this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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143
New Map Shows Community Broadband Networks Are Exploding In U.S. (www.techdirt.com)
submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/36607

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

All told, there’s now 400 community-owned broadband networks serving more than 700 U.S. towns and cities nationwide, and the pace of growth shows no sign of slowing down.

Some of these networks are directly owned by a municipality. Some are freshly-built cooperatives. Some are extensions of the existing city-owned electrical utility. All of them are an organic, popular, grass-roots community-driven reaction to telecom market failure and expensive, patchy access.

Cannot imagine happening in Canada but we desperately need it.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Definitely seeing that where I live. One of the local electric companies started offering gigabit fiber for $75, where most people were paying a lot more than that for DSL or low quality satellite (which were the only choices before). It's been a huge improvement for those people, and it's forced some of the long stagnant Telco companies to actually compete and start rolling out fiber of their own.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

One of the local electric companies

Already leagues ahead of me :(

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Do you live off grid?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago

Haha, no, just a monopoly, but that does make me appreciate the absurdity of it, thanks. Ironically being off the grid is the only alternative.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

it’s forced some of the long stagnant Telco companies to actually compete and start rolling out fiber of their own.

The fact that they failed to do so of their own volition is reasonable grounds to continue to avoid said Telco even after they've finally deployed fiber.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Right, but in my case I'm not actually a customer of the local electric company that offers fiber. However pressure from them got my telco company (the only choice I have besides satellite) to offer me fiber, raising my max speed from 3Mb/s to 1000Mb/s.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago

Glad things turned out favorable for you.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

A lot of this started in the US because the big telecom companies were paid a lot of money by the government to roll out broadband in the middle of the country, where customers are spread out enough that they didn't want to bother building the infrastructure, but they took the money and did none of the work. So, these communities did it themselves. Some of them literally burying fiber optics cables by hand through their farm fields.

I remember reading somewhere a few years ago about how this is feasible on the neighborhood level now at potentially better speeds and cheaper than the telecom companies with a satellite connection that people can use via a wi-fi network across the neighborhood.

[–] 0x0 4 points 4 weeks ago

but they took the money and did none of the work.

It's called fraud in my neck of the woods...

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 weeks ago

Entirely separately from the message content, I find it so awesome to see the author acknowledge their potential biases right at the start! :-D

So much of journalistic integrity seems dead these days that I wanted to call that out as being good, even though it probably is mandatory, but even so... how many would actually do it?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 weeks ago

So pagers, walkie-talkies, and now routers? I feel like we need to get to the bottom of this.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I love this trend. Power to the community!

[–] 0x0 1 points 4 weeks ago

This is crazy... next thin you know they're spinning up their our lemmy instances... crazy, i tell you!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

Pin at Cleveland Ohio.

"Location: Cleveland Tennesse"

Wut.