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Louisiana Towns Going High-Tech
wolverineinspector writes "Mink, LA is finally getting telephone land lines after the neighbouring communities got theirs in 1970. In the article they also say that as many as 6.2% of US homes don't have phone service - that would mean that 19 million Americans don't have wired phone lines available to them."
If you had read the article, you would've realized that they went to the town dump to make a call, because they got the best reception there.
probably meaning land or cell.
My mother lives way out in the country, and the local telco quoted her an obscene price to run a landline to the house. Unfortunately, she lives too far from the highway to get decent cellphone coverage. She ended up having to pay it.
I have to believe, though, that if the people of Mink, LA really wanted phone coverage some company would have wanted to sell it to them. I guess it wasn't worth it, until now, for just fifteen homes.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
In the USA, there are Rural Telecommunication (and electrification) Acts. I'm not sure about new construction, but I know that in rural Texas if you have an old isolated homestead in need of telephone service, you can call up the nearest telco and they'll string out lines no matter what it costs. It all gets paid for by federal grants.
The only catch is the telco territory boundries. Sometimes two telcos will bicker over who gets to (or who has to) string the lines. A vist to your state's public services commissioner will get things moving though.
They use the Census.
"Recognizing the need for more precise periodic measurements of subscribership, the Commission requested that the Census Bureau include questions on telephone availability as part of its CPS, which monitors demographic trends between the decennial censuses."