UK Community Gives Up Waiting For High Speed Broadband: Digs Its Own Fiber Trenches
from the nicely-done dept
Providers of high speed broadband love to talk about how they're providing private networks that shouldn't be regulated at all, but they tend to ignore the fact that they usually rely on government subsidies in the form of rights of way -- the legal ability to dig the trenches (or string cables on poles) to run the key infrastructure. Now, of course, we've heard of various muni-broadband projects, but one community in the UK apparently got so fed up with waiting for a big broadband provider to bring service to their village that they not only started setting up their own system, but they literally got dozens of residents to help them start digging the 51 mile-long trench where the fiber optic cable that connects them to the wider internet will lie. Talk about taking matters into your own hands...
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gotta love america....land of big business and greed
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The purpose of the network was to provide the infrastructure as a utility so that people could choose from a free market of ISPs, but the existing, government subsidized qwest-comcast cartel didn't approve. Instead, they spewed FUD about the sufficiency of twisted pair and coax while simultaneously proclaiming that fiber was antiquated technology. It was unbelievable how far and wide this paradoxical FUD went when I started hearing these talking points being blabbered about unchallenged by technically illiterate people.
It wasn't too hard to get the masses incensed against socialist "utopia" since most people here believe already that roads, prisons, police, and government itself should be privatized, so that the free market can optimize our state for us. As Mike likes to point out, however, none of these changes could even work without considerable, dedicated, anti-free market privileges both natural and contrived.
Instead of UTOPIA, we're stuck with (except for the cities courageous enough to not acquiesce to quest and comcast) an overpriced, underliberated, antiquated, pair of networks now enshrined by political edict.
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RE: Utopia
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try to lay your own fiber and get sued!
However, Bell South and Cox Communications have filed motions with the courts to stop Lafayette from going forward.
In January 2005, BellSouth threw a wrench in Lafayette's plans to issue a $110 million bond to build its fiber network. Bell South filed a legal challenge in state court arguing that the way the city was issuing the bond didn't follow state law."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/121832/public_broadband_hits_speed_bumps.html
After a FIVE YEAR legal battle...
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/After-Five-Years-Of-Fighting-Lafayette-Gets-Their-Fibe r-100724
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Our city is supposedly a city of the future, but our Cable ISP/DSL Providers are still stuck in the 70s.
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I was going for the truth, but guess maybe 70s was a little bit of a ranty exaggeration. The phone companies want to deal with landline phones and the cable companies want the heyday of running cables for television. No legacy company wants to deal with modems, cellphones, data, smartphones, internet, etc. If they did, they wouldn't be trying everything they can to restrict our capabilities and wind us back to the dark ages (remember, AT&T just not long ago tried to push the several governments to adopt 200kbps as broadband.) I suspect they would be happy with us renting the headsets again if they think they could get away with it.
Sure the internet didn't exist until the 90s, but as a bulletin board operator in the 80s and early 90s, I can assure you that the phone companies hated us just as much as they now hate the internet. They tried on numerous times to get me to buy a business data line (at huge markups,) in order to run my BBS, because they couldn't understand how someone who was doing this for free would expect their modem to work on a regular phone line when the government said that the phone lines must be able to support modems.
They went so far as to move my phone line to the bottom of the stack, so that every time it rained and the switching station flooded out, my lines would die, I would complain, and end up bringing in regulators to check the lines and confirm that the lines were unfit for voice communication. Then they'd "fix" it, and the next time it rained I was back to calling them because I couldn't even get a dialtone. I knew this because every time a technician was sent out, they would explain to me that they could not guarantee my modem would work and I should upgrade to the digital business line and eventually one of them told me that they fixed it by moving me from the bottom of the stack up to the top, and then came by the next week to tell me that they had an order from the company to move me back down.
They've been playing this game since before the world wide web, and before the internet was publicly available.
