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."
some places have it ready already (Score:2)
Memphis Light Gas and Water have been laying cables with fiber optic cores since the 1970s. If only the law allows them to offer Internet service - fiber to the houses, at prices unseen before in the United States.
They could have it as good as the Google Fiber Hood. But... too much entrenched interests.
Re:some places have it ready already (Score:5, Interesting)
The city of Tacoma has their own fiber network. Put in by their power company [click-network.com] for the purpose of controlling their substations, it turned out to have some extra capacity. Some Eastern Washington State power PUDs, awash in cash from their hydro power sales have strung fiber around their largely rural, agricultural service territories as well.
Since then, the telcoms have sought legislative injunctions against public utilities implementing new systems. And the private utility I used to work for was scared sh*tless about their wrath to the point of never putting in fiber even restricted to their own internal requirements.
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why? lack of balls :\
Re:some places have it ready already (Score:5, Interesting)
Telecoms lose money in rural areas. Even with phone service. This has been a problem since the invention of the telephone. The solution? Give the telephone company monopoly over a large area, but require them by law to provide service to rural residents. Just how far rural they go will be negotiated between the local municipality and the telco. Putting in rural service is not profitable, but the telco can raise rates in the metropolitan areas to make up the difference.
Now, some jackass comes along claiming free market and starts selling his own service. He offers it to whomever he likes, is under no obligation to provide service to anyone, and can undercut the telco in the easiest to serve markets. If you want free and open competition in these markets, that's fine. But you need to lift the regulations the telcos are under before you can do that. There are some areas of the country were the local phone company is required by law to maintain dialtone and 911 service even if the house is vacant or condemned. Just in case some homeless person needs to use the phone. How can a company that has to do maintain service like that compete with random competitors that have no such obligations? A free and open market for internet service means NO rural internet service at all. Simple as that. It's not profitable, and an open market means it can't exist.
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That's what we call universal service for telephones. But the phone companies are under no such obligation to provide uniform broadband service. They cherry-pick the markets just like everyone else for this product.
Now, if they want a monopoly to keep the "jackasses" out with broadband, they are going to have to provide uniform service to rural as well as profitable urban markets on an equal price basis. With regulated terms of service, utilities commission oversight, common carrier status and a bunch of o
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Telcos are required by law to provide broadband in some areas, just like they are phone service. It's entirely up to the local government. Some areas have such requirements, some do not. The problem with such requirements is that to provide the required service, the rates inside the towns and villages go up substantially. This isn't an easy sell for local politicians.
Re:some places have it ready already (Score:5, Insightful)
Telecoms lose money in rural areas. Even with phone service
That's debatable. The value of the phone network is that it can reach pretty much anyone that you want to be able to reach. A phone network that only covered major cities would be a lot less valuable to everyone. Lots of people didn't bother getting phones until coverage was almost universal, because there's no point if they can't use it to call their rural relatives. You may lose money on the individual lines, but you gain money from all of the people who join because those lines exist.
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That's true. But it only works as an argument for a monopoly supplier. In a free market, you have a tragedy of the commons scenario, where all can see that 100% coverage would be advantageous to the technology, but none of the individual suppliers wants to be the one to put the money into those rural areas.
It MIGHT work, if there's a limited number of suppliers and they successfully negotiate to split the costs. But there's nothing in free market pressures that make that likely. The instinct to compete is u
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Sure, it's the opposite of the classic formulation. I'm not sure if it officially counts as a tragedy of the commons, but that seemed like the best way of describing it. Maybe there's another term for it?
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Wait just a minute, WE pay for those services, not the telco. Haven't you ever looked at your phone bill and wondered what all those extra taxes they add on are for? I mean, besides enriching themselves by making us pay for their expenses?
In any other business, the taxes are included in the price as part of the cost of doing business. but cable companyes and telcos seem to feel that they're special, so they advertises lower prices and then make you pay for their business expenses. Does Wal-Mart make you
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"Memphis Light Gas and Water have been laying cables with fiber optic cores since the 1970s"
And you'll never get a piece of that considering MLGW vbuilt that for their own measurements/price control.
Hi, I used to work for MLGW for a tiny period of time as a subcontractor.
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Only because they are prohibited to do so by law. The people who built it want to use it. But they can only use it for the internal stuff
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too much entrenched interests.
I see what you did there.
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That's it right there. The big companies have been using the law to stifle competition.
