaper and more reliable than from those crooks at Cinergy. If the co-op turned a profit, I got a profit sharing check at the end of the year. Someone has proven that neccesity is the mother of invention, not just the potential to get filthy rich. I wish all utilities were available from co-ops and not corporate robber barons who gouge me.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Nice UNICODE art, dude. Mad props and all.
sPh
I recalled this being mentioned on /. before. Glad to see that they were finally able to realize their goal! Now they can get the ultimate stress-test: a slashdotting :)
--Kylus
Idiot-proof something, and Life will build a better Idiot.
I guess the server is on their DSL line as well beacuse its been a Slashdotted.
-Vic
You can find a bunch more links & comments on this story here. Oops.
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
*nick
This is a cool story, yes, and an even cooler solution to an existing problem. But I think we (Slashdot) need to be a bit more responsible about thinking to sites like this. Can we possibly think that a rural network like this can sustain a Slashdotting?
Linking to the MSNBC story should be plenty to get the point across. Why waste these folks network?
PDHoss
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
Gee, didn't I see this story somewhere before?
(BTW, check out Carl Oppedahl's comments to that story...)
We don't get a lot of lighting in silicon valley. Not to mention there are lots of things much higher than the cat5 that the lighting would rather hit first.
... tens of millions of Slashdot geeks! If you squint, you can see the copper T1 glowing red hot!
On a more serious note, I wonder if mod_gzip and a faster server would help out at least a little bit -- make slightly better use of the limited thrput the T1 provides.
most vpn solutions don't work over satelite (2 ip's one for upload one for download) and alternative os's are often out. There are many reasons why splitting a couple T-1's via dsl drops is a good solution. Plus this way you have presumably more controll over your internet experience, eg need more bandwidth, call a motion and if people are willing to pay you get more. Code red got you down, block incoming request on the appropriate ports etc. Plus almost anything interactive sucks arse over satelite. Oh yeah and there is that monthly bandwidth cap and random slow as 56k speed caps etc.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
What the hell is a fucktard anyway? Think of a decent insult at least.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Maybe someone should videotape and mirror the meltdown of the webserver!
It is high time I find out what a T1 costs and calculate the numbers and see what the people on my street think.
Maybe someone with some real education in this area can explain it better. Still, point is, you're probably best off running fiber between buildings to be safe.
BEGIN RANT
:o), Another 2 cheeseburgers at Burger King, or supporting a great company? You Cockeater.
Look Jon, rather than sitting there and counting down to the Delisting of LNUX from NASDAQ, why not do something about
it. I mean, why not got out and buy some stock in VA?
Now is the time to put your money where your mouth is and invest in this company. You can trade in LNUX stock right now for only $0.82.
Unless you cannot even spend a buck to save the company. BTW That is lees than that Fat Ass Sally Struthers begs for to feed the children.
Exactly! VA is down to only 205 employees, and planning to cut more jobs before the end of this quarter.Understand?
So, what is it going to be? Are you going to support this company and invest. Shit, look at the ads on the OSDN network. 90% of them
understandably promote other OSDN sites. We need to get those big pocket investors in here to buy adspace.
Contact the VA National Sales Director Eric Kazanjian eric.kazanjian@osdn.com, Voice: 650-551-0175, Fax: 650-551-0195, Mr.
Kazanjian can also be mailed at eric.kazanjian@osdn.com. Call and see what you can do, buy a banner stating YOU HELPED!
So, in conclusion
END RANT
Mod me down as Off topic but I needed to clear that up!
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
Aha! I've been happy with my cable service. I just didn't know I could be that happy!
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
I worked on a project as a consultant a number of years ago... a town decided to wire itself. It was city government sponsored, and they had their own T-1, and were wiring homes with ethernet. Since then it appears that they've really expanded! I wish I could live there. :)Check it out!
http://web.rochelle.net/~city/
I guess I'm a knucklehead, the html formatting doesn't seem to be working when I preview. Ah well, you get the link anyway.
I wonder how much the monthly charge is going to go up just to cover that poor barn getting Slashdotted.
