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Starting a Local Fibre Co-Op?
swordsaintzero wonders: "I have seen several articles mentioning local co-ops implementing fiber. I am moving to a smaller town to take a position as a Solaris Administrator for a large university. After calling around, I found out the fastest bandwidth package available is half the speed of my previous package. For all of you Slashdot readers, who have worked on getting fibre implemented for your town through a co-op, what was involved in presenting it to the city government? What would be the best way to get the ball rolling on getting fiber for home use implemented?"
'Cause frankly I don't believe it. A co-op to get DSL implemented on already laid dark cable is one thing. Most communities don't generally have dark fiber run to every residential address. If it's been laid it's being used. To create a co-op tasked with rolling out a community-wide installation of fiber to each doorstep, with or without the local government's help, would be an astronomically complex and time consuming task. Instead of trying to convince a town to fund such a fool's errand why not try convincing the university to subsidize business-class broadband at home in case you need to work from there ("If the system(s) go down at 3am I can get them back up and running faster if I can just log in from home instead of driving across town." etc...).
Please name a big city with fiber to the premises -- outside of Korea, that is.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Why the hell would you even want fiber to the doorstep? You realize how much it costs to terminate the stuff? You can get a much better price/performance ratio from SHDSL if you really need quite a bit of bandwidth (it'd still be excessive for home use). Otherwise, just go with regular DSL, it's good for at least 3 MBits.
It seems that Verizon is doing its FTTP rollout first in less dense area to work all the kinks out of the system before they move into the big cities. The two towns next to me (northern NJ) just got hooked up and mine is being done right now.
So if you want FTTP right now, move to a suburb that's already been finished.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car