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The Farmer Who Built Her Own Broadband (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a BBC article: "I'm just a farmer's wife," says Christine Conder, modestly. But for 2,300 members of the rural communities of Lancashire she is also a revolutionary internet pioneer. Her DIY solution to a neighbour's internet connectivity problems in 2009 has evolved into B4RN, an internet service provider offering fast one gigabit per second broadband speeds to the parishes which nestle in the picturesque Lune Valley. That is 35 times faster than the 28.9 Mbps average UK speed internet connection according to Ofcom. It all began when the trees which separated Chris's neighbouring farm from its nearest wireless mast -- their only connection to the internet, provided by Lancaster University -- grew too tall. Something more robust was required, and no alternatives were available in the area, so Chris decided to take matters into her own hands. She purchased a kilometre of fibre-optic cable and commandeered her farm tractor to dig a trench. After lighting the cable, the two farms were connected, with hers feeding the one behind the trees. "We dug it ourselves and we lit [the cable] ourselves and we proved that ordinary people could do it," she says. "It wasn't rocket science. It was three days of hard work."
You would be arrested and thrown in jail for endangering the livelihood of some mega corp.
Also, if you become profitable, well a company like AT&Fee can come in and undercut you, stealing all your hard earned customers. One could try 2 or 3 year commitments, but that will scare off many.
I'm sure a lot of people would not consider that a bad thing. They want internet and are willing to pay for it. If AT&T at first says that there is no profit in running a line but someone else comes along and proves them wrong then we now have competition. There desire was not to get in the internet business but to get people internet. If AT&T comes along to do better, or buy them out, then the problem was solved.
Competition is good, no? It's not like these people didn't have any internet access, they just didn't like how slow and expensive it was. These people created their own internet to compete with satellite, dial-up, and cellular internet. They were able to do so with lower (or at least comparable) prices, faster speeds, and no data caps (or much higher ones).
This is how business should be done, allow people to go out and compete in the market. All too often though we see people that, instead of trying to do better in business, lobby the government for price controls, government should require that businesses need to offer services to people where there might not be a profit, etc. They see the force of the government, rather than the invisible hand of the free market, as the best means of bringing products and services to market.
Part of a free market is that businesses should be free to fail.
The problem is the competition can be unfair. If a big company wishes to kill a smaller company they can either buy them, or simply reduce prices until they are dead, then jack them back up, effectively bankrupting the people who did the hard work. They could then, if it was useful buy any infrastructure that was left for pennies on the dollar. A variation on the above it to value add things like free data from their partners video streaming company, and, well the little guy can't even begin to compete.
What I proposed previously was for the last mile (or whatever) to be intelligently managed by a co-op, possibly bidding out the work, and for people to be able to choose their providers from whatever the central offices had for all their various data services. Basically it is not practical for everyone to lay their own fiber, the same way it is not practical for everyone to lay their own electricity lines across a city.
More accurately: When the competing empire at the time decided to use Communism in its marketing.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
For some reason we have the idea that farmers today are some dumb hicks. While modern farming is very advanced. They had self driving tractors for decades. They use big data to help analyze weather and crops. Robotic cow milking... I am a Tech worker and I don't have nearly as much technology to play with than what most farmers have.
Hey look at that web form I made on your phone see how much more sufficated and advanced we are over our rural neighbors. In many ways our city life in terms of technology skills are behind the farming life. Who needs advanced technology to survive and keep up. While in the cities we can still operating with faxing or just giving a letter to a carrier to send to the next office.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.