

German villagers build own broadband network - nkurz
http://www.thelocal.de/20140601/german-villagers-build-own-broadband-network

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onli
The part that is completely missing in that article - and could be interesting
to people from outside from germany - is that this shouldn't be necessary if
you follow the official worldview. The ISPs are obliged to provide High-Speed
Internet to the whole of Germany, but the government is not forcing them to do
that, instead letting them promise and promise again to make that happen.

They do it somewhat with LTE, which they have to roll out first in rural areas
before being allowed to go into the big cities (where the money is). But in
the DSL-market, where there is no such force applied, they simply don't do it.
Promises are worth nothing and the market doesn't succeed in providing basic
infrastructure.

~~~
sentenza
The moment that LTE started happening, people realized that they were not
going to get decent internet. Because "rural" in Germany includes villages
with 1000 inhabitants in it.

Just because the big Telcos don't consider it economically viable to invest
there, these 1000 people would have to share the badndwidth of LTE among
themselves indefinitely. So of course they became active. (Note, some
communities already started to get involved in their own internet connectivity
long before LTE was rolled out in Germany.)

Funny enough, once there is a decent alternative by a local/small provider,
the big ones also start showing up.

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Maakuth
This is also happening in Finland. It worked well for single villages, etc.
but then the municipalities discovered how cheap these co-operatives were and
enlisted them to build big networks. Now these companies with very little
actual expertise of network building have tens of millions of budget to
network almost entire counties and are failing hard.

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sii
This is not at all uncommon on Sweden. Rural communities come together and
organize fiber buildouts in their own local areas. Average cost is around
$2000 per connection. The biggest problem is generating enough interest to
make a build out economically viable.

We've been working on this for two years where I live and the digging will
finally begin in august, 180km of fiber to ~600 homes.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
Good work. I live a bit more urban, but our local council (kommun), i.e. the
tax payers, owns the local network and we have eleven companies providing
different type of services (IP, cable TV, VoIP etc) on the fibre. We have
about half of the houses (6000 of 12000) and essentially all the apartments
connected. Getting my house connected by fibre was one of the best things I
have ever done. Ran a startup from the basement for a while.

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chrisBob
It is an interesting problem even in some areas that are not too remote. My
parents are within 2 miles of the nearest cable or DSL connection, but it
might as well be 100 miles. The spent a while considering a 50 foot tower for
a line-of-sight radio link to a town a few miles away, but right now they
still have HughesNet service with low caps and high latency.

I am really not sure how I feel about their situation. They have plenty of
money to throw at the problem, so they could fix it if they really wanted to,
but that isn't the case for everyone. For now it is just horrible when they
want to show me a youtube video and then we all huddle around the laptop for a
few minutes while it buffers.

~~~
micro_cam
Microwave link is the way to go. There may be a local small company that
already has towers in place on a hill or something. I'm in rural Montana and
can get 40 Mb/s, no caps, low ping. Get the latest generation of radios with
the small (<12") dish if you can as they are much less effected by wind etc.

~~~
ClashTheBunny
Affected?

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pmorici
A lot of local citizen groups have tried to do this in small towns in the US
but typically what happens is Verizon or Comcast comes in with a big budget Ad
campaign rallying against it. Of course their plans usually involve using the
cities tax dollars but the basic idea is the same.

[http://www.tricitybroadband.com/](http://www.tricitybroadband.com/)

~~~
theandrewbailey
Or the incumbent ISPs will sue them to hell for a few years to stop it.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/05/lousiana-fiber-
ne...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/05/lousiana-fiber-network-
running-despite-cable-telco-lawsuits/)

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zymhan
I'm not sure I understand how they did this. Did the residents' money go to
building the local network for the village? Who provides the backbone? I just
wonder how applicable this might be to small towns in the U.S.

~~~
rndgermandude
Well, as far as I understand, some of the residents essentially formed a
company (BBNG) which then built a fiber optics connection to the nearest TNG
access point. TNG is a regional provider, serving in particular the town of
Kiel (capitital of the state of Schleswig-Holstein) and is also (one of) the
ISP for the corresponding state government. TNG in turn provides the actual
service to the subscribers, and pays a leasing fee to BBNG. BBNG uses that
revenue to reimburse the investors.

As for the peerings of TNG: [http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-
report?as=AS13101](http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS13101)

