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Re: [funsec] Not so fast, broadband providers tell big users (fwd)

  • From: Valdis . Kletnieks
  • Date: Wed Mar 14 02:47:57 2007 
On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 23:15:30 EDT, Joe Abley said:
> This conversation has suddenly become very weird. I suggest you go  
> and spend a year on Niue before you decide to make claims that  
> anywhere in the US is as remote (and, for the record, there are no  
> cables which land in Niue, fat or otherwise).

We're specifically talking about the connection from where the end of the fat
pipe is, be it a fiberoptic or copper or a satellite dish, and where the user
is.

Craig Mountain:

http://www.topozone.com/map.asp?lat=37.0836&lon=-80.3281&datum=nad27&u=4&layer=DRG&size=l&s=50

About 2 square miles, almost all trees. All the houses are marked (the little
squares).  How many towers do you need? How many are economically viable,
especially for "free" wifi?

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&z=12&ll=37.198612,-80.407562&spn=0.191156,0.395164&t=h&om=1

To be fair, you can probably get away with hand-waving away trying to provide
coverage to all the green areas - they're forested because they're too steep
for either farming or building houses on, so it isn't like you will be cutting
off a lot of people.

> about it not being there (hi, Rich!). Do the 70k people that are  
> "easy to cover" in Montgomery County have free wifi? If it's so easy,  
> why not?

It's hard to find somebody who will underwrite the cost of free wifi. You
can't even ask the local government to do it, because they respond with "But
we got everybody online on copper a *decade* ago".

http://www.bev.net/about/history.php

(That page dates back to 2002 or so - we got out of the ISDN business
around then.  Uptake rates are even higher now)

We wired the town up. We're not feeling real motivated to un-wire it.
Somebody wants to come in and get bits to that last 10% that none of the
dozen ISPs with presences in the county have found economical ways to reach,
they're welcome to do so.

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