A T1??? How about multiple T1's or frac-T3 (which is actually fairly reasonable compared to what they used to be). Split it out to a nice wireless and you're done. But if you can only get 5 people, then, yes, you're screwed. It probably explains your situation. Unless there is a real demand for that market, then you won't find any interest to enter the market.

DUDE! Opportunity is knocking! Find the CO in your town (it might be just a shack considering the size). The CO will at least have T1 service. Find a plot of land or someone's roof and set up your own wireless ISP.

Only game?? Satellite -- high latency, but can do better than 1.5mbit. Heck, cell towers give better than 1.5mbit down these days. Is there a Verizon tower in your town? Is the town so small it doesn't have a cable company?

Depends on where you live. I have FiOS and I can tell you the download/upload is very, very good. Price? It might be more than $30/month, but for me it's worth it.

Make a local mirror, pxe boot, upgrade.

Or

Make a local mirror, install the new fedora-release rpm's and do a 'yum upgrade'.

Or

If you have FiOS, don't make a local mirror, just 'yum upgrade' after installing the new fedora-release rpm.

There only time yum upgrade didn't work was when they switched rpm payloads a few versions back.

I don't know that NTFS implements their shadow system like btrfs. If they do, you might want to inform IBM and ACM Transactions on Computational Logic and let them know that they should have publish Microsoft's research instead. The paper the refer to was published August 2007.

B-trees, Shadowing, and Clones by Ohad Rodeh, IBM Haifa Research Labs.

But btrfs may actually have a better foundation than ZFS. When ZFS was first conceived they didn't believe a file system could do btree's and COW. btrfs has proven that it can be done. See the section "btrfs: Pre-history" at:

A short history of btrfs

This is the single point where I am sympathetic to the point that "our money built the Internet." I just personally feel the current proposals for net neutrality go too far. In the case of the copper lines, it was more of a deregulation in that the government was allowing competitive access to a monopoly. The monopoly being that the phone companies own all the communication copper that goes to each home -- everywhere. What is interesting about this is now the phone companies lost that monopoly they are pulling in their own fiber to the neighbor hood or to the house so that they have exclusive pipes again. Though, it is not so much of a monopoly anymore since any company could petition a city for a franchise and make a u-verse-like service.

It is an engineering problem. And it is easy to solve with QoS and traffic shaping! That way this theoretical ISP can penalize bulk p2p traffic for the benefit of the majority of subscribers. But net neutrality won't allow that -- go figure.

And companies are doing that now. They have put in caps. Happy now?

Maybe your electric bill should be priced that way too. Take the peak amount of electricity for a month and price it that way for the entire month. That way people that *do* use that amount of electricity for the month are covered. How about it?

It seems to me that the Internet *really* exploded when DSP technology advanced. You had 56kbs modems that pushed the limits of copper. Once the analog portion of the link was converted to digital at the CO, 56kbs (or more like 40kbs) started to work. Then DSL came out. As far as I know, DSL is not under any regulation. All government did was allow other companies into established Central Offices so they could drop DSL equipment at the end of the copper lines. We also had cable companies figuring out how to use the previously unusable frequencies in their coax for upstream data. Both of these innovations had more to do with DSP advancements more than government intrusion. No only that, but the whole reason people wanted on the Internet was when the government stopped controlling the rules for content and connectivity.

And companies are now doing that. All I hear is people complaining about traffic being capped. Boohoo, the people that complain the most are the ones that caused the ISP to resort to capping. They also probably have their little Internet router set for QoS so their mommy doesn't complain about browsing the intertubes when they are downloading pr0n over p2p.

At worst the government or the Better Business Bureau or whatever will push for clear advertising of caps. No need for the government to trample on configuration of networks.

Peering is driven by demand. I can't peer if I can't make it worthwhile to the network I want to peer with. If a lot of my customers want vonage, then I peer with vonage. If another VoIP provider wants my customers, they could peer with me, but they have to make it worthwhile for themselves. Barriers to entry are nothing new to markets. People have figured out ways around them. There is no reason the government has to get involved here.

Never had a problem with this ISP before. The existing 10Base-TL has worked very, very well. Even if it does go down, I can afford secondary links that provide better bang for buck than the government regulated T1's provide.