A network of one's own...
Interesting writeup in
News.com about cities and municipal organizations (schools, etc... ) getting frustrated with traditional cable companies taking too long and charging too much for bandwidth that these organizations are taking matters in hand and doing it themselves. This approach is usually a lot cheaper too.
From the article:
bq. So far, their math appears to be working out. For a total cost of $2.2 million and a year's worth of work, Douglas County traded its old 1.5 megabit per second leased system for a brand-new 10 gigabit per second network--enough capacity to consider selling the excess for a profit. The new network, which is capable of carrying everything from voice to video to data, has also eliminated roughly $320,000 per year in recurring data communication charges, according to administrators.
bq. "We can't lose on what we've done," said Lee Christianson, senior project manager for the school system's technology team. "The network will pay for itself in just a few years, and we haven't experienced any downtime at any of the schools that we've switched over to the fiber network."
Heh... Jen and I are moving to a rural area in a few months and the only option for internet access is either dialup or T1 - I'm looking at splitting the cost of T1 with some neighbors. Community fiber would be a fantastic idea - I would subscribe to it without a second thought.
Posted by DaveH at March 1, 2004 1:52 PM