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British Farmers Growing Their Own Internet Service

Posted by Soulskill on from the bring-tucows-over-to-spread-e-fertilizer dept.

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."

4 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Or... by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Or... by mk1004 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Power and telephone service to rural areas were subsidized in the US, back before everyone got the "no one else can play with my stuff" attitude that permeates this country today. Internet access could be done the same way, and probably would have been if it had been developed in the '50s. For that matter, nationalized healthcare probably could have been done too. Yes, I'm sure some people didn't like the power/telephone subsidizes back then, but there were enough people who thought it was the right thing to do.

      --
      I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
  2. It's a race by paiute · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who will be faster - the ditch diggers or the telecom lobbyists demanding the end to such community ditch digging?

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    If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
    1. Re:It's a race by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Who will be faster - the ditch diggers or the telecom lobbyists demanding the end to such community ditch digging?

      You do realise this is a story about Britain, don't you? Maybe it's different where you're from but here BT really couldn't give a monkey's what farmers get up to in the places where they themselves can't be bothered to lay down decent lines. Nor do they "lobby" together with their competitors... on account of them not really having any when it comes to telephone infrastructure.

      I might as well just give up hope of ever getting a story about the UK where the comments section isn't nearly-instantly filled with Americans who have very little idea of how things are different here and instead of asking questions - never mind insightful or thought-provoking ones - just post comments about how it would work in places that the story isn't referring to. Anything that is worth reading just ends up buried in a sea of irrelevances.