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How a Group of Rural Washington Neighbors Created Their Own Internet Service (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes with a story that might warm the hearts of anyone just outside the service area of a decent internet provider: Faced with a local ISP that couldn't provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by [friends Chris Brems and Chris Sutton], and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It's a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.
There are so many places forgotten by the mainstream service providers. Competition is a good thing.
If a lightening bolt strikes an ethernet connected device in the trees, the ethernet cable just melts/burns away.
There is no way in hell that any current reaches a ten yards away house or what ever.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The placement of the microwave link on the water tank, the network of '10 relay points, which have multiple radios", using "5.8GHz and 900MHz frequencies, and a little bit of 3.65GHz". Long term planning "take their time to add capacity before connecting everyone who wants service"
Tracking what relay point is down and having backup battery power for a time. The suggestion to place a "Raspberry Pi at the different relay points to do speed tests" was a good read too.
This is really motivating and shows what a community can do with existing methods rather than waiting for more traditional networks to even be planned or upgraded or offered.
Thanks.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
a municipality _is_ a bunch of local citizens acting in concert for the good of the community. Texas has MUD (Municiple Utility Districts) that handle things like water and sewer in un-incorporated housing developments (Some developer buys a few hundred acres, and drops 2000 2500-5000 sq ft houses on it) the developer helps orginize the MUD, and the community runs it, and funds the infrastructure investments required to build and maintain the infrastructure.
you would have to float a bond of some kind to build enough towers that pass legal muster... Nothing says you couldn't buy some cheap windmill towers and put them in high spots... ;) and trying to get the existing utilitys to share space (can I put it ontop of a power pole?) is a huge potential legal SNAFU...