Slashdot Mirror
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.
Post Hole Digger.
I mean, really, someone has to put a stop to this sort of thing, or next thing you know everyone will be doing it and then where will the monopolies and the billionaires be?
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
Incredibly, many B4RN customers had been surviving on dial-up services or paying high fees for satellite feeds. Chris says that some still are.
Clearly, she's an anti-capitalist sociopath terrorist, depriving the hard-working and honest telcos of their honourable business!
Exterminate exterminate exterminate!
From the Twentieth Century Magazine, Vol II, 1910
CO-OPERATIVE VERSUS COMPETITIVE TELEPHONES
A VALUED friend, Mr. Arthur E. Harris, of Boston, has kindly given us the following impressive illustration of the difference between a public utility controlled by a modern commercial corporation, and the same monopoly under co-operation. In the one instance we have avarice as the master spirit actuating the promoters, huge dividends for the favored few and poor service for the people being the result. In the other case we have a fine illustration of fraternalism in business, in which the interest and benefit of the people is the first concernâ€"something that should ever be insisted upon in a government that pretends to represent the rule and interests of the people.
"Some twelve or more years ago," says Mr. Harris, "in the town of Mercer, Maine, where I was born, and where my father still lives, a telephone system was installed among the farmers as a branch of the New England Telephone Company. Stock was sold and the rent for an instrument and the use of the line was fixed at $10 per year.
"Several of our neighbors bought some of the stock and took great delight in boasting to the less fortunate in the neighborhood that it was paying 18 per cent dividends.
"But they were not satisfied with making that profit by the exploitation of their neighbors and began to talk of raising the rental fee.
"The promoter, a man from an adjoining town who had the line put in and who was a member of the trust, was overheard to say: 'We've got to get this up to $15 before we quit.' ' But,' he was asked, 'will the people stand for it?' 'Of course they will. They like it and can't get along without it. We've got themâ€"now squeeze them.'
"Well, in the country money does not come easily and some, including my father, felt that they could not afford to pay any more, much as they wanted to keep the telephones.
"They talked it over and an indignation meeting was called.
"There were two Socialists present, who organized the farmers and put in an independent line upon a Socialist basis - for use, not for profits.
"Each member contributed $25 in money, material or labor, and received an instrument which he owned, and was entited to one vote at all business meetings.
"This amount ($25) from each member of the organization paid all the expense of putting in the new line and left something in the treasury. It was a success in every way and has been running about ten years and costs less than $2 per member each year to maintain it.
"They bought instruments that were much better than those put in by the trust - in fact, two-fifths better.
"In the place of six, as with the trust line, 20 could now talk without the use of the switch, and could hear better than the six could with the trust line because of the superiority of the instruments.
"There are no restrictions upon its use and all are satisfied and contented; whereas with the trust line they were kept in a state of irritation by the mean acts of the managers, who were always on the watch for every penny they could grind out. If company - a visitor or a friend - was heard talking, the question promptly came from central 'Who's that talking?' 'Well, collect ten cents.' Their methods and purpose were like those of all big corporations and trusts - their motto, 'First profits, last use'; or, in other words, the maximum profits for the minimum service.
https://books.google.com/books?id=v0fZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PR4&ots=puFXQk-1BD&dq=twentieth%20century%20magazine%201910%20competitive%20telephones&pg=PA364#v=onepage&q&f=true
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I got a fine from the county for using a CB channel for a radio modem, today someone lays a wire from point A to point B and its the effing transalantic cable
you know what the sad part is, its still 10x faster than than upper end cable modem connection
There's been multiple examples of people deploying their own connectivity solution and starting local broadband services. I think it's awesome when people solve a problem for themselves and their neighbors. Take charge, start a project and don't wait for someone else.
The examples I've seen were in rural area, and I suspect that helped. In more urban areas, the difficulty is getting a right of way from the local government (who is often in bed with incumbent ISPs).
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
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.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
This reminds me of "the village" or "sleepy hollow" . Lit the cable with a lamp?
It's not really laws blocking you but apathy
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
For those of us who aren't network engineers (or farmers by day, and telco engineers by night)... how did she do this exactly?
The article is extremely thin on details, but I'm wondering, where in the world she got so much money for cabling, the network equipment, routers, firewalls, etc?
I'm guessing she went out looking for funding, because it mentions she has shareholders?!
After lighting the cable, the two farms were connected
Again, no details what-so-ever, but the main question is, what's the source? Where does the fibre connect to maintain the gigabit internet speeds? i.e. who's the backbone to the Internet? And surely, she must have had to pay astronomical fees as a business connecting to the outside world with several hundred people sharing the same gigabit Internet in the village?!
Thought this story sounded familiar
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
"It wasn't rocket science. It was three days of hard work."
Best News Quote of 2016, hands down. Or 2013. Or sometime. Still the best.