If a group people tried to do what B4RN is doing there'd be lawyers in their fancy suits and expensive shoes stumbling about in the field, trying to stop them.
This is what happens with Government sanctioned monopolies.
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:Or... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh please. You know what's "crony capitalist?" Bullshit like states banning municipal broadband at the demand of local telco monopolies so that they don't have to compete with better service.
We've already tried forcing them to spread into more rural areas, all they did was raise rates and mark up impressive profits.
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Perhaps you should, because there are people who genuinely believe what you wrote.
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The tone was obviously sarcastic, but it is normal all over the world for utilities to provide gas/water/electricity/telephone to rural areas at the same price as city customers pay, or at least heavily subsidised. This works best with natural monopolies, but runs into trouble when there are competing providers.
You may have to deal with competitors who want to cherry-pick the most profitable customers, and ignore others.
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Er, in this case, maybe you should. You sounded quite similar to what many people seem to actually argue these days. :|
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Neither you, nor my GP, appear to have the slightest clue what "capitalist" means.
The GP describes a (presumably) democratic socialist state and then calls it capitalism. Wrong.
Parent describes yet another form of Marxist principle implementation - state run or controlled industry, such as became the case in eg. Germany, Italy, and Russia, and It and calls it crony capitalist. (It's also called just totalitarianism, and a hundred other things like neo-feudalism, but capitalist it is not.)
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Can you enlighten us then, what is capitalism for you?
I understand capitalism as an advanced commodity economy, where labour itself became a commodity. The free market is just one form of capitalism, and not a stable one either, since competition leads to winners and in the next round the free market already biased toward these winners to the point that those winners became eventually the ones who dictate the rules. All what I know about capitalism isn't in contrast of what you call "democratic socialist st
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
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And the premium is higher since for the same area there might be more fire trucks than necessary.
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Ever wonder how the "no one else can play with my stuff" attitude came about?
It comes from the freeloaders that benefited from these improvements all their life but don't want to do anything for their kids.
Did I get that right?
It certainly wasn't the boomers that were building anything in the 50s or 60s. But they are certainly the ones with a giant sense of entitlement and the "not paying for that!" attitude.
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It comes from the freeloaders that benefited from these improvements all their life but don't want to do anything for their kids.
There's only so much lunch to go around. When you got too many freeloaders for the free meal, they'll turn on each other. It's worth noting that the same sort of selfishness came out in people who aren't boomers.
Social Security was a known problem for decades and while they did make some fixes to it, there also was some crazy stuff like the one percent "kicker" (the amount of benefit was increased by CPI-indexed inflation plus 1% each year) that was implemented for a brief while in the 70s and the accoun
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...because ultimately, you're taking that money from some other freeloader.
That's a key point. I can pretty much guarantee that anyone who tries to play the "no one else can play with my stuff" card can be shown to be getting some tax break that others of us don't get. They're the ones saying tax somebody else, all the while ignoring the preferences they receive. My point is that everyone nowadays gripes about how others are benefiting at their expense, while ignoring or denying how they benefit at the expense of others.
Re:Or... (Score:4, Interesting)
"It certainly wasn't the boomers that were building anything in the 50s or 60s."
And you think that they should have been building stuff then?
You might consider that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, baby boomers are those who were born between 1945 - 1964.
For instance, I was born in 1947. What do you think I should have been building in, say, 1960, when I was all of 13 years old? Or 1967 maybe, when I was 20? (Now, by then I did work in the construction trades, but hadn't the capital to even leverage buying land and setting up construction projects; I wasn't precocious enough for your liking, I guess.)
And for someone born in '64, I suppose you're really bent out of shape that the greatest building projects for a 6-year old likely involved Lego or somesuch.
As for the 'sense of entitlement'....
You'd have to search far and wide to find someone in my parent's generation who hadn't been affected by The Great Depression (as it was known, although it seems there's one of those every other generation or so) and World War II - both thoroughly global things.
So, no, we didn't have to deal with either of them directly, although the aftermath of each had some lasting effects on attitudes, behaviours, values, politics and law.
Sure, our parents, having gone through some real shit, generally wanted to see to it that their children didn't have to - 'cuz it was some serious bad shit, the kind that was bad enough that a grown-up mostly wouldn't wish even an enemy to experience.
