| I'm in a rural area with monopoly DSL from Frontier. These days they use repeaters to service people that are more than 18k feet from the CO: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_houle/3340856649/ If you're far from the CO they use an ordinary DSL line card that communicates to the repeater, which itself contains both a DSL modem and a line card that talks to your DSL modem. This strategy is good in the short term, but they'd be better off running a fiber bundle to the repeater farm in the long term. Cable service terminates about 1.5 miles from my house: everyone who wants TV gets it by satellite, so Time Warner doesn't think it could get enough customers to justify further build-out. The main trouble w/ Frontier is reliability: the ATM network that hooks up DSL line cards to the network goes down regularly, particularly on the weekends. They've been making noises about a preposterously low 5 GB cap, but haven't enforced it. I wouldn't mind having some reasonable way to pay $1 a GB or so past a certain point, but there's been no talk about that. Perhaps white space would help, but I've got no faith in wireless broadband systems above 1 GHz. Our area is subdivided into narrow and long valleys that don't get cellphone coverage -- there's an independent ISP that offers tolerable WiMax service around the city of Ithaca, but they're having trouble getting a stable upstream connection and trouble getting high-performance DSL lines to support their infrastructure. |