Elsewhere:
Authorities are looking into web-related assissted suicides and their connection with the Slashdot community. One of the most recent and haunting Slashdot-assissted suicides involves a poor distraught I-Paq being abused to run a webserver. The I-Paq posted on slashdot under its owner's username and linked to itself. The large community of thousands of members began surfing to the handheld and within the hour, the poor thing was dead.
In a related case, a webserver being kept in unfit conditions in a barn located in Colorado wrote in to Slashdot under a username suspected to have been stolen from one of its users. Once again, the chilling "Slashdot effect" has killed this webserver.
Members of the Slashdot community claim innocence, claiming that they all have a right to connect to the webservers linked to on the Slashdot site, regardles of the end result. In the words of one Slashdot member, "If my viewing of content on a site contributes to the taking down of that site, so be it. Especially if the webserver has posted about itself in the hopes that it gets slashdotted! If the server wants to die, it would go against its rights to not allow it to. I'm just helping the cause."
Zeke: Durnit! All of a sudden, the DSL got reeeaal slow, then it stopped altogether!
Ezekiel: Hmmm, my 28.8 connection seems to be connecting fine... let's just surf on over to Slashdot... OH MY DEAR GOD
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Cause - You throw a dart at a map of the United States.
Effect - Much of the nation can't access broadband if they wanted to.
Solution - For the love of God, DON'T THROW THAT DART!
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
From their FAQ, it really sounds like the biggest obstacle was the lack of cooperation from Qwest.
The Phone companies forget that they are public utilities. They are given certain privileges, not least of which is monopoly power, not so that they can turn a profit, but so that their service can do good for the community. The profit motive is just an incidental factor to encourage them to invest in providing that service.
Hats off to Ruby Ranch for having the moxie to get the thing done. I wish I could get 1.5Mbit SDSL for $60/month.
evanchik.net
That's just funky, to think that the source of one's DSL service comes from a barn. But hey, if it works...
But to say they had no choice other than 28.8 is probably a bit of hyperbole...
In most discussions of this sort the term "cost effective" or "acceptable" is implied, i.e. "they had no other cost effective (or acceptable) choice other than 28.8" is probably not hyperbole. Remember, satelites work for download, upload is still limited to what the phone line can carry, ie. 28.8kb, so satelite wasn't really a choice that would have addressed the problem of speed to their satisfaction (read their website for specifics of why when they systematically investigated the satelite option they rejected it).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Ha ha, you got trolled. Sucker. Feed them and they get bigger and stronger.
Is Lariat.
Its basically a co-op out in rural wyoming that provides internet access, support, and other stuff to members of the community. Pretty interesting, really. Check out their FAQ, or their Clone Us page which has information on how to create your own local community network.
----
One of us needs to stick ones' head in a bucket of ice water.
- Hobbes
NT/WINDOWS 98 is their main server o/s!
check netcraft...
They will not permit any of their user/members to run any kind of server at home. Not even a "vanity" domain which generates little or no traffic.
If you look at their bandwidth stats,
who's gonna pay the bill?
According to http://www.rric.net/faq/speeds.htm, the subscribers pay for usage; slashdot users should be billed to suck up that much bandwidth, eh!
have you been defaced today?
This is an old story??? They went into operation on June 1st 2002! Thats 5 days ago! Did it have to happen today to not be conisidered an old story?
I've said this many times before
Yeah, and I've said this many times before:
READ THE FUCKING ATTACHED LINK YOU STUPID MORON
Oh, but it was slasdotted...
READ THE FUCKING GOOGLE CACHE YOU STUPID MORON
Oh, but I'm a dumb fuck still stuck on AOL and don't know what the hell I'm doing...
READ...oh wait. Never mind. There's nothing you can do about that. You have my sympathies.
There was an "I, Cringely" article about this last year. Nonetheless, it's still pretty damn cool.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/09/124226 &mode=thread&tid=95
... that none of the residents are chickenboner spamming trailer trash, or else their lil DSL link won't be worth the fight in the first place.
Anybody remember the last time this story was posted? It's definitely cool, but it's easy to check if the story has been covered before...
