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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 hear Monsanto has a patent on that
Who will be faster - the ditch diggers or the telecom lobbyists demanding the end to such community ditch digging?
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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.
Yeah wherever will a bunch of farmers get their hands on earth digging and moving equipment...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
Umm what? To start with they can have an old beige box as the router, and secondhand media converters are cheap as well. They don't necessarily need gigabit haul, probably 100mbit stuff that's dirt cheap will do the trick. And nobody lays down a single-strand fiber cable!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Optical works in the snow, ice, storms and other UK conditions.
Placing a good antenna on a roof and then getting the aim to the next site is not cheap.
Placing a good antenna on a perfectly positioned roof may not be allowed due to historic building listing.
Placing a good antenna on a tower might need gov approval and the costs can then go up with expert advice and paperwork.
The new expensive tower might not even allow good 24/7 connections.
A wireless box in a field or wood might attract 'easy' theft, property damage or free data use.
Optical is the neat generational fix. You can always blow in new cable if needed.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
They just put one of those little rubber cable covers across it it to keep the cars from tripping as they drove over the fiber.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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
I used to be a member of the WAFreenet, and whilst we did a great job at low cost, the network had major issues.
Wifi is just not up to the job. The protocol cannot handle the timings and collition avoidance at outdoor scales, not to mention the fact that it was just plain unreliable. Oh and the channel space was completely saturated, plus you could only have 3 x 2.4GHz antennas co-located before you self-interfered. It's pretty hard to build a robust mesh this way.
Carrier grade wireless is far better and addresses many of these issues, but they are not cheap.
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!
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
Yeah wherever will a bunch of farmers get their hands on earth digging and moving equipment...
They'll probably get a grant from the fucking EU to buy new JCBs, claim 100% capital allowances against the full cost, and keep the equipment after the "internet cables" are laid between their friends' multi-million pound farmhouses.
All farms and land should be compulsorily purchased at the price that was paid for it (so about twopence an acre if it was pre-WW2) and nationalised.
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.
And they're doing it all with components built by Lucas!
WiFi is great till you actually have to use it.
Once you start putting any serious amount of traffic over it, you find yourself putting up more radios over different channels to avoid all kinds of different issues.
Or you can pay more up front and get your actual speeds with incredibly low latency with fiber.
>Carrier grade wireless is far better and addresses many of these issues, but they are not cheap.
Most people don't realize that. Getting a chunk of private spectrum costs. Getting radios that are good and talk in that spectrum costs. All of a sudden you're paying a significant fraction of the fibre costs with none of the benefits. If you want more bandwidth with wireless, you might have to buy more spectrum and new equipment for it to work. With fibre, well hopefully you ran a full bundle in your pipe and just connect it to end points.
Oh, and if you over build your fiber network, depending where you are, it's not hard to sell extra capacity to third parties.
So like â16,000 per farmer? I get almost that much in tax breaks for having a mortgage in the US. While I think doing away with all these subsidies and taxes that are not for offsetting externalities, I am not going to send my tax break money back to the government because I don't believe those tax breaks should exist.
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.