Reading Simon Rumble’s ’blog post on country broadband, & a few thoughts crossed my furry little mind. I have had experience with broadband in a small country town (in Western Tasmania) & despite being spread out around the corner of a hill, reticulating broadband to the entire town could easily be done using two cheap (AUD$50 apiece) TP-Link wireless routers with a top speed of 100 megabits. The problem would be getting a pipe to the rest of the world, however the next town, 15km away, has ADSL so a tap into the bandwidth for that (which has to be run along the highway that our primary town is built across) seems reasonable. That solution won’t suit everywhere but in many cases it should be practical to alter a standard/cheap router to cover maybe 100 households per throw, given only an uplink. Some uplink stuff can be done reliably/cheaply as well, with 100Mb via hops of several 10s of km at a time via simple, cheap Yagi or dish antennae. Now the show-stopp...
Linux Advocate in Western Australia