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http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110512/13475214253/concerned-citizen-critic-muni-ca ble-system-now-admits-he-works-time-warner-cable.shtml
Also see
http://www.muninetworks.org/content/att-bid-broadband-monopoly-south-carolina-resurfaces
h ttp://stopthecap.com/2012/01/25/another-bought-paid-for-anti-community-broadband-bill-appears-in-geo rgia/
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110614/13195214690/wisconsin-kills-wiscnet-because-only- good-infrastructure-is-att-infrastructure.shtml
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Individuals can be awesome people. The People and The Community are greedy asshats who manage to be both self-serving and self-destructive at the same time.
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Re: or a huge mess where nepotism, cronyism, and protectionism are the words of the day.
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Not necessarily, see Wikipedia for one of many many examples. It's voluntary, funding is voluntary.
If a 'community' wants to pass anti-competitive, that should be dealt with separately. But if a community wants to build a competing broadband network I have no problems with that.
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Yup, then we can have another Harrisburg, PA type situation, where a smaller town invests heavily in putting in fibre, only to discover that the costs to maintain the network and keep everything running is too high, and the end up going broke.
Yup, sounds like a plan.
We need more community owned infrastructure, that would probably be the tipping point to bankrupt most of them.
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If incumbents knew ahead of time that these alternative broadband efforts would fail they would be glad to allow them to try it out, fail, and say "see, we told you so". They would have nothing to fear, they would have no reason to use the government to establish monopolies. They need the government to establish monopolies because they know very well that in the absence of their government established monopoly power competition will be detrimental to their profit margins and might even drive them out of business.
Will every attempt to build competing broadband services be a success? Of course not, it takes experience to be able to do it efficiently. Early attempts to build broadband and phone lines and cable lines had their failures as well, heck, even now we complain about poor quality cable signals only to have cable companies come and 'fix' the problem and have their initial fix not work properly (for them to come again and fix it a second time before getting it right). But if we keep trying and learning we can eventually gain the experience that incumbents have and learn how to efficiently and effectively build competing services, provided the incumbent government-industrial complex doesn't get in the way in the form of anti-competitive laws.
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At some point people need to learn to make things work on their own, not trying is not a solution at all.
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This is where the >30 crowd comes in. Mess with their net and we will see a 'freenet' or people's net happening. I tend to believe the future is wifi and not cables anyway. These legacy companies are shooting themselves.
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There are no secure networks, only temporary secure ways to communicate.
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The RIAA will fuck it up
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Municipal ISPs would be great.
A 100 Mbps synchronous connection for everyone would be a huge benefit to society. Such a fast connection would permit us to get all of our communications needs entirely from the internet. Video, web, voice, games, news, education, etc., could be accessed simultaneously from one bundle of thinly stretched glass strands attached to our home.
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Verizon and Vermont..
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yay for me!
They already offer symmetrical 10mb+ DSL with no cap and a small static IP block.
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And in response to reply #3, yes, people are such idiots at believing ANYTHING government run must be bad and evil, when that's clearly not the case. Ironically the rural areas, that cry most about the evils of socialism are the ones that most frequently take in more tax dollars in the forms of new roads/bridges/entitlements/benefits then those ultra liberal big cities that keep on voting for 'socialist' candidates. They're also the ones that NEED 'socialist' governments coming in and installing phone lines and internet connections for them, because there's too few people there for a private business to think it's worth investing any money in.
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And the general rule is that where it isn't illegal, country folks tend to build their own infrastructure. You have to remember that things like highways and power lines are tightly regulated -- do you really think that's a coincidence?
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bt is the biggest isp
they have the right to dig up almost any road they like
they dont need planning permission
so people digging trenches wont help as bt/virgin still need to fit the cable and upgrade the exchanges/street boxes
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This is being done in Sweden too.
There many parishes have created non-profits to get fiber to the parish. One difference is that in Gotland there are very few villages, so they never really had any hope of getting fibers in the first place, as there simply aren't enough people at the end of each fiber. So the farmers who own the land dig their own trenches. In the end each house gets a 100MB connection with cable, telephone and internet. Not bad for the country side. :-)
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