woody said:
I've been with earthlink for several years, but I'm growing impatient waiting for broadband out here in the boonies. Currently paying $22/mo for the dialup account and probably about that much for a dedicated phone line. (to Sprint... which is earthlink in drag)
Not to hijack but just to redirect with some experience I went thru.
I also went thru this waiting game for a few years. When I started my own business and joined the chamber of commerce I mentioned broadband at one of the meetings, backed it up with alot of papers and research on the economic impact of broadband in a regional area, chamber got real interested in that, so we started bringing in various vendors that were not part of the local ISP/cable telco conglomerate that had a strangle hold on internet access here. We also had the town in on setting up a muni ISP thru bonds. Man, did that get the cable and telco off their ass, once the possiblity of a municipal ISP came above the horizon they started turning on services like nobodys business. The 'schedule' went from 5 years to 3 months in a hearbeat. The municipal ISP was the turning point, Kutztown already has this and it works, cheap, fast and reliable so we already had a model and local advice from a town that had done it. We also started playing the telco against the cable company and that also helped light the fuse. We were in the process of looking at wireless and using town property for towers and leasing it to wireless providers and colocating with the cell providers, piggybacking on their under utilized towers.
The only way to get the telco's and cable companys moving is to get them in the 'we're going to loose alot of business if someone else gets there first' frame of mind. From that point on it gets moved up on their agenda and actually gets done. We more or less had high speed cable and DSL turned on within a month of each other. You need to do it thru a recognized organization though, one that has some clout and is known for getting things done. They got it going fast enough that they did not start the terror campaign they normally start agains municipal ISP's where they actually send telco and cable employees out like jehova's witness's proclaiming the evils of municipal ISP's to defeat the bond issues at the ballot box.
It was really funny seeing fleets of phone and cable trucks in this county literally causing traffic jams for about 3 months or so while they raced to pull fiber and install 2 way amps on the cable system and the telco's broke all barriers to getting the new slic's installed. Verizon had trucks from 4 states working here and the cable companies had these massive trucks with rolls of fiber cable and outside cable contractors from all over the country pulling cable on to poles where possible and burying it in all the new developments.
If you are really rural and have alot of neighbors that are 'line of sight' you might want to consider setting up your own local wireless network and share the expense of the feed, single T1 or dual T1, granted it not rocket fast but it's better than dialup. The equipment is not that expensive or difficult to do and it is growable for expansion and distance. I actually set wisp up here and it worked great in the winter, once the leaves came out though my range went from 5KM down to 1-2km and in order to get the range back I'd have had to up the power to a level that would have fried every squirrel in the devleopment or raise antenna above the trees which would have made it about 60ft high. I had my initial antenna mounted on the chimney and up about 8 ft above that. All you need for a break even point is about 15 subscribers to start and about $400 ea to buy the equipment. That would get you the router, 4 sector panel antennas to cover 360* and the premise equipment for each user which would be an antenna, cable and their router. Some of the premise antennas can also be used as repeaters so with a bunch of line of site people going say around a hill the signal is carried house to house. Just some thoughts.