UserAdvocate: The voice of the user
to say they had no choice other than 28.8 is probably a bit of hyperbole...
I very much doubt that. I've lived in a rural area most of my life. Even though I was only about 8 miles from the CO, and on a fairly new all copper loop(1), with 56k capabilities on both ends of my connection, I was lucky to get more than 19.6k and never got more than 28.8k. PacBell is the high end for line quality around here, too, being the major carrier. There are a few parts of the county that are served by GTE, and they are much worse.
I'm guessing that you have never lived in a rural area. You wouldn't believe how bad phone service can be in areas where you can't open your window and spit on your neighbor. Universal Access is satisfied by only the most basic telephone capability on nasty, noisy lines, and the phone company only guarantees 4800 baud. My complaints about line quality were met with "you can get ISDN". I've since moved somewhere I can get DSL, but my mom still lives in the house I grew up in, and the situation hasn't changed a bit.
No, saying that they were limited to 28.8k is probably not an exageration, and is in fact probably a quite generous depiction of the service they were actually getting. It's quite possible ISDN isn't available to them, or if it is it's unreasonably expensive for the bandwidth it provides. If they're in a mountainous area there could easily be line-of-site issues that would prevent them from using one of the satalite based services. Line-of-site is also a problem for radio and microwave (despite what folks would like you to believe about cell phones, they do have LoS issues).
The MSNBC article says these questions are answered on the rric web site, but it seems to be barely limping along at this point.
(1) The new copper loop was paid for by 5 families (including mine) when our self-installed farm lines started getting sketchy about 7 or 8 years ago. It cost us $10k per family for 2 miles of line extension, plus a 3 year service contract with PacBell. PacBell made it a loop a few years later of their own volition.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
The voltage difference between buildings over the same wires appear to be caused by the electrical load in one building being greater than the other at any time. The electrical resistance from the mains generates a voltage drop. Also, when dealing with the higher voltages, the current leakage due to capacitance and corona discharge add up greatly. It happens with 120 volts and becomes very pronounced with 480 volts. With 14400 volts from substations, this becomes a significant portion.
Its best to use fiber optic cable over large distances, unless you like to isolate the circuits and treat the chassis as possible live conductors. The voltage differences across one building can reach several volts. Over different buildings, I'd hate to touch the wires if the worst happened. I have seen 277 volts (one phase of the 480) make it through the ground reference before. If its copper from another building, beware! Don't touch!
pls mod parent up
IN TEH FUCHAR, LITERSY WLIL EB OPSHANAL!!!!!111
Stan: Why's this damn thing taking so long?
Kyle: Stupid slashdot crashed our DSL.
Kenny: MFFMFMMMFMFMMMFMM
Stan: Yeah, this movie of Cartman's mom's taking forever to download.
Cartman: That's it! Screw you guys, I'm going home!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
As if slashdotting some poor guy's PDA earlier today wasn't enough, the hounds behind slashdot, the worlds #1 DOS trigger, had to go take out an entire community.
Way to go guys!
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
See this article from April 9th.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Rolling out a community network is a great idea and probably any network geek's dream. But DSL, oh my! Many wireless community networks have proved 802.11b is the perfect technology for this. These guys in Seattle are trying to cover the whole city and IMHO they're very likely to succeed.
So you want to roll out a network in a small city ? UseNoCat Auth for authentication, connect everything to the net, and already you'll be able to read slashdot while sitting in the middle of the street.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
They'll spend a lot of time keeping it patched, but if they're willing to, so what? It's probably NT 4, but that's not real surprising. Not everyone is a Unix/Linux admin. However, since it seems they have a good deal of cash, if they want ease of administration and security, the fast and easy road to a better server would be OSX.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
--I'd love to do this myself out in the boonies, but no idea what you really need in the way of equipment and software, etc to get started. I can operate a computer, duh, but besides that, does anyone here have a link to some newbie detailed info on accomplishing a task like this? Or just some ad hoc info on a basic setup, what you need? Assume zero prior knowledge on getting an actual isp setup and going.
Thanks in advance!
