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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."
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.
Who will be faster - the ditch diggers or the telecom lobbyists demanding the end to such community ditch digging?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The city of Tacoma has their own fiber network. Put in by their power company for the purpose of controlling their substations, it turned out to have some extra capacity. Some Eastern Washington State power PUDs, awash in cash from their hydro power sales have strung fiber around their largely rural, agricultural service territories as well.
Since then, the telcoms have sought legislative injunctions against public utilities implementing new systems. And the private utility I used to work for was scared sh*tless about their wrath to the point of never putting in fiber even restricted to their own internal requirements.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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"
Telecoms lose money in rural areas. Even with phone service. This has been a problem since the invention of the telephone. The solution? Give the telephone company monopoly over a large area, but require them by law to provide service to rural residents. Just how far rural they go will be negotiated between the local municipality and the telco. Putting in rural service is not profitable, but the telco can raise rates in the metropolitan areas to make up the difference.
Now, some jackass comes along claiming free market and starts selling his own service. He offers it to whomever he likes, is under no obligation to provide service to anyone, and can undercut the telco in the easiest to serve markets. If you want free and open competition in these markets, that's fine. But you need to lift the regulations the telcos are under before you can do that. There are some areas of the country were the local phone company is required by law to maintain dialtone and 911 service even if the house is vacant or condemned. Just in case some homeless person needs to use the phone. How can a company that has to do maintain service like that compete with random competitors that have no such obligations? A free and open market for internet service means NO rural internet service at all. Simple as that. It's not profitable, and an open market means it can't exist.
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
Telecoms lose money in rural areas. Even with phone service
That's debatable. The value of the phone network is that it can reach pretty much anyone that you want to be able to reach. A phone network that only covered major cities would be a lot less valuable to everyone. Lots of people didn't bother getting phones until coverage was almost universal, because there's no point if they can't use it to call their rural relatives. You may lose money on the individual lines, but you gain money from all of the people who join because those lines exist.
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