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Rural residents' DIY 1Gbps fibre project

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Rural residents' DIY 1Gbps fibre project

#11

Post by andyking »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #10

As someone who grew up in a rural part of the UK, I can empathise with how annoying it is to be limited to a 56k connection with daily timed limits (usually around 3 hours or so) to be connected when all of your city dwelling friends have 1mbps broadband. I wonder if this is as much to do with property values as anything? It must be very difficult to sell a house with no option of fast internet and the modern interne…

I live in rural Yorkshire, and there's a village about five miles from me where broadband is not available - at all. There's no FTTC/H, no ADSL, no 3G coverage from any network, nothing. Residents still use either dial-up, or expensive, high-latency satellite connections from an outfit called Tooway.

It's a beautiful little village, not bad for commuting into the nearby city of Sheffield, but last time I looked, there were several houses to rent, that had been up for rent for over three months each, in a rental market that's generally red-hot. The lack of broadband is surely an issue. I'd move there if broadband was available, and I'm sure a lot of other people are in the same boat.

The issue here is that the rest of South Yorkshire has now been wired into a publicly-funded FTTC operation called Digital Region (http://www.digitalregion.co.uk/) which I'm using right now. The connection quality is good, I get a full 40Mbps with the option of raising it to around 110Mbps for more money - but the network is failing financially, because they've wired up places that are already connected to BT "Infinity" FTTC, instead of those areas which don't get broadband/fast broadband. My small town is one of the few places which has Digital Region and not Infinity, and I don't know anyone else with a DR connection.

Re: Rural residents' DIY 1Gbps fibre project

#12

Post by ricardobeat »

nemilar wrote: post #4

This may actually be much easier in a rural area, as opposed to urban/suburban. Rural landowners have large tracts of land, and the land is in fewer hands. You need less individuals to buy-in, since a single buy-in on the project can mean miles of line. You don't need a jackhammer to dig up sidewalks and streets, and you (presumably) don't need as many (if any) permits; you don't need to take as much care not to disr…

Shouldn't this be a very attractive market for commercial ISPs then?

Re: Rural residents' DIY 1Gbps fibre project

#13

Post by wcunning »

morphle wrote: post #8

We run a couple of startups like B4RN, one in the US, one in Europe en one in South America. We build our own 10 GBps routers. Come join us, we have room for extra founders. info at buurtnet dot org

I see nothing on that site about the US. Where would I find such information?

Re: Rural residents' DIY 1Gbps fibre project

#14

Post by Hoff »

B4RN is using burial, which is a great approach for reducing long-term maintenance, but the extra costs of burial may or may not work in other localities.

Burying wires in gravel, or burying below the usual furrow depths in farmer's fields is fairly easy, and trenchers are commonly available. (And if you bury your wires outside of the growing season, you won't disrupt the farming.)

In an area of the US that I'm familiar with, the granite ledge and glacial erratics (big rocks) would make burial problematic. Nearly all electric and telecommunications distribution wiring is accordingly overhead; on poles. With the problems that brings; ice storms, trees, etc.

Rural distribution does have some advantages in terms of not digging up existing infrastructure, and the ability to easily trench connections across the gravel-surface roads, but the cabling distances are usually (much) longer, and the numbers of and densities of houses and potential subscribers are (much) lower than in urban areas.

This means that the survival economics of the installation are fully in play; how many subscribers you'll gather, and how much to join, and how much to maintain the (overhead) wiring. This is why many rural areas of the US will tend to have DSL broadband, at best. DSL is cheap(er), and it uses the existing copper.

As with the rural electrification and rural telephone efforts that preceded this in the US, the stumbling block for rural broadband is the (large) installation costs; they're not a financially viable undertaking for commercial entities.

Incumbent telcos are seeing their business go to cellular, and wireline subscribers are dropping. Some of the telcos have been in and out of bankruptcy. Because of the budgets and the wireline subscriber trends, incumbent telcos also aren't inclined to install wiring ahead of a requirement; dark fiber isn't commonly installed during repairs in this area.

Yes, you might hope to see some of the incumbents build out broadband as a way to stay relevant. But in rural areas, that build-out involves greater distances and lower (potential) customer densities, and with higher on-going maintenance costs. And around we go...

Re: Rural residents' DIY 1Gbps fibre project

#15

Post by InclinedPlane »

ricardobeat wrote: post #12
nemilar wrote: post #4

This may actually be much easier in a rural area, as opposed to urban/suburban. Rural landowners have large tracts of land, and the land is in fewer hands. You need less individuals to buy-in, since a single buy-in on the project can mean miles of line. You don't need a jackhammer to dig up sidewalks and streets, and you (presumably) don't need as many (if any) permits; you don't need to take as much care not to disr…

Shouldn't this be a very attractive market for commercial ISPs then?

Of course not, the expense of the fiber and equipment itself is the same but the number of customers and thus the maximum revenue is far lower.

Re: Rural residents' DIY 1Gbps fibre project

#16

Post by sdoering »

What I really like about projects like this is the fact, that local communities organize themselves and get things done, that the bigger entities are not able to tackle.

The more I read about such endeavors and the more I think about it, I believe, that local communities in a connected world have more power than

a; they thought for a long time, due to the fact, that a lot of things are decided far away. b; a lot of bigger players would like them to have.

They might not be as "efficient" or as "moneymaking" but that might be actually a good thing.

For example, building this network underground is much more resilient, than on poles. But I also believe, that the bigger players, will try to enforce their role, as such initiatives get more common.

The same might happen, as power generation becomes much less centralized or as food production (hopefully) returns to a much more local situation.

I really hope to see more such initiatives, not only in Britain, or Europe, but on planet-scale.

Re: Rural residents' DIY 1Gbps fibre project

#19

Post by ianlevesque »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #10

As someone who grew up in a rural part of the UK, I can empathise with how annoying it is to be limited to a 56k connection with daily timed limits (usually around 3 hours or so) to be connected when all of your city dwelling friends have 1mbps broadband. I wonder if this is as much to do with property values as anything? It must be very difficult to sell a house with no option of fast internet and the modern interne…

It's really unfortunate that there are still places where people casually call 1 mbps "broadband." It's the same in rural areas of the USA though.

Re: Rural residents' DIY 1Gbps fibre project

#20

Post by kalleboo »

Communities like this were a factor in accelerating the broadband buildout in Sweden as well.

Here, when we broke up the telco monopoly, instead of splitting it up regionally (like AT&T), they were split into roles. So after the splitup, the ownership of all the POTS copper and related infrastructure (buildings, backhaul etc) ended up as a separate entity[0] who had to treat everyone the same and couldn't favor a single telco.

Come DSL. To get DSL, this company obviously has to upgrade the local switches for DSLAM operations, and for this operation they would charge the first telco to request a DSL connection for the upgrade. In the DSL buildout rush at the turn of the century, the big telcos obviously focused on densely populated areas. So people who lived on switches that were too small to be attractive to any big telco would start up a coop like this to save up to pay for the upgrade themselves, and there were several small broadband operators who would take care of the technical, broadband-providing bit. And once your switch was upgraded, suddenly you could get your pick of any of the DSL providers.

There were/are also a ton of small, local wireless providers who use directional antennas to service people who live too far away from a DSLAM.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skanova

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