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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."
Yes, and it was a lousy idea back then too. The result was to encourage city dwellers to move out of the cities, resulting in much less efficient energy use, long commute times, and a destruction of inner cities.
The reason people live in cities is because it is more efficient than in the country. If you destroy that efficiency advantage by forcing city dwellers to subsidize country folks, the predictable outcome is overall low efficiency and a destruction of cities.
And progressives still don't get this through their heads, since they still throw around subsidies for everything and then whine and complain when people react rationally in response.