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In Virginia, Delivering Broadband To the Customers Big Telecom Forgot
cheezitmike writes "A Washington Post story tells how former automotive engineer Paul Conlin just wanted to get broadband at his rural home in Fauquier County, Virginia, and ended up forming his own wireless ISP: 'Paul Conlin, the proprietor of Blaze Broadband, is not a typical telecom executive. He drives a red pickup and climbs roofs. When customers call tech support, he is the one who answers. Conlin delivers broadband to Fauquier County homes bypassed by Comcast and Verizon, bouncing wireless signals from antennas on barns, silos, water towers and cellphone poles.'"
Verizon sued a local WISP service where I live (very rural southern Indiana), and they lost. That was around 2004. The company now covers the county.
Verizon (now Frontier) put in DSL a few years later.
Gone!
Already happened in some locales:
Telco wouldn't install fiber network, sued to prevent city from doing so (Another Article: we sue because we care)
Louisiana Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Fiber-to-the-Home Plan
I'd love to know myself, as it has occurred at least twice. See here and here.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
They sued EPB too. EPB prevailed in court, but then the cable companies lobbied to change the laws.
Fortunately for all the 1GBps customers, EPB was grandfathered in.
I live on a pond with 6 houses on the side of the pond I live on. Because there were so few houses, it was never economical to improve service. We never had cable. When I was a work at home programmer, we originally went with ISDN, and later T-1. Being a regulated service, the phone company has to provide it to anywhere they string wires, but it is not cheap. I recall it was an $1,800 installation cost just to prep the wires. After I parted company with Red Hat, we paid for it on our own ($400/month), but when the T-1 provider jumped the price to $700/month, we finally bailed. Fortunately, when we dropped the T-1, the lake had gotten a cell phone tower (that in fact helps pay for some of the lake improvements), and we were able to switch to cell phone networking for casual use. I did have to watch the bandwidth carefully, and not update my photo album from home in order to stay under the 5g limit Sprint charged. About 6 months after we switched to cell phone networking, one of the two towns that the lake straddles was getting Verizon FIOS, and fortunately that town government required the phone company to make FIOS to every house in town, even the houses on the ponds where access was more difficult. So all of us got FIOS. It would be nice the other town (the one I live in) would sign the paperwork so that I can get TV over FIOS to allow me to turn off my DISH TV satellite service.