Ren_Rivers
join:2004-11-02
Louisville, IL
 ·Wabash Networks
| DSL in Rural Areas.
I may be one of the luckiest in a rural area from what I am reading. Never realized that it was such a problem, although some in nearby larger city don't have DSL so guess what you are all saying is logical.
I live near a little town, population 900, in southern Illinois called Louisville. Here we have a telephone coop called Wabash Telephone Coop. The company is pretty old for a coop, going back to the late 1940's, and is now completely self sufficient. Several years ago, they decided, after much encouragement from people like myself, that they would install fiber optic cable for all of their customers, and offer both DSL, and cable TV, using copper feed from the junction boxes to the residence using 6 pair cable. What a project it was, they installed hundreds of miles of fiber optic, and installed control boxes every 5 miles, they even bought their own fiber optic splicing trailer to do the work. There were some problems along the way, and some downtime too, but as they began to learn about it in depth, they ironed out most of their problems, and today we have 99% uptime.
As for speed, I average 1.5 MBS down, and 384k up, which is nearly T1 speed, and sometimes I can get as good as 1.6mb. The service they have provided our community is immense. On top of that, being a member of the coop, means that I share in the revenue that they get. In the last 2 years, I have gotten over $2600 back in dividends, on capital gains that they got 10 years ago. Today, I get my internet, cable TV w/HBO and Starz, and unlimited phone service for about $200 a month. While that might seem high, on the one hand, if you take the dividends I got this year, and subtract that, I get all of those services for about $67.00 a month. How can I beat it?
Here is a link to the coop. www.wabash.net, if you want to look it up.
The reason I make this remark is because I wonder why more rural communities haven't done this kind of investment in their communities? |
pythoncoder
join:2007-03-19
Brookhaven, MS
| I live in `rural` (5 miles out from town) America myself. I have no broadband option besides satellite or ISDN.
Funny thing is, our neighboring county has their own telco. My brother-in-law who is a linesman for AT&T says that the entire county belongs to the telco and all their cable is buried.
The neighboring county in general is very rural compared to ours. However, I know a handful of people living in locations far more remote than mine who get DSL service.
Sure it's an anecdotal story but it's funny that a local telco can provide better rural coverage than the new AT&T.
pc |
