[FRIAM] The Last Mile, again

[Gary Schiltz]

Way to go, mosquito infested bog guy! I'd be curious how much "raw
bandwidth" ends up costing the group. What speed are they promising each
client? Here in the People's Republic of Ecuador, dedicated bandwidth goes
for about $10-20 per Mbps. I manage a micro network of 4 households and get
8 Mbps for $120/month ($30 for each household), which so far has been
enough to do medium quality streaming of Amazon Prime video. Not great, but
then, this is the hinterland.

On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 8:43 PM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net>
wrote:

> Dear friends and relations,
>
>
>
> There is a movement afoot to bring broad band to us here in the mosquito
> infested bog.  A group of locals is forming a for=profit company to bring
> internet (25/3) to hundreds of subscribers in our hilly, rural town.  They
> will put 4 “Radwin” transmitters atop 150 foot towers on two local hill
> tops with smaller repeaters as necessary.  The transmitters look for all
> the world like Mac Powerbooks.   Each house will have a waffle sized
> receiver. The plan for 200 dollar initial buy-in cost and a one hundred
> dollar per month subscription cost for UNLIMITED service at the advertised
> rate.  (No “up to”.)  I now pay about a hundred dollars a month for a
> Verizon jetpack which pays for only ten gigs of data.  To stay within that
> limit I have to turn off anything that moves on the internet, and go to the
> local library to get podcasts, movies, or to update software, or do a cloud
> backup.
>
>
>
> In short, I am enthusiastic about the idea.  What’s wrong with it?  And if
> nothing is wrong with it, why haven’t  all you Eldorado folks done it
> already.  Go ahead.  Rain on my parade.   I asked them if they were afraid
> that Verizon would get religion and put in DSL at the last moment just to
> put them out of business.   Their response was that  local DSL service is
> so crappy that it probably wouldn’t make any difference.  They say their
> real competitor is Elon Musk who is planning a vast satellite service that
> will light up everyone in the universe
>
>
>
> I gather you have all been suffering gale force winds and duststorms.
> Ugh.  We, for our part, have had seven snowfalls since we got here. (All
> minor, but still, relentlessly gray and chilly) The weather broke this
> weekend and the garden is beginning to be populated.   I hope the
> equivalent break is happening for you.
>
>
>
> Miss you lots,
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20180423/940d846a/attachment.html>