As a result of all those good wishes, some of us were spoiled, some still came up hardscrabble, and, as in most things done by humans when nothing special is going on, most of us just came up in the middle of the muddle, as it were.
Overall, the watchword was opportunity - we tended to have better schools, better clothes, better medical care, better diet than did our parents generation, so we may have taken those things for granted.
The cultural, social, and psychological stuff, that was a mixed bag. There were some little things, the undeclared war in Southeast Asia (first advisors, 1955, first combat troops, 1965), the Cold War (duck and cover, mother-fucker), the commie hunt, the wonderful Cuban missile circus, all the various civil rights issues. Nothing special, really.
But maybe you had your own fun in the Sandbox, I dunno.
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>Most people I know don't live in cities because they're too fucking expensive,
But that is exactly the point, if you, living in the country had to pay the 'true' cost it would cost far more to live in the country, and less to live in the city. $30,000 for electric service, $10,000 for water, $20,000 to have telephone so you can live $10 miles away from anyone else and all of a sudden city life is cheap.
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Out in the country, you generally use well water, which you pay for yourself. Electricity and telephone service was already there by the time non-farmers started moving out into "the country" anyway.
Most people in rural areas when this all happened were farmers. Back then, people tended to look at farmers as being an important part of the country. You know, feeding everybody. So such things as electric and telephone service were considered the right thing to do. How much of that played into people moving ou
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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.
"We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
— Frank Sobotka, The Wire.
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I would rather the local government grant a temporary monopoly
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2. This was a story about British farmers and you are talking about the US government and American companies.
Did you actually RTFA? it started off about british farmers but it quickly shifted to the USA.
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actually, it does make sense.
people are people and countries are imaginary lines.
controlling classes are controlling classes.
this is human-wide. not country-specific.
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"the government ALREADY forces phone companies to provide rural service"
Every government does this?
Re:Or... (Score:4, Insightful)
In all seriousness why do we want access in rural areas to be subsidized? If it is expensive to bring access to these places, why shouldn't it be the ones who want it to pay for it?
Economies of scale is one of the benefits of living in an urban area. You get cheap internet, cheap water, cheap electricity, cheap garbage collection, cheap sewer, etc. When you live out in the boonies the land is cheap, but you don;t get the benefits of living in a metropolis.
If you want to live in the forest, that's awesome. If you want high speed internet in the forest, then I support allowing you to have the fewest restrictions possible to allow you to pay for that getting that infrastructure yourself. I don't think it's fair to subsidize rural internet costs anymore than it would be fair to subsidize rent in urban because it's "too expensive". The free market decides what things cost, and we should be trying to achieve a free market (externalities accounted for) so that everyone pays the true cost of what they consume (people, corporations, everybody).
Re:Or... (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you serious? Rural America votes, and their votes affect you. Do you really want them not to have at least potential access to the wealth of knowledge and "dissent" that Internet offers? Consider the alternatives: they'll only listen to the local ClearChannel station and watch Fox News OTA. I'm not saying an average Joe Redneck is reading random wikipedia article each day to edify himself, but your way of thinking makes it not merely improbable: it becomes impossible.
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There aren't that many people in rural america. By definition it's the part with less people. The last census indicated that only 16% of Americans live in rural areas. Also, they already have internet, they just don't have internet that is as fast for the price as in the city on average. You don't need fast internet to read a newspaper or Wikipedia article.
In order for rural people to get Fox News, it means they have basic cable or satellite TV. Fox News is only 1 television station. I know people who
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In order for rural people to get Fox News, it means they have basic cable or satellite TV.
Wrong. Before calbe and satalite, people had these things called television ``stations'' that broadcast over radio waves. Many are still in operation. Fox affiliate stations broadcast pretty much everywhere. With a 30 year old TV and a bent-up metal clothes hanger you can usually get pretty good reception on at least a couple Fox stations. CBS and NBC are pretty flaky, and PBS is there, but it sucks.
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I don't think we want everyone to just pile into the cities.
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When you say benefits, you mean like having someone living directly above, beside and below you at all times, subject to whatever noise your neighbors constantly put out? Or do you mean the constant drone of traffic out your window with the accompanying fumes it produces?
Maybe you meant the fact there is no green grass out your front door to walk in bare feet but instead have to take a bus, ride a bike (through traffic) or subway just to find green grass. Then
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Well when I said "benefits of living in a metropolis", I was referring to the *benefits* not the disadvantages.
