Thanks 
Several of my others. Sheep Happens. Genetics is a Bitch. Beer must Flow. The first 2 are particularly appropriate rightnow, I’m evaluating sheep and deciding who will go to butcher next month, who will go on the sales list and who has earned the right to stay here.
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Believe it or not, there may actually be some support for co-op fiber from FCC big bad Ajit Pai. I’m an independent contractor for a company that designs and manages websites for electrical co-ops. One of our clients is the Oregon Rural Electric Association, and they just ran an article about Ajit Pai visiting rural eastern Oregon to chat with a cooperative investigating the deployment of fiber to the home.
Congrats on the success in your area! We have a private company working on deploying fiber neighborhood by neighborhood in my area (actually using the same CrowdFiber platform your co-op appears to be using). It’s not offered in my building yet so I am on Charter’s 100/10 service, which could be better but is a nice bump from the 60/5 they used to offer here.
Here’s hoping that somehow the FCC could be an ally for co-ops and municipalities looking at rolling their own.
I’m lucky enough to live in an area serviced by Sonic. 1Gb symmetrical fiber, only $50/month including a phone line. Zero downtime in 2 years, never see any congestion.
And the fiber is lit, 138 down 100 up at main house 132 down 98 up at our guest house.
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A few months ago I got fed up waiting for the NBN to arrive in my inner Melbourne suburb (that’s Melbourne, Australia…) and signed up for a fixed wireless service that gave me 25 MBPs down and 10 up. I was previously on ADSL2 which game me about 6 and 1 (I’m about 3 k from the nearest exchange), and it costs me very little more per month, and I’ve got unlimited downloads.
Since then I’ve discovered that when the NBN does roll out in Middle Park the north half of the suburb (that’s me) will get FTTN and the southern half (starts on the OTHER SIDE OF MY STREET) will get FTTC. When asked why the difference NBNCo couldn’t explain. (Apparently their social media operatives know nothing about network technology…). As far as I’m concerned the less copper in the network connection the better. I imagine Australia is the laughing stock of the rest of the world for the mess we’ve made of introducing advanced broadband?
Although Australia seems amazing (I really want to visit) your internet is terrible. I actually feel bad and wish to give you better wifi. Also I’m sure it somehow affects business capabilities.
As someone who is driving 120km each way to go to an important meeting today, because we can’t just trust the internet to work, consistently and quickly enough yes, yes it does impact business.
The Australian internet problem is a really hard one to solve, because we are a stupid large country (something like the third largest for landmass, don’t quote me on that), with a density problem (in school they always said Mongolia was the only place with lower density). In my opinion, the mess of the NBN (national broadband network) comes from pure politics.
A brief foggy recollection that is the trainwreck of the Australian National Broadband Network.
Australia has always had internet problems, and in the past essentially all the infrastructure (90%) was owned by one company, (Telstra), many of my fellow Australians will likely agree, that Telstra is not the best company to try to work with…
Back in 2006 one of our political parties, (Labour, political left wing) ran on a platform that included better national internet, they happened to win that election and thus the NBN was born.
Then the GFC hit and spending an estimate $48 billion dollars building a fibre optic network across the in entire country because a touch more political as politics switched to belt tightening mode because no one wanted to drive up the national debit.
But we pushed on and some areas got the promised fiber to the home, (I am one of those lucky few) but a little while after the roll out started the other political party got in, (Libral, political right wing) they said fiber to every home was way to expensive, so now the backbone of the network is fiber and homes are connected using copper, they said they would shave about $20 billion dollars off the project doing this. To date, the NBN is on track to cost the initial $49 billion dollars but is way worse.
You can read a much more detailed and likely accurate history of the NBN over on its Wikipedia page Here
With all the talk of national spending it’s worth noting that the expected government revenue in 2017-2018 is only $444.4 billion dollars
The density thing seems like a bit of a cop-out. Yes, the country is huge and does not have a ton of people, but the vast majority of the people live in relatively small areas of it.
One of the issues is that we have the laudable aim of providing equivalent services to urban areas and the bush. We do that with postal services, but with fibre-optic broadband it would be impossibly expensive. That said, what we have with all the chopping and changing and poor implementation of policy is equivalent areas of the country getting completely non-equivalent services.
Thanks for the thought, but there’s nothing much wrong with our WiFi (in fact we invented it 
). Our problem is entirely political. We have a long history of appalling telecommunications policy, starting from when our neoliberal government privatised the national carrier and allowed competition for service without vertically separating the resulting Telstra into wholesale & retail companies (so “competition” doesn’t actually work). It’s my view that if we still had a public monopoly of comms infrastructure then we’d by now have much faster internet.
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Thanks @dajashby for the reply. Interesting to here both from you and @Ben_Lincoln surrounding the political aspects of the internet problems. Granted in the United States each city and even sometimes each block or condo building (such as here in Chicago) deals with contacts for service providers. Comcast can be a tough word to say positively here!
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