Where's the link?

There is a local translator that brings in a lot of TV stations, so I'm not sure how much whitespace is there. It's something worth looking into though, if only for the education.

My home is 18,000 feet from the DSLAM. Using ReADSL I can get 1.5/384 at best, but it usually negotiates around 1.3mbit down and ~300kbit up.

I've been through these hoops with AT&T and they are simply not interested unless the feds are paying for it. They refuse to tell me where they do offer ADSLv2 and ADSL+ Uverse service, so I don't know how close I am to a VRAD where Uverse and bonded DSL are offered.

Almost everyone in the neighborhood has AT&T already. Four of the 22 owners went satellite for everything and are just sucking up and paying for it, but they hate that _almost_ as much as being AT&T customers. You're right that we're small potatoes. We're 22 homes in a part of the county where there isn't a whole lot of income outside of our development to go around paying for premium information services.

We do have an electric co-op that serves our neighborhood, so that's something I hadn't thought of. I don't believe they offer BPL services - at least nothing is listed on their website - but it can't hurt to make a phone call.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Thanks for that suggestion. I looked and nothing came up for our area. We're pretty rural.

I know of a WISP that operates in the nearest town to me, but even with my 65 foot crank-up tower I can't see their SSID, and they only offer 500kbits anyway.

We'd probably have to go a little deeper than that, but it's not that simple. There are issues of ownership, maintenance, junction boxes, insurance, easements (if we "gift" the rollout to the ISP and they become responsible for maintenance), and so on. Say everyone owns the portion of the cable that goes through their property. Say Neighbor X has a problem in their section, but refuses to fix it, thereby causing an outage for everyone downstream? They, of course, get mad at the ISP for the outage, which is powerless to fix it. It becomes clear that the ISP must be given ownership of the cable, and with it the necessary easements for access.

We're talking about 7500 feet of cable required to make it around the subdivision if we lay it out to avoid having to trench through concrete driveways and the side street. Good, long-lasting direct-bury RG6Q is probably $1/ft or even more, so figure $10K just in the cable, the cost of junction boxes, and so on. I can see where it starts to look very expensive, which is the crux of the problem.

If it were up to me I'd just go rent a ditch witch and lay it myself, but the legal fees involved with adding the easements are considerable, along with the legalities of giving the ISP a bunch of infrastructure they didn't build but that nevertheless they become responsible for maintaining.

Long story short (because I've posted it elsewhere in this thread) - there's a state law in SC that may make that criminal. It's illegal to connect a consumer to a network that was subsidized unless all competing network providers were offered the same subsidy. Since we can't afford to offer all competing ISPs (including AT&T) the subsidy, we may not be able to do it.

Paying for it ourselves may actually not be an option here. There is a State law in South Carolina that prohibits connecting any consumer to any subsidized infrastructure unless all competing carriers are offered the same subsidy. It might be construed by that law that our offer to pay for at least part of the installation costs constitutes a "subsidy" that we would have to offer to all other ISPs, which obviously could never afford.

This Law came about because my county got a Federal contract to string Fiber to every residence in the county and offer 100Mbit duplex to every home. AT&T lobbied the state legislature to criminalize hooking consumers to subsidized infrastructure. So, now only county government entities are allowed to connect to it, and the county taxpayer may be on the hook to reimburse the federal government for the money that was granted to build the network.

Just to clarify, we're not an HOA. In fact the covenants prohibit the formation of an HOA. We have a "neighborhood association" that organizes the annual yard sale and put luck BBQ party, and does other non-binding social things like brainstorm ways the community can act together to make it a nice place to live. There are absolutely no enforcement powers authorized by the covenants, and in fact they specifically state that action must be brought by an individual owner in the county court system.

In any case, this is one of those activities where a few of the owners who care get together to try to get something accomplished - like getting modern services installed. We're willing to foot some of the installation costs up front, but dealing with them is painful at best. They just seem like they're not interested if they have to shoulder ANY of the rollout or maintenance costs.

Our situation is similar. We have large lots and just a preliminary walk of the proposed cable route is nearly 1.5 miles - average lot size here is about 3 acres.

What I did a year ago was put together a survey/petition form for everyone to say who they were using and how much they were paying for the services the cable company provides. I imagine they're looking at about $2-3k/month in revenue if everyone jumps on board with Phone, Internet, and TV, and it seems like everyone will if they can.

I have no idea how much of that is profit for them so I can't begin to guess what the payback would be assuming ~$100k in installation costs.

I've been at them for nearly a year now, but we'll keep pushing. Thanks for the reply.

We tried the LTE thing, but our usage needs, even trying to conserve, pushed 6 GB/week or so and would have had us in a $120/month or so plan.

I've had my firewall counting packets and we seem to use about 40GB/month doing whatever we want, so at minimum I would want a 50GB/month plan, and that's a car payment. Forget that. I'd rather give up computing as a hobby than be stuck with that kind of access cost.

Hugh Dot Pickens needs a timeout.

My wife and I are pretty close to just turning off Internet at home. We can only get AT&T, and we can only get legacy DSL at 1.5mbit. Usually when I'm sitting on the PC at home I'm thinking that I'd rather be doing something else anyway, like right now, in fact.

Depends on which Federal district you are in. In whatever district Colorado lives in, you must decrypt your phone/laptop and or open your safe at home during a search. If you refuse, you can be thrown in jail until you comply.