Ask Slashdot: How Do You Convince an ISP To Bury Cable In Your Neighborhood?

EmagGeek writes "I live in a semi-rural micropolitan area that generally has good access choices for high speed Internet. However, there are holes in the coverage in our area, and I live in one of them. There is infrastructure nearby, but because our subdivision covenants require all utilities to be underground, telecoms won't even consider upgrading to modern technology. The result is that we're all stuck with legacy DSL (which AT&T has happily re-branded as U-Verse even though it isn't) as our only choice for wireline access. There is a competing cable company in the area, also with infrastructure nearby, but similarly they are reluctant to even discuss burying new cable in our 22-home subdivision. Has anyone been in this same predicament and been able to convince a nearby ISP to run new lines? If so, how did you do it? Our neighborhood association could really use some pointers on this because we hit a new brick wall with every new approach we try — stopping just short of burying our own cable and hoping they'll at least be willing to run a line to the pole at the end of the street and drop it into our box."

Re:The basics...

[pepty]

Hmm. How about just suspending a thin piece of fiber optic cable around the neighborhood on poles? Of course OP and several neighbors may have to convert to Judaism to apply for a religious exemption for their eruv ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv#Tradition_regarding_eruv