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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.'"
Sued by Comcast and Verizon for "unfair competition" in 3, 2, 1...
He'll figure out just how "expensive" broadband is when the telecoms tie him up in court. That is, if this ISP is large enough to affect the bigwigs.
I, for one, welcome our red pickup driving, roof climbing overlords.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
We were working on stuff like this using mesh wireless, which would have been a great option for those the big boys leave behind. It was possibly a bit early for its time, although a lot of competition was going for the line-of-sight option. Line-of-sight though isn't so good in many places. When we stopped making them we had a large number of smaller ISPs still interested, but the company was more interested in getting a big name telecom to purchase from us rather than a lot of tiny customers (always the snag, need to make money). What I'm finding interesting now is that in the intervening years it seems like mesh has taken off again.
Climb roofs and towers, run cables mount radios, answer tech support phone calls...done it all.
Hard way to make a living, but very grateful customers. Two other WISPs in town could not make it.
I am a board member of a newly started association that are going to build fiber-optic network in rural Sweden. All members own their real estate and will be members of the association who will own the network. The projected cost for 150 members are around €2500 per connection for building the network and €30 per month and connection for operation (100Mbit with triple-play). The fiber-optic cables will only pass thru real estate owned by the members. I own around 430 acres of forrest so there is a long way between each house/real estate/member. Our website www.sodrakindsfiber.se is only in swedish.
That's excessive, although on track.
The sad, sad truth is that people would rather someone come and save them from "the corporations" rather than even attempt the sort of work the incumbent providers did to offer the service in the first place.
How does he proof there is no monopoly by running business in an area that's void of competition? If anything, he has unintentionally monopolized the local void.
FTFA:
Fauquier might be 45 miles from the White House, but many residents can't look at WhiteHouse.gov in their homes.
They mean Whitehouse.com, right?
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
The reason this works is the guy can charge a premium ($89 is not cheap for the speed of Internet he is offering, more like 3 times the cost if it was DSL or Cable of the same speed), but he can do it because they have no other option.
His business model works because it is an affluent county without another choice (how many people do you know that will pay $300+ install fee?). It would not work in any market with DSL/cable with costs of $30/month and no install fee/contract (mind you many DSL will try to lock you in with a contract, but you can go without a contract in most cases if you pay $5/mo more, which is what you'll pay when the contract runs out anyway).
I'm not saying what he is offering is bad. It's a great deal for those people with no other choice. But it's not a model the telco/cableco will follow, and it's hardly a good example in the case of the US's dualopoly ISP model.
Even my local WISP, Fire2Wire won't post their prices, because they're not anywhere near competitive. The only reason anyone will get them is because they have no other option but dial-up. I believe they also charge $300+ install fees and prices comparable to BLAZE Wireless (WISP mentioned in the article). Further, WISP speeds are often just barely on par with low-end DSL/cable. Worse still, if your downstream neighbors are hogging the bandwidth, you're pretty much out of luck (QoS could help here, but effectively you're still sharing the "max" that you could get if they were idle).
I know one business which hosts an antennae for the local WISP and they get free Internet. They only use it as a low-end backup, but instead pay for a carrier-grade ISP T1 for their production business needed. They'd never pay for the WISP, and it's only because of the free deal that they have them at all.
I'm glad to see this guy doing this, but it's not exactly unprecedented. It was done on grain silos, grain elevators, water towers, leased space on other people's towers, and even on flagpoles all over rural Illinois and Missouri a decade ago. I worked for some ISPs that did this and did some of the server consulting work for more than one startup doing this, too. I wasn't the one climbing to do the radio work.
The startup cost for the customer is still pretty high for this sort of thing, usually around $200 to $275. Then it's typically $50 to $70 per month for around 400k to 600k down and 128k up or 256k or 512k symmetric, depending on which company and how far you are from their towers.
Frontier is putting 6Mbps DSL in lots of former Verizon territory in towns as small as 3,000 or 4,000 people. Only the really rural places will need this sort of thing in Frontier's areas soon, and it's much more expensive even with radio equipment to get the people on 80 and 120 acre or even larger plots miles from towns covered. That is, much more expensive compared to using the same radio towers closer in. It's still much cheaper than running new cables to all those customers.
It's not a perfect solution, but when weighed against dialup in the countryside or having to move closer in and change your lifestyle just for decent Internet access, a lot of people who don't prize low latencies and high throughputs as much as your typical Slashdotter will be happy to have it.
Oh, I guess I'll just imagine that I have more than one option in my area, then.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Yes, Virginians, there is a Santa Claus.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I would say they ARE competitive.
A guy walks into a store and asks what the price for potatoes is. 2,50EUR a kilo. "That is crazy, the store around the corner only ask 25 cents a kilo".
+ "Go buy there", says the store owner.
- "They don't have anything left"
+ That's just crazy If I don't have anything left, my prices drop to 15 cents per kilo
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Recently, sold to one of the bigger boys. It was ... too much work, really. (bunch of "entitled" folks in community made life difficult)
Don't regret doing it. There was NO chance of anyone in that area getting connected without our work. But - glad to be free of it.
"We are going to have to solve this problem creatively ourselves. "...fearful the county won't qualify for broadband infrastructure grants...[officials] are pushing to expand homegrown services such as Conlin's."
That's what the free market is all about. Entrepreneurs will provide solutions far cheaper than the government ever could, and create jobs in the process. How about we just eliminate all of those broadband infrastructure grants, and let people like this build their businesses?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
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.