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British Farmers Growing Their Own Internet Service
pigrabbitbear writes "Look outside of your window: if you see miles of farmland, chances are you have terrible internet service. That's because major telecommunications companies don't think it's worth the investment to bring high-speed broadband to sparsely populated areas. But like most businesses, farms increasingly depend on the internet to pay bills, monitor the market and communicate with partners. In the face of a sluggish connection, what's a group of farmers to do? Grow their own, naturally. That's what the people of Lancashire, England, are doing. Last year, a coalition of local farmers and others from the northwestern British county began asking local landowners if they could use their land to begin laying a brand-new community-owned high-speed network, sparing them the expense of tearing up roads. Then, armed with shovels and backhoes, the group, called Broadband for the Rural North, or B4RN (it's pronounced 'barn'), began digging the first of what will be approximately 180,000 meters of trenches and filling them with fiber-optic cable, all on its own."
Memphis Light Gas and Water have been laying cables with fiber optic cores since the 1970s. If only the law allows them to offer Internet service - fiber to the houses, at prices unseen before in the United States.
They could have it as good as the Google Fiber Hood. But... too much entrenched interests.
You could just lobby your legislators to pass a law requiring ISPs to provide sparse areas with cheap broadband access, effectively subsidizing the internet costs of a few by raising rate on everyone else. I mean that's how government works right? Everyone lobbies their legislature for special favors until everyone has special favors and everyone is paying for everyone else's stuff in addition to providing much needed jobs for lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, regulators, etc.
Forming a private cooperative to build their own internet infrastructure seems like a perversion of the crony capitalist system that is the foundation of western society.
I suspect there are a lot of laws in the way in most cities/towns etc, but imo this is something that should be done even in urban areas. local intranets; the difficulty comes when one residence can supply an internet connection they paid $50/mo for to hundreds of people; which odds are the ISP forbids this in their contract... Still community forums, files, games could be used over community/street intranets and be quite enjoyable; ie: BBS days.
I hear Monsanto has a patent on that
... please come back when (if?) they have the first 100 homes connected to Internet.
Being a provider is not an easy task in terms of investment and operations.
Who will be faster - the ditch diggers or the telecom lobbyists demanding the end to such community ditch digging?
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If they were in the USA, I'm sure the telecom companies would find a way to sue the everloving piss out of them. You simply don't infringe on their business, no matter how much sense it makes. It's them vs. you, and they have multiple orders of magnitude more money and lawyers to throw at the courts to make your life a living hell.
Hopefully it won't turn out like it seems to in the US.
The rural areas aren't worth the big ISPs money to invest in the infrastructure. That said, the few times I have heard about small towns setting up their own local ISPs the big ISPs seemed to have no trouble finding all the money they needed to try to litigate the upstarts into the ground.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbed_wire_telephone_lines
Whoosh!
Came here expecting net-enabled wheat stalks but at least I learned how to pronounce B4RN because that sure wasn't obvious.
TH4T'5 'BARN' 4 TEH 1337 1LL1T3R4T3
There was a time when the same sort of thing would happen in the USA, but who in the USA today would dare run afoul of one of the literally thousands of Federal regulations that MIGHT apply to them?
The Federal government is so powerful that it's created a generation of Americans that sit frozen unable to solve problems for themselves out of fear that some distance authority will swoop in and punish them. There is nothing anymore that can be done without their permission.
Land of the free and home of the brave? Hardly.
I have a pretty radical socialist Czech friend living in the US that said that the problem with American politics is that it requires everyone agree. Every problem has to solved at the federal level and it prevents things from getting done.
When even a European socialist complains that the US central government is too powerful, you know there is a problem.
wouldn't it be cheaper to setup multiple 802.11 b/g/n channels running 20-30km hops between nodes using dishes?
