At 9/10/14 04:05 PM, TomFulp wrote: This sort of thing drives me nuts. There are towns in the US that have built their own Google Fiber-speed networks that serve THE PEOPLE and like you said, towns in other states can't do that because their representatives are in the pocket of Verizon and Comcast, even when Verizon and Comcast won't deliver their degraded version of high speed service to the people.
Tell me about it!
I grew up in a small town. We only had like 1000 residents. Nobody wanted to provide us service. We couldn't even get cable TV! So back in the 80s a local guy linked up our town (and a couple others if I recall) to cable TV. He built a little office with a garage and bought a cherry picker pickup truck and installed some satellite receivers and ran cable.
Then in the 90s we were stuck on 56k when everyone else was getting cable and DSL service. The little local telecom got together with the town board and they got some grants to start providing cable internet. By the 2000s we were hoooked up with high speed internet. These past few years they've begun an initiative to ensure that 95% of students at our little public school are connected to high speed internet at home. They've won grants and awards for their work.
But if we lived in another state we would still be stuck on 56k dialup to this day. Our market wasn't worth while for anyone to invest into the infrastructure but one guy was able to work something out on a local level. They didn't even get cell phone towers until a couple of years ago and only because the state gave big incentives to Verizon Wireless after some people died because they got in car crashes on rural roads in winter and had no service to call for help.