Obviously, telecom stocks will take a big hit, but Caterpillar's about to take off.
The main problem arises when you start trying to have agreements with owners of land where you want to lay the cable. And God save you from trying to put it through a forest.
In this case the land owers were local farmers who also had rubbish interent (often dial-up), and really wanted better interent. In some cases their businesses almost required it, as far as I can tell. From the article, quoting Christine Conder:
"So the farmers have been incredibly supportive of this and that's why they've given us free rein throughout the fields, which we go through to connect them and then we get to the villages which subsidise the farmers' connections.
"You couldn't do it just for the farmers alone, but you couldn't get to the village without the farmers so it's tit for tat."
I have very recently looked at becoming a isp. Cogent will work with Small ISPs, hundred megabit connection is around $325 per month and a one gigabit connection is around $1200 per month. My intention was to bring it out via wireless and that Equipment is easy to figure out and do the problem is that it ended up being around $1500 a month to get roof rights to get the darn data out from a carrier center which was only 100 yards from my first POP.
The capex "capital expenditures" you can expect to be around 7 to 30K depending on number of initial customers. But in this case my opex " "operational expenses" were to great. You will see in my case I would have to have around 50 customers to break even, and that's just offering 20 meg service. To get where you could start making a real wage and take a day off you have to reach 500 customers. So if your ever really thinking about doing this stuff do some real research.
What I proposed previously was for the last mile (or whatever) to be intelligently managed by a co-op...
Good luck with that. I'm sure there will be a few outliers that can find someone to manage their neighborhood network, but in most cases you'll see the same mess you see in any HOA or government. A lucky few would even have some nice embezzlement/nepotism going on.
That case is entirely different, because it is about local governments competing with private businesses. Such competition is inherently unfair, because the governments have a conflict of interest — they can smoothly issue all the necessary permits to themselves while sabotaging private enterprises.
The lady described in the write-up is a private entrepreneur — if true, more power to her.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
continues unabated. Well at least now MI6 and NSA can spy on farmers too.
And AC trolls can continue spewing crap.
This is true so long as the big telcos care.
Had this experience about a month ago:
Big Telecom (Rogers) comes to the door
"Hi! I'd like to lower your internet bill. If I can't give you better service for less, I won't waste any more of your time. Are you using Bell?"
"No, Teksavvy"
"OK, I won't waste any more of your time then. Have a nice evening" :)
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
When a residential user reads Slashdot over a gigabit connection, here's what happens:
1) The browser requests the 150KB web page.
2) At 1Gbps, that 150KB is transferred in 0.00015 seconds.
3) The user reads the page for 15 seconds.
4) GOTO 1 for next web page.
So it's 0.00015 seconds using the connection to fetch a page, 15 seconds looking at the page, 0.00015 loading, 15 seconds reading. You're actually using the connection only 0.001% of the time. During the 99.999% of the time that you're not loading a page, 10,000 of your neighbors are loading their pages. So you can pay a very small percentage of the cost to build and maintain the infrastructure, plus the cost of having you as a customer - costs to send an installer out initially, cost to print and mail your bill each month, etc.
On the other end, Slashdot has their server connected to a business class connection. It's usage pattern is much different:
You load the page (0.00015 seconds)
I load the page (0.00015 seconds)
APK loads the page (0.00015 seconds)
Beau HD loads the page (0.00015 seconds)
The usage is pretty much constant. The capacity isn't divided between 10,000 users, so the cost isn't divided between 10,000 users.
I buy both kinds of connections. At home, I browse Slashdot just like you do, using a high-speed connection for a fraction of a second to load the page. At my data center, I pay $65/Mbps and use it constantly, serving web pages to hundreds of thousands of people.
Neither type of connection is "good" or "bad", they are different types of service useful for different things.
Anyone can make assertions.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
> Yeah, because collective, public ownership is exactly the same as corporate ownership.
Indeed it IS exactly the same. Corporate and collective are synonyms.
The difference between the two approaches you're thinking of is that you'd prefer to FORCE people to pay for my idea, while the public corporation gives them the CHOICE. With the approach you think of when you say "corporation", you can choose to help pay to expand my internet-related service and then share in the profits. Somehow you think it's better if politicians choose what you fund, take your money, and put it toward the projects they choose.
Literally the only difference is you choosing which cooperative (corporate) endeavours you wish to be paet of versus politicians forcing you to be part of the ones they choose.
Digging a hole in your own property is no rocket science, digging holes in other people's property is.
I'm curious which ISP that is. Most don't allow servers* on a home internet plan. Some block ports 25 and 80, some just disallow it by written policy but don't enforce it.
* Where "servers" means business-type use, not just anything that accepts a connection.
Look: a self-made man!
You replied to the wrong person, comrade
He's been doing that a lot in this story. I just have to think it's an intentional part of the charm.