Furthermore, not everyone living in a city has all the disadvantages you described. I live in the outskirts of San Diego. I live in a 2 story house. I have green grass and trees in my front and back yards. I can't really hear the traffic, but I can hear airplanes. I have windows open all the time. I don;t get any fumes. San Diego does but a bit hot in the summer, but I thought that was a goo
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If farmers have to pay for everything with no cost burden sharing, do you know what happens? First, in order to afford Internet, water, electricity, garbage collection, sewer, etc. they have to raise the prices on what they sell.
Yes that's what *should* happen. Bringing food from the rural parts of the country and having the workers live in areas without luxuries *is* expensive and these expenses should be paid by the consumers that consume these goods.
This means that all these resources that cities depend on are suddenly inflated. End result? Either cities suffer mass inflation, or they get their resources from somewhere else that doesn't have the same expenses. If they do the second, the people in their area who WERE supplying those resources are forced to close up shop and move to the city, decreasing choice and diversity, and also shifting municipal dependency on to people who are willing to subsist at a significantly lower standard of living than the people they're supporting. This never ends well in the long run.
If people are willing to provide the food for a low cost, then that is the market cost of production. If we decide to pay local farmers more money to do the job instead, all we are doing is redistributing wealth from the consumer and the foreign farmer to the American farmer. I do
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Shouldn't the fruits of labor to be considered wealth? Someone who has spent the whole day cleaning his house is surely wealthier than if he has spent all day playing video games (because he now has a clean house rather than a dirty house). OF course this person had to sacrifice leisure time in order to make this wealth. If he had a robot he would only need to spend money on electricity to power the robot.
A world where robots perform the labor is a world where you have more free time to spend on leisure,
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How many hours must you work to afford to buy a bed from ikea?
How many hours would it take for you to make your own bed?
How much does it cost to ship a package to L.A.?
How much does it cost to ship a package to Siberia?
How much does it cost for a megawatt*hour of electricity in L.A.?
How much does it cost for a megawatt*hour of electricity in Siberia?
Graft Greed and Corruption have existed for all of human history. They existed back when the largest human cities were smaller than a small town today. Do you
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in the USA all the tiny hick towns make the carriers build them yarn museums and other crap in town as a sign of gratitude of being allowed to sell their services in the town
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In other words, the oppertunity cost of not trenching fiber to a farm 35mi out of the city is more than the cost of trenching it.
Funny how that works.
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Especially that in the rural areas you can really trench very quickly as there's almost no other infrastructure to deal with -- just soil and an occasional road, usually unpaved.
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Yeah, but....
In rural areas initial cost to plant poles and string copper is low, but upkeep and repair kill you in the long run. Since at least the Sixties, wherever reasonable (politics, geography, finance) there's been a big shift to lay cable. (I worked buried cable for a telco in '67; and yes, the runs were plowed-in fibre, trenches were for house drops and road cuts.)
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There are also trees in lots of places, they like to fall over on to your lines.
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Trenching is really the only sane way to go. If you're dealing with farmers directly and forming a cooperative, you don't have to ask any utilities for permissions. You simply trench on people's land and that's it. You still need to deal with the county for right of way to snake under roads, but that's a minor inconvenience compared to dealing with the pole-owning utilities.
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"that means the people living in these rural areas would save a lot of money by doing it themselves"
You are forgetting that the individual usually cannot make such a large upfront capital investment. So it is a good way for governments to invest in the PUBLIC interest and provide services the individual may not be able to provide for themselves.
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I never said it was done by individuals. A group of individuals can form a cooperative and take on big projects like the ones described in the article.
The government itself is a cooperative formed by it's citizens. Ideally this cooperative would be working for the best interest of it's members, but as Bengie pointed out, this government cooperative would actually be profiting from it's members.
If this profit is significant enough, then it makes financial sense to form a cooperative and perform the work in
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Right on! :) Yay for cronies!
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So like â16,000 per farmer? I get almost that much in tax breaks for having a mortgage in the US. While I think doing away with all these subsidies and taxes that are not for offsetting externalities, I am not going to send my tax break money back to the government because I don't believe those tax breaks should exist.
It's a race (Score:5, Insightful)
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I would be curious what (probably bullshit) legal theory the telecom lobby would use?
