This Rural Community Is Building Its Own Gigabit Internet Network | Hacker News Reader

This Rural Community Is Building Its Own Gigabit Internet Network

motherboard.vice.com

67 pointshitchhiker99921 comments

A group of locals watch eagerly, mindful not to trip over an orange cable lying nearby in the grass

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?

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.

Press the Twp council - who says there are going to be lawsuits? Why do they think there are going to be lawsuits? Who is supposedly going to sue? Get actual answers.

Run for office! You can then green-light it.

Go up higher in the telco food chain and/or act like you're a bigger outfit than you are to get the telco's attention, so you can actually get to talk to someone who is authorized to sell you something.

SO...in the years of 1996-1998 I was working for a small city owned electric utility in FL. I was hired on to be a part of their ISP efforts which included a FTTH project.

Within a few months of joining them, Bellsouth got some lobbyists to sponsor legislation that would ban any political subdivision of the state (like, say, a city-owned electric utility) from providing any telecommunications service.

The law was passed.

So our 10mbps symmetric ethernet service to the home was capped at just 24 homes or so.

Ain't democracy grand?

@Loughla: get in touch with Milo Medin at Google Fiber. I met him in 1998 at a conference when he was working for @Home. He's now the chief brain behind Google Fiber. I'm sure he has some good advice for you and he was always an approachable guy when I knew him. He might have some suggestions on how to proceed.

Look for a company that does alot of erate work with school districts.

They'll probably know the lay of the land better with respect to what vendors own what in your area.

Also, look into the Obama stimulus broadband contract awards -- figure out what companies laid fiber where. In many cases, that stimulus funding was used to build fiber infrastructure to remote prisons. So lots of fiber, some owned by smaller vendors, that isn't very utilized.

If the township council is actually cooperative, then it might be possible to get Google Fiber to notice. They've only done big cities so far, but perhaps they'd come there just for novelty's sake in the next round.

This might be even more probable, if there was fiber already in the ground. That's how Provo got it.

also, research "microtrenching" which can possibly reduce, dramatically, the costs of installing fiber in the ground through unpopulated areas...

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.

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...

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

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...

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.

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

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!

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.

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!)

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.

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.

There is a similar effort in Scotland called B4GAL: http://b4gal.org.uk/

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

http://www.tegola.org.uk/

Inspiring. Good show, rural north!

Who are they connected to?

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