Building a Town-Wide LAN?

The Mainframe asks: "My town (Hanover, NH, home of Dartmouth College, the Dartmouth Medical School, and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital, non-college population approx. 9K people, double that with the college) is conducting a feasibility study on building a town network. They'd like to deliver fiber to every home within town limits. This fiber will carry (certainly) the internet and (probably) cable-like television programming access. They're estimating that it will cost $40 per month per household. I just filled out and returned my survey (one sent to every Hanover household) in which they asked a number of questions like: 'What would your primary use of this service be?' and 'Would you be willing to pay $40 a month for this service?'. What reasons, other than the obvious benefit of having fiber to one's house, can you think of for making this kind of commitment to the infrastructure?

"I would imagine that there will be an enormous secondary benefit because we will become an attractive town to technically inclined people and businesses. At the same time, Is this a good idea? I, personally, think it would be wonderful, but (as an IT major) the technical challenges of laying fiber and maintaining a network to serve 9000+ citizens are mind boggling. Policy decisions, network abuse, outages, spam, filtering (god forbid), all nightmares that will require a dedicated, 24/7 network maintenance team. Any network engineers out there have any juicy morsels from their work on large networks?

I know the town manager, so I'd like to feed this discussion to her, after moderation has taken its toll (probably at a level of +3), so she can see what the technical community thinks."

Comments

not their first controversial networking adventure

[donkiemaster]

Dartmouth tried to go wireless before the technology was ready and it turned out to be a disaster. The founder of Cisco donated a buttload of money to get them going (he went there i think) but when they set the whole thing up it just plain didn't work. I didn't hear much about it after that, but they were talking about scrapping the entire thing. I bet he is at it again. I have family that grew up there and know the town fairly well, I bet the townspeople will not pay $40/month for this.

Re:Over-estimating the combined intelligence of /.

[ppc970]

SlashIQ

How to calculate the combined IQ of slashdot.

Take the IQ of the lowest IQ'd slashdot user (we'll exclude the folks who just read, and haven't figured out how to get an account, which should bump this figure up by at least 3 points)

Divide by the total number of slashdot users.

I will leave the actual calculation to the reader.

Re:Function of government

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

Roads, water, sewage treatment and water systems are all needs. As much as you want internet access to be, it is not a need.

If you want to be a socialist, go live in Europe.

I notice you've marked me as a foe. I take it when people disagree with you, they automatically are foes, right?