Unless it's brown envelopes stuffed with banknotes. That I could easily imagine. But that just transfers the problem to the legislators being lobbied. what legal theory would those fine citizens use to advocate for this kind of restriction to community action?
Watching evil in action can be fascinating.
Re:It's a race (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.
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Exactly! Queue the posts about how "slashdot is a US website and if you don't like it then leave".
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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?
Yes, we realize that in England BT is a 15 billion quid company with a heart of gold which would never hire a lobbyist but shows its displeasure with harrumphs and a brandished brolly and that there is always more gruel.
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Yes, we realize that in England BT is a 15 billion quid company with a heart of gold which would never hire a lobbyist but shows its displeasure with harrumphs and a brandished brolly and that there is always more gruel.
The key thing for people in the US to realize here is that there is nothing like the same extent of regulatory capture [wikipedia.org] in the UK, and it is actually possible for the people doing this to get connected to the wider world without ever dealing with BT at all (just use one of the other business ISPs who run fiber to the customer). If the landowners are happy, it's not causing a hazard, and there's people willing to do it, who would have the standing to put a stop to it?
But truly, BT don't care because these are
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You say that, but in South Yorkshire the councils grouped together to create the Digital Region project because BT outright said they weren't going to roll out any fibre there deeming it not cost effective.
As soon as the project started, BT suddenly decided to roll out fibre to the exact same addresses as Digital Region which has left Digital Region no longer commercially viable against the backdrop of competition from BT and so the DR project looks like it's basically going to die, then BT wont roll out to
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BT cares, BT cares about holding onto it's nationwide monopoly no matter what. If you want BT fibre in your area the best way to do it is to setup a scheme that will compete against BT, you'll see Openreach vans turn up with fancy new cabinets in no time. It knows full well that it's biggest long term threat is local projects that turn into competing telcos over time. I guarantee if this project in TFA starts to cover more than a handful of houses, BT will get interested all of a sudden.
The difference with the US is that BT is dealing with these things by improving provision instead of by getting their friends in the government from making it illegal for anyone to build out the fiber at all. The difference is that people at least gain access to the improved service (if possibly at excessively high prices) and that's a huge difference; the (near) monopoly is contributing to the Public Good.
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"the (near) monopoly is contributing to the Public Good."
Not at all. The monopoly is being used to block growth of competition, retaining artificially high costs, artificially low investment and preventing rollout to many other areas.
In a truly competitive marketplace, the cost would be lower, investment in infrastructure would be higher due to competition, and they'd be fighting consistently to rollout everywhere. If there was a true competitor to BT in the UK they would be fighting each other to rollout t
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Lobbyists? Don't be silly, they'll not waste their time with elected officials for this one. They've already bought them, as well as the regulatory positions they help create.
These ditch diggers will probably get slapped with something outrageous. I'd wager something relating to environmental impact and destruction, having not completed the proper impact analysis forms and commenced with a multiyear study of how the purple wren's natural habitat will be impacted and....
They're more American than Americans (Score:4, Insightful)
There was a time when the same sort of thing would happen in the USA, but who in the USA today would dare run afoul of one of the literally thousands of Federal regulations that MIGHT apply to them?
The Federal government is so powerful that it's created a generation of Americans that sit frozen unable to solve problems for themselves out of fear that some distance authority will swoop in and punish them. There is nothing anymore that can be done without their permission.
Land of the free and home of the brave? Hardly.
I have a pretty radical socialist Czech friend living in the US that said that the problem with American politics is that it requires everyone agree. Every problem has to solved at the federal level and it prevents things from getting done.
When even a European socialist complains that the US central government is too powerful, you know there is a problem.
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There's still a few of us out there that embrace the American spirit that made our country. The problem is that we have to keep a low profile and stick to trusted circle of friends/family/associates to avoid being prosecuted for being innovative.
It was really screwed up when I had to redo a section of my roof and a city inspector came onto my property saying I needed either to pay for a permit or hire a contractor. The only thing that saved my ass is that I have a fenced in yard and driveway and a habit of
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Yeah, I agree with you. Though as a caveat, a Czech socialist is kind of like a Belgian redneck capitalist in ideology. The Czech Republic seems to be one of the few marginally functional, economically sane, governments in that part of the world.