The MSNBC story, and the Coop's website, were really great reads. Thank you, Slashdot :)
I learned a lot about what really goes into a broadband connection, and I even went so far as to look up all of their equipment on ebay!
Old, but here it goes:
100 Mbps FTTH in my home.
I have 1 Gbps Internet access@home
http://web.archive.org/web/20011031052416/http://w ww.rric.net/
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Anyone know if legislation exists in Canada that would give you access to the right pieces of the phone network? I'm working on building a co-housing community and this may be an option for us.
Brant
IT blows and sucks at the same time. I am running a cisco 675 with a small lan to boot. We have currently 512 down and 128 up. For some reason I am lucky if I pull 6k off of anything. Currently we only have 6 people on the lan during summer session(college). Qwest keeps telling me I must have done something wrong, or that the router is broken. Which I replaced at a cost of $100 off ebay only to find out our old router is not broken, it still continues with slow dsl and periods of outage. We pay $60 some dollars for barely better than dial up, but to provide a fraternity house with access it's the only way. I am senior Comp. Sci. major and preparing to take the CCNA this summer so I don't think it is anything I did to the router. Plus I have followed the instructions to a T to set up the initial config. I have better things to do with my time like work on code for my Senior Project than to sit on the phone with qwest all day and have the technician tell me I am stupid and assume i f'ed it up. You go to hell qwest you go to hell and die
So, rather than get ISDN at $100 per month, you spent TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS for a phone loop?
You do realize that the same 10 grand you spent would have paid for your ISDN for EIGHT YEARS, right?
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
The other day I saw something on The Discovery Channel or something similar. After they went back through the tapes of the regional weather radar and the satellite pictures and all that, they discovered that the lightning that hit a guy on a bicycle in Vail, CO, out of a bright, clear sky came from 10 miles away, traveling sideways over a mountain before it got to him.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
[insert Randy Weaver or Janet Reno joke here]
You can't get ISDN on a farm line. You also can't get most of the other extra services, like call waiting and such. We had to spend the 10 grand for the phone loop before we could even have a chance at getting fleeced for ISDN.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
A few of us set up a network using SDSL modems. 2 Megabits over a 20 dollar a month leased line (analogue/voice). We used Pairgain SDSL modems to do it, which made us all appear on the same net. The machine in the next room was no faster than my friends 4km away.
You have to be on the same exchange though, otherwisde your leased lines are not copper.
I moved recently, and sadly disconnected. I have the two SDSL modems if anyone is interested (1000 dollars for the pair)
Gary_howland@hotmail.com
What a pity that you could not quote the paragraph that you were talking about. Here's what our web page (http://www.rric.net/faq/speeds.htm) really says: "We will not, however, permit servers, at least not at first. We need to accumulate some experience with actual traffic levels and with our charges billed to us by our upstream provider. Any server that were to generate appreciable traffic would need to be paid for at a higher rate than the rate paid by other subscribers who merely check email and visit web sites."
Your question about why we didn't use satellite service is answered on our web site. See "Why don't you simply use a broadband satellite connection?" at http://www.rric.net/faq/nosatellite.htm .
For our Coop we have lightning protection at each end of each loop. At the DSLAM end we are using 16-volt solid-state fused protectors (described on our web site in the FAQ section). At each home we have the protectors provided by Qwest -- gas-discharge devices that trigger at 150 volts or so. Plus the cable is buried at all points (other than pedestals and end points) so lightning is less of a risk than it would be for above-ground cable.
These folks are fortunate that they had available loops to grab. I've been trying for months to get Qwest DSL. Qwest told me that my line wouldn't qualify because my second line was installed using a bridge tap and was interfering. I cancelled my 2nd line and asked for the bridge tap to be removed. Two weeks later I get a different story from Qwest that there are no unused pairs in my area so even though DSL is available just 2 blocks away, it will probably never be available in my area. No one ever mentioned whether anyone had removed the bridge tap as requested.
I live in a city of 50,000 people in Northern Arizona. It's a crime that Qwest can treat it's customers this way and that DSL is not universally available in a city of this size. It isn't just that I can't get DSL, I cannot connect at anything higher than 28k. I don't have words to describe how bad this is.