a large fraction of all countries in the world have USF, Universal Service Fund. it's supposed to be used for last-mile type work.
usually the way this works is that the telcos/operators pay taxes/levies every year into the fund. these pools mostly only grow in size because they never get spent for plenty of reasons/excuses.
(in 2008 or 2013, India announced its pool was USD4billion, or maybe that was USD11Billion, either was is a crazy amount, and was to be spent on
free! Nationwide Broadband by something like 2015 or 2020. not so sure I see it happening. and those aren't even the largest endowments compared to some other countries.)
generally USF most have rules along the lines of:
- the companies are
required to do the work, even if there's monetary loss instead of profit.
- except... as Puppy and others have mentioned, there's all sorts of conditions that have to be met first. the companies can use engineering surveys / census as a valid excuse for refusing (making up a random example here: it could be along the lines of "there is required to be at least 1 wired payphone in a non-incorporated town populated by 200 people)
- it makes sense to take the easy way out and do some form of wireless. but, again: too few people? no towers for you!
- but some countries already have plenty of copper pairs and dark-fiber in place! oh well, telco still doesn't want to be bothered with lighting it up? company finds a suitable population density rule that lets them off the hook.
- data-entry glitches: wrong side of the street? zipcode slightly off by one number? "we don't service your building." "but all the other apartments in my building already have working DSL." "no, you must be mistaken."
other thoughts:
- I work at least a couple times a month on satellites with ships at sea. ridiculously expensive. pathetic downlink, even worse uplink, terrible latency. (made even worse by the fact everyone on the boats seem to be constantly watching soccer or adult videos, all day every day, ha.)
- a couple times, I've tethered laptop to unlimited-4G phone for a week or two, it's not bad but wasn't great (no secret-soft-caps or secret-throttling, it was simply consistently mediocre. which was good enough given the area only very recently got 4G)
- I've got a single powerline-ethernet connection from one end of the house to the other, just because it's easier. it goes through at least 2 different circuits and possible 2 different breakers, which really feels like it shouldn't work.
but...
years ago, industry were getting very excited about large-scale-powerline-ISP ideas. which would be great given mains electricity is just about everywhere. but seemed to run into too many issues: prohibitive distances, user density too high sometimes: i.e. bandwidth sharing not to mention would to many signals to weird things to the transmission stations, security/encryption,
- other years ago, I was helping do some design for a friend running a 'NetCafe in Uganda. this is actually one of my most favorite solutions: cheap, robust, secure, does clean/seamless handoffs, very low power to operate, doesn't require mains electricity...
easy/fun/quick project, get yourself a:
-
meshpotato (I prefer the v1's solid weatherproof case and layout/flexibility of its power and other connectors; v2 looks good but I've never used one)
- solar panel, charge controller, whatever SLA car battery you may have lying around - or a spiffy new glassmat marine battery can't hurt (and meshpotao runs off 9-40VDC, so you have quite a lot of flexibility in this power system) ((oh wait it says charge controller built in. it also says 110-250VAC although I forget that means it also has a switching transformer built in, or maybe just means any universal DC brick will do...))
- optional: an analog phone. yeah, all you have to do is plug it in and immediately be able to call any other potato in your bubble-mesh-network
a single node like this comes to, ?USD300-400? although a lot more if you're investing in actual security chassis.
the software is very well written, so not really too much to set up. (WDS key stuff; passwords; phone# for the potatophone?)
plug one or more of the nodes into an available Internet connection. start placing overlapping bubbles as far as you like. turns out you have Internet (wired, or could even be wireless) at some other corner of the bubble? eh just plug it in, the software already understands redundancy and how to correctly share routing.
(edit cleaned up some typos)
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