Like these guys
Optic has some great benefits of wide bandwidth and less prone to environmental factors such as storms but it is very expensive and time consuming to dig and setup. Wifi nodes can literally take a few minutes to setup and test and are configured for multiple points of failure redundancy. And solar is very lucrative seeing as these areas are the farmlands where sun is abundant. Running this equipment away from the grid would be trivial at best.
Referring to:
sparing them the expense of tearing up roads
I'm just curious how they did this...
Or, publish a completely off-topic rant that annoys everyone who came here for intelligent commentary. Oh, and post it A/C.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
This was reported on in online media over a week ago. What the fuck.
it might be North West England but it's middle-ish of Britain ......
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=54.040038,-2.758484&hl=en&ll=54.085173,1.625977&spn=7.764374,26.784668&num=1&t=h&z=6
mind you the wa things are going Scotland will leave the UK next year anyways... still for accuracy's sake.. at the moment it's NOWHERE NEAR NORTH WEST BRITAIN!
Farmers in the US ran a telegraph network over barbwire in the late 1800s or early 1900s (can't quite remember which). From The Information James Gleick
Forming a private cooperative to build their own internet infrastructure seems like a perversion of the crony capitalist system that is the foundation of western society.
Ever hear of the Common Agricultural Policy? These "farmers" (0.5% of the UK population owns over 60% of the land) receive around â5 billion a year---just for owning "farmland"!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Good. That definitely means there would be no SIX strikes in the home grown service. Now what if these were to spread across the world?
Similar community-driven projects have been carried out in other EU countries, such as Finland.
Here’s one such example from the region that geographically centers around Töysä – a small rural community of 3,000 people – and its neighboring towns/municipalities, some of which are a bit larger, but not much:
Verkko-osuuskunta Kuuskaista (The Network Co-operative Kuuskaista)
6net+ core network (a PowerPoint presentation)
Or, publish a completely off-topic rant that annoys everyone who came here for intelligent commentary. Oh, and post it A/C.
Any criticism of slashdot editors is off-topic by definition, unless it's an article about how fucking brilliant the editors are. Which is perhaps unlikely.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Some hired noobs have the innate, breathtaking ability to bottom a plow completely below ground.
+ some schools got a fat internet pipe virtually for free a couple of years back. They're now being asked to find ways to pay for it, so in some cases, they're hiring companies to dig up local gardens and driveways to plumb the neighbours into the same pipe. Using optical means the neighbours now become as well connected as the school, so can pass it on to more neighbours and so on. There are some using 'trunk' wireless solutions, not 802.11, but something related to get to areas where the fibres can't reach.
And they're doing it all with components built by Lucas!
That exactly same thing was done in Spain like 6 years ago. The project is called Guifi.net and it is the largest citizen-owned network in all the world. It has received several European prizes. It spans several cities and towns (mainly the Spanish east coast). Lately it has reached 20,000 active nodes.
It is composed mainly of wireless links, but a couple years ago or so the farmers started building fiber links. They reached up to the closest Internet exchange point (CATNIX). They call this fiber-laying project "FFTF" (Fiber From The Farms, as opposed to Fiber To The Homes).
They are supervised closely by the national regulator and all is perfectly legal. They are their own ISP, registered as such.
I encourage similar projects to get in touch and at least coordinate IP addresses.
I'd sure like to. While in general fire service seems pretty low on the list of things that need privatizing, given that it doesn't do too badly (although it may be massively overpriced; I have nothing to compare it to), I would certainly like choice and competition in any and all services. Why should a private fire department be forced to put out someone's house for free (except to the degree that it's necessary to stop it from spreading to customers or brush)? Why should anyone be forced to subsidize services for their neighbor? Why are you defending slavery?
yeah and where was the spelling problem? I went back and didn't see it, maybe someone cleaned it up already? Now if you want to fuss intelligently then you could talk about the writing style which is abhorrent, poor quality high school level writing. Not good, but not as horrible as the aged P wants me to think. No, this is just a rant, and not that well thought out either.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.