British Farmers Growing Their Own Internet Service 178
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."
Or... (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.
Re:NOTHING IS EVER THEIR FAULT! (Score:3, Funny)
Get a job as a Slashdot editor.
Never, ever, ever, ever, EVER use a spell-checker. No matter what. This is CRITICAL.
Whatever the fuck you do, don't ever proofread either. Yeah that's what an editor would do, but you're special.
Post stories that are themselves flamebait, to drive up page views.
Never link to an informative site that gets to the point. Instead, drive traffic to your buddy's shitty blog and let posters provide good links.
Or, link to a paywall site when free articles are available.
Laugh at nigger jokes and other troll posts. Then use your infinite mod-points to mod them down to -1.
Never review a book you don't like.
Never disclose whether or not you financially benefit from book reviews.
Play different camps against each other to drive up page views. E.g. Microsoft vs. Linux vs. Apple.
Repost^H^H^H^H^^H Recycle old stories. You could mod down people who point it out.
Obsess over patents because there is NOTHING ELSE going on in the world of technology.
Mod this post down too because it's true and that makes you uncomfortable.
Mod +5 Funny idiotic regurgitations of tired old memes that weren't very funny to begin with (sharks with lasers on their heads, etc) because you have no social life and feel so desperate to be part of a group, any kind of group.
B4RN; (Score:1, Funny)
Re:home groan (Score:3, Funny)