

This Rural Community Is Building Its Own Gigabit Internet Network - hitchhiker999
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-building-its-own-gigabit-fibre-network
A group of locals watch eagerly, mindful not to trip over an orange cable lying nearby in the grass
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Loughla
So, I live in a rural area in flyover country and have taken the approach so
far of contacting the state government, local ISP as well as the owner of the
fiber that runs directly through our community from one large metro area in
the north to another in the south. I've received nothing in the way of
assistance or advice. The large telco that owns the fiber acted as if it was
impossible to tie into their lines.

My community is very, very interested in tying into the existing fiber and
building its own network; the existing line quite literally bisects the
township. But, the township council is very adamant that it needs to be
assisted by someone externally to avoid lawsuits, which, to be honest, we do
not have the funds to deal with.

I have hit the end of my expertise in this endeavor. Does anyone here have any
advice?

~~~
msandford
Calling the ISP's bluff directly will likely be counterproductive.

Snoop around and see if you can find a fiber cabinet anywhere. It's not
uncommon to get many km between fiber repeaters so it's entirely possible that
the cabinets will be located well out of town making it more difficult. If you
find one close in then you can move on to phase two.

Call them up and pretend to be a businessman who wants to lease a fiber line
to connect his small, local, automated manufacturing plant centered close to
the fiber cabinet and lease a fiber to a big city somewhere where the
"servers" are located in a colo facility. It's all blatant lies but it will
tell you if the ISP is willing to play ball for money or if they really can't
be bothered.

If they are willing to lease you a line you've solved the back-haul side of
the problem. The tough part becomes cobbling together enough people right near
where the cabinet is who will all invest in a non-profit to get the thing off
the ground. Once you have the infrastructure in place adding an additional
user or ten gets much easier. I am not really sure how to build the necessary
demand in the group of people who live right near the cabinet. Plan a meeting
and go door-to-door? A lot of the success there depends on people feeling
enough sense of community to go in on the whole thing. If it's a small enough
town you've got a decent shot at it. Try and get some respected elders to join
up with you even if they're not on the city council; my mom's dad lives in a
small town (where his dad also lived) and he's said he could get elected to
city council if he just ran since everyone knows and respects the family name.

I wish you the best. It would be great to see more of these kinds of things
crop up.

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_mulder_
B4RN are great but they're unique, primarily because they have local access to
backhaul fibre. There are some key fibre routes travelling through their area
and there are existing fibres (originally used to connect local schools) that
run to the nearby Lancaster University (where the CEO of B4RN used to work),
and from there onto Telecity in Manchester.

Organising a fibre across some fields and your neighbours gardens is one
thing, but connecting into the national fibre network can be quite another,
especially for "real" remote villages where the nearest fibre point is many
miles away.

Of course you then have to lease the fibre capacity too which is very
expensive (£20k-40k+ a year for 10Gb backhaul) and ultimately at the
operator's discretion, some operators will just not sell to customers who they
see as direct competition. I seem to recall in B4RN's case they had such a
clash with BT that they pretty much burnt their bridges with them for any
future assistance.

This lack of existing infrastructure is why you couldn't (cost effectively)
replicate B4RN in rural Wales for example, even if you had fibre to all of the
houses in a village.

~~~
arethuza
The HUBS/Tegola projects I linked to in another comment have managed to
provide broadband speeds to Arnisdale - which must be one of the most remote
villages on the UK mainland:

[http://www.glenelg.co.uk/news/broadband-solution-provided-
fo...](http://www.glenelg.co.uk/news/broadband-solution-provided-for-
arnisdale-and-corran-by-tegola-project/)

It's wireless though - still a pretty good result getting decent connectivity
to small remote communities!

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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)

------
ensignavenger
I am working on a similar initiative in a rural Missouri (United States)
county. DadeCountyFiber.org

We are looking for help, if anyone is interested.

~~~
xhrpost
How successful have you been in getting the average citizen on board for such
an endeavor?

~~~
ensignavenger
Everyone I have spoken to has been supportive, but I am struggling to get them
involved. I don't think I am presenting a clear enough message as to what it
is we need to do to get the job done.

Unfortunately my wife has been sick and was in the hospital all last week, so
I am behind on my list of things to do, and simply don't have the time to do
it all myself, so at this point I really need to get more community members
actively engaged and helping me get the message out.

Any suggestions are always most welcome!

~~~
xhrpost
Sorry to hear about your wife, I hope that situation improves. Regarding
community involvement, this is the hurdle that I can't figure out myself. I've
done research in this area and talked to people about the prospect. I haven't
gone door to door but in the end, I think involvement will be rather limited
in a place that already has reasonable broadband access (albeit for
unreasonable prices and silly data-caps). I think B4RN is successful in
getting community involvement because the rural areas have very limited
Internet access. For sub-urban and urban areas, I think you'd need to simply
start offering a service. If you can offer comparable service for a lower
price, some people will switch. I'd love to hear otherwise.

~~~
ensignavenger
In my rural county, about 50% of households have some form of DSL service from
CenturyLink. They are the ones that live in the towns. Some of those towns
also have cable service from Mediacom. There are 2 WISPS serving parts of the
county, but their speeds aren't really broadband- and they are expensive!
Verizon does have wireless data coverage in some areas, but that is
prohibitively expensive for streaming video.

The rest of us are stuck with satellite as the only option, which is expensive
and laggy, and has very limited data caps.

I have no doubt we would be able to get 30-50% of households to signup for
fiber service if we had it. But I can't finance the entire cost of building
the network and still make it financially viable. Volunteers and community
support is the only way to make it happen.

If I can make it happen here, I plan to work very hard to expand the network
and help other communities to do the same thing.

(PS My wife is doing much better now, thanks!)

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Fuxy
I so want to learn how to do the splicing now. :D

Creating fiber networks is something i always wanted to learn how to do.

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Poiesis
I'm not always sure what to expect from a vice.com article, but I was
pleasantly surprised by this one. Not much technical detail of course, but I
found this to be a great story of, well, hacking.

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s0l1dsnak3123
There is a similar effort in Scotland called B4GAL:
[http://b4gal.org.uk/](http://b4gal.org.uk/)

~~~
arethuza
Also the linked HUBS and Tegola projects - more for wireless access in really
rough spots like Knoydart:

[http://www.tegola.org.uk/](http://www.tegola.org.uk/)

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NDizzle
Inspiring. Good show, rural north!

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callesgg
Who are they connected to?

