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?"

Comments

Could you provide a link to the articles you read?

[Quarters]

'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...).