I bet it isn’t possible in the UK, or someone would have done it by now.
As Albert says, this is normal in the US. Cable companies and competitive phone companies hang their coax and twisted pairs on the power company’s poles, even in some densely populated suburbs. I am disappointed to hear that some areas are outlawing it.
BT Openreach lines hang from Southern Electric’s power poles and old GPO poles. Someone please tell me why another business can’t or won’t put copper or fibre there too.
]]>I set up a script to log the state of the link every five minutes (data rates, S/N etc.) to an sqllite database, and then plotted them, and also printed out the BT MAX rate change data (that is available via UKFSN’s account pages) to show that my graphs were supported by BT’s own data.
When the engineer came, he was clearly very pleased with my graphs, and told me that policy would normally have forced him to tell me that there was nothing much wrong, but that he’d be able to justify checking at the exchange (especially sine the graphs had convinced him to monitor the line noise for longer than usual, which was showing some weirdness).
When he got to the exchange, he phoned me and said “wow! you’ve had ADSL for a long time — this is a first generation card — not seen one of them for ages — I’ll swap it out”
I’ve had better than 7Mbit/s ever since — shame it took them about 8 months to look at the exchange, despite me telling them repeatedly that it was obviously the lightening strike that did it, and that I’d tried four different routers, as many splitters, and associated wiring, and was plugged into the bare master socket, with no other wires in sight. BTW I got a selection of routers from tesco and took them back when I was done.
]]>@Stuart Nearly, but you’d also need to test with a known-good router too in order to be completely confident that you won’t be liable for the fee.
]]>The engineer visited this morning and found no fault with either their line or my house wiring. Now to wait and see what happens next…
]]>@fulanoDeTal - what country?
]]>On the adsl router look at the connection page this will have a some values for quality of the adsl signal being received. Google these to see if your values are acceptable or not.
]]>@Albert - I’ve no idea on the laws. The municipal-linked networks I’ve seen have been wifi, involved private companies and they’ve usually been opposed by existing network providers. Sometimes they’re opposed by residents because they’re wifi-based. http://www.somerset.gov.uk/somerset/latestnews/pressreleases/details.cfm?releaseID=1493 was deep-sixed after 14 months of its 3-year trial.
Maybe someone else knows the laws about council-run networks?
]]>Here’s a couple of examples of ones I’ve found:
* http://www.communitywisp.com/coverage.html - this isn’t too rural of an area, so its more of a backup / redundancy
* http://www.webjogger.net/services/highspeed/availability.htm - this area is very rural and the fact that this service is available there is very appealing to me
I don’t use either of these providers though - I use mobile internet, fiber, and cable to access the net.
As far as reliability goes, my experience with DSL has been so poor that I will honestly move somewhere else instead of use it.
What are the laws in the UK like for municipal networks? In many areas where I live in the northeast, many electricity providers are owned and operated by small local municipalities. They started laying fiber to better read meters, then realized they could use them for networking too. Some got setup before the lobbyists successfully outlawed it in many areas - Grrrr! The Taunton Municipal Lighting Plant is a great example:
]]>In my city (capital of the country) 4Mbps IS spectacular.
In rural areas, 0.5Mbps is spectacular.
And the service is normally unstable. There is kinda monopoly, with each city (except big ones, of course) being ruled by only one telco company each.
Look down, bro. You’re very lucky.
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