Last-Mile Solution For A Rural Land Co-op? 312
macguys writes "My community consists of about 150 households spread out over several hundred acres in North Florida. We are far enough away from the nearest city that broadband cable and DSL services don't make it here. We're well organized, and used to working together on projects. We have a lot of home based business offices here and high speed access something that many of my neighbors are hungry for.
We've looked at projects like http://www.magnoliaroad.net and know that others have addressed the issue with 802.11b/g/etc.
There is no big problem getting a T-1 to the community. That part is easy. The hard part is distributing the bandwidth among those here who want to participate. Wireless works in places but in general this land is covered in hardwood and pines and the signal drops off quickly.
We have a long history (community is 25 years old) of working together to solve problems. Running copper or coax is not out of the question if we can find a reasonable way of distributing the bandwidth.
Any suggestions are welcome."
If you dig things up. (Score:5, Insightful)
James
Who gets control over the T1? (Score:2, Insightful)
Use powerlines (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Last Mile (Score:3, Insightful)
Choose a central location for your CO. Contract with the local telephone company to run dark (unused) copper circuits between residences that want DSL and the CO. Most telcos will do this, presumably as a back-up for businesses.
That may or may not be the hard part. From there you'll need to purchase the network (routers, CSU, DSLAM) and customer premises (DSL modem) equipment, and turn up the network.
It is, however, possible.
Re:If you dig things up. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:With respect to the T1... (Score:2, Insightful)
Rural Last Mile Solution (ReachDSL) (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course this would require the assistance of your Telco provider. Submit a Buisness Plan to them if they are a down to earth Teleco.. if they are a Megacorp, I doubt they'll work with you.
DSL is so much better for gaming than High Latency Satellite! (And Way better than Dial-up!)
Snippet from an Informative PDF [paradyne.com]:
"offering a minimum rate guarantee of 256K at a
distance of 18,000 feet (5.5 km), with typical performance
far exceeding this rate. In fact, astounding distances of up
to 60,000 feet (18 km) have been attained with ReachDSL
products - without the use of repeaters or amplifiers."
Re:Easy (Score:3, Insightful)