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from the mama-don't-allow-no-competition-'round-here dept.
TechDirt reports
Wilson, North Carolina's Greenlight [publicly-owned ISP], has had to disconnect one neighboring town or face violating state law. With state leaders tone deaf to the problem of letting incumbent ISPs write such laws, and the FCC flummoxed [by a federal court] in its attempt to help, about 200 home Internet customers in [the town of] Pinetops will thus lose access to gigabit broadband service as of October 28
[...] Greenlight's fiber network provides speeds of 40Mbps to 1Gbps at prices ranging from $40 to $100 a month, service that's unheard of from any of the regional incumbent providers (AT&T, CenturyLink, Time Warner Cable) that lobbied for the protectionist law. Previously, the community of Pinetops only had access to sluggish DSL Service from CenturyLink.
Related:
Muni ISP forced to shut off fiber-to-the-home Internet after court ruling (Ars Technica)
Previous: Appeals Court Rules the FCC Cannot Override State Laws Banning Municipal ISPs
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday September 20 2016, @08:10PM
There's also the problem of frequency congestion. Cell system based wireless is doable, but expensive to implement except where populations are very dense. Mesh networks don't scale well. Etc.
UUHF narrowcast transmissions can give everyone all the bandwidth they want, at a huge cost. (Nothing is mobile, and each site needs custom installation.)
Fiber is the best generally available solution for most cases. And it's becoming more commonly available...though I don't know how fast it's spreading to low population areas. For those narrowcast might be better, which frequency chosen based on the necessary coverage. E.g., if you just need to cover a few hundred people in a valley, microwave might be the best choice, essentially turning the entire valley into one high powered cell tower cell. (But the mobile transceivers are likely to need more transmit power than a default system could provide.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.