One man’s DIY fibre Internet service connects Marin County hamlet

sfchronicle.com

21 points·gfredtech··5 comments

Good job. Unfortunately efforts like these are contingent on being in a location where you have reasonable access to wholesale bandwidth and enough population density to defray the costs of buying bandwidth and building the network.

Marin county is very, very hilly. Somewhere between hilly and mountainous, given that Mt Tamalpais sits smack in the middle of it. While most of the population is close to the freeway on the inland side, there are many many lightly populated areas with awful or no cell reception and issues with high-bandwidth type connections of various sorts. Many of the ocean-side areas are largely cut off from the main population by the mountains. I've never been to Dillon Beach, but it doesn't surprise me at all that Marin is where something like this would happen!

What are the logistics of laying fiber yourself? How do you legally dig up the ground and put the fiber down?

He didn't lay it himself; he found that AT&T had nearby fiber and paid them to run it to his garage. Then he connects to his customers via antenna.

"Kuykendall now buys Internet service at a bulk rate from AT&T, then beams the connection wirelessly to other homes. Some customers get service free in exchange for hosting Mimosa equipment that relays the signal around corners and over hills to reach more homes."

You have basically two choices: either you get permission to put up your own poles / get permission to hang your cable on somebody else's poles or you get access to the public right of way / get permission from the landowners to dig up / trench / bore your fiber into the ground.

As to the actual mechanics of laying fiber, there are whole industries dedicated to this task. If you want more detail, you'll have to be more precise.

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