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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 res

by xhrpost 12y ago

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 12y ago
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!)