~~~
kzar
What I don't understand is how you figure out where the closest fibre access
point is. I'm trying to get my head around how to carry out a project similar
to this / B4RN and the first step seems to be to check if there's a fibre
access point reasonably close by.

~~~
jacquesm
Find a local line-man and ask! Wherever you see one of those trucks working on
overhead or underground lines there is a ton of knowledge about local
infrastructure present.

Good spots to scout for: railroad stations, microwave towers, datacenters
(unlikely, but still), highways.

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jmspring
This is interesting to see, especially the older Germans chipping in. My own
in-laws who live in the Oberpfalz have no broadband nor do other family in the
same building. I usually end up topping up a data stick when I go.

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JeanMasqa
Check out ffdn :) [http://www.ffdn.org/](http://www.ffdn.org/) This is not
uncommon :)

~~~
zz1
And also taziden's talk:
[http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5391_-_en_-_...](http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5391_-_en_-
_saal_6_-_201312291130_-_y_u_no_isp_taking_back_the_net_-_taziden.html)

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lucaspiller
The UK is currently building out it's broadband network to provide 2MBps [0]
to everyone by next year, and "Superfast" broadband to most people with the
next couple of years. There is a local bidding process for who the funding
goes to, but in most cases it is BT meaning people will get up to 24Mbps.
There is a bit of controversy though as local initiatives like this are being
shunned in favour of BT due to red tape [1].

I wonder whether it would be better to instead invest in 4G services in rural
areas. Here I can't even get 2G (yeah this place is a bit remote), but most
rural areas have that or 3G in the UK.

[0] [https://www.gov.uk/broadband-delivery-uk](https://www.gov.uk/broadband-
delivery-uk)

[1] [http://northdorsetbroadband.co.uk/](http://northdorsetbroadband.co.uk/)

~~~
Bleepy
I feel that achieving the 2MBps by next year will be very unlikely.

I live in a very rural area and over the past 3-4 years our internet has gone
from poor (0.5MBps) to nothing. We were told by an engineer that the wire is
so badly damaged that there is nothing that he could do and the majority of
the wire from the exchange from our house to the exchange would have to be
replaced. Its so bad landline calls are no inaudible due to the amount of
noise coming down the line.

What did BT have to say about this? Absolutely nothing, there is a flag on our
account letting the call centers know that there is nothing they can do for
us. They just keep telling us to move ISPs. But everything goes down the BT
line anyway so thats just moving the problem elsewhere.

(Its quite sad that I can remember the sequence of numbers to press when
ringing up to get through to the tech support and then the script they used to
ask when tried to resolve our issues.)

There are about 5 other houses with us, then about 4 miles before the next
town, and then the exchange. In total we are about 5-7 miles from the exchange
(which is fibre ready).

The problem for us now is that everyone just expects broadband of some form or
another, its like a utility. Nobody wants to buy a house with no water, or
electric and now people don't want to buy a house without broadband. So we've
got to the point where we are trying to move house to get access to the
internet but cannot sell our current house to get the funds to move.

EDIT: Also just like to add that I've looked into 4G and due to the landscape,
it wasn't an option :(

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kayoone
I don't know much about the broadband market, but i feel the future will be
wireless highspeed internet. In many regions LTE/4G already reach very decent
speeds with low latency, the main problem is insane traffic costs and probably
not enough infrastructure to support many clients. But the technology is
already there isn't it ? Or will companies always want wired highspeed
internet ?

~~~
pratyushag
Companies might use wired internet but residential places without cable will
likely move to mobile. This is exactly what is already happening in Nigeria.

~~~
_delirium
I even know of a few people in Copenhagen who've done that. Companies are
starting to offer all-inclusive packages for mobile+home 4G, where you can add
a fixed wifi router onto your existing mobile 4G plan. If you're already
paying for mobile 4G, the incremental cost to those packages is often
considerably less than the cost of home cable+DSL, at least if your data usage
is moderate.

~~~
kayoone
thats exactly what i mean, i could see most of the population with moderate
internet usage move to mobile internet completely in the next 10 years. Its a
different story for power users and businesses of course.

On the other hand you have more and more services like phones and TV move to
IP, so a wired highspeed connection might be even more important in the
future.

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grecy
A small town in Alberta, Canada did the same thing.[1]

All 8,500 residents have access to gigabit for $57/mo.

[1] [http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-alberta-town-gets-
ma...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-alberta-town-gets-
massive-1-000-mbps-broadband-boost-1.1382428)

~~~
josefresco
Serious question, but how does a town/municipality handle network maintenance?
Many of these stories seem to feature a lot of grants, and one-time costs but
I don't see much about the cost required to upgrade the network over time. I'm
assuming some of the fee users pay is earmarked for this?

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Ihmahr
They could also route some Tor traffic from their community project.