NOT NORTHWEST BRITAIN!!!! (Score:3)
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=54.040038,-2.758484&hl=en&ll=54.085173,1.625977&spn=7.764374,26.784668&num=1&t=h&z=6 [google.com]
mind you the wa things are going Scotland will leave the UK next year anyways... still for accuracy's sake.. at the moment it's NOWHERE NEAR NORTH WEST BRITAIN!
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Saying that Lancashire is in the middle of Britain is about as useful as saying that Texas is in the middle of (the continent of North and South) America.
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Britain is the name of the island. The countries within it are Scotland, England and Wales.
Saying that Lancashire is in the middle of Britain is about as useful as saying that Texas is in the middle of (the continent of North and South) America.
it IS in the middle and the lower middle at that geographically. While it may well be in the North West of ENGLAND ,it, as i said before, is NOWHERE near the North West of "Britain".
Also point to note if you are going to try and be a pedant about what is "British" then you might as well learn that Ireland, both North and South are part of the British Isles [wikipedia.org] , granted that's a geographical term as opposed to a geopolitical one.
however the English obsession with the geography of "Britain" Ending North of
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It's northwest of the population centre....
and it's still geographically incorrect no matter how you try to spin it
Similar projects in other EU countries (Score:2)
Similar community-driven projects have been carried out in other EU countries, such as Finland.
Here’s one such example from the region that geographically centers around Töysä [google.com] – a small rural community of 3,000 people – and its neighboring towns/municipalities, some of which are a bit larger, but not much:
Verkko-osuuskunta Kuuskaista (The Network Co-operative Kuuskaista) [kuuskaista.com]
6net+ core network [6net.fi] (a PowerPoint presentation)
Bury it deep (Score:2)
Those wonderful whacky Brits.... (Score:2)
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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 s
Re:NOTHING IS EVER THEIR FAULT! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, publish a completely off-topic rant that annoys everyone who came here for intelligent commentary. Oh, and post it A/C.
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Or, publish a completely off-topic rant that annoys everyone who came here for intelligent commentary. Oh, and post it A/C.
Any criticism of slashdot editors is off-topic by definition, unless it's an article about how fucking brilliant the editors are. Which is perhaps unlikely.
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Yeah wherever will a bunch of farmers get their hands on earth digging and moving equipment...
They'll probably get a grant from the fucking EU to buy new JCBs, claim 100% capital allowances against the full cost, and keep the equipment after the "internet cables" are laid between their friends' multi-million pound farmhouses.
All farms and land should be compulsorily purchased at the price that was paid for it (so about twopence an acre if it was pre-WW2) and nationalised.
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Umm what? To start with they can have an old beige box as the router, and secondhand media converters are cheap as well. They don't necessarily need gigabit haul, probably 100mbit stuff that's dirt cheap will do the trick. And nobody lays down a single-strand fiber cable!
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Re:Optic? (Score:5, Informative)
Placing a good antenna on a roof and then getting the aim to the next site is not cheap.
Placing a good antenna on a perfectly positioned roof may not be allowed due to historic building listing.
Placing a good antenna on a tower might need gov approval and the costs can then go up with expert advice and paperwork.
The new expensive tower might not even allow good 24/7 connections.
A wireless box in a field or wood might attract 'easy' theft, property damage or free data use.
Optical is the neat generational fix. You can always blow in new cable if needed.
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WiFi is great till you actually have to use it.
Once you start putting any serious amount of traffic over it, you find yourself putting up more radios over different channels to avoid all kinds of different issues.
Or you can pay more up front and get your actual speeds with incredibly low latency with fiber.
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I used to be a member of the WAFreenet, and whilst we did a great job at low cost, the network had major issues.
Wifi is just not up to the job. The protocol cannot handle the timings and collition avoidance at outdoor scales, not to mention the fact that it was just plain unreliable. Oh and the channel space was completely saturated, plus you could only have 3 x 2.4GHz antennas co-located before you self-interfered. It's pretty hard to build a robust mesh this way.
Carrier grade wireless is far better and
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>Carrier grade wireless is far better and addresses many of these issues, but they are not cheap.
Most people don't realize that. Getting a chunk of private spectrum costs. Getting radios that are good and talk in that spectrum costs. All of a sudden you're paying a significant fraction of the fibre costs with none of the benefits. If you want more bandwidth with wireless, you might have to buy more spectrum and new equipment for it to work. With fibre, well hopefully you ran a full bundle in your pipe an
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They just put one of those little rubber cable covers across it it to keep the cars from tripping as they drove over the fiber.