The biggest problem is middle mile. That is where the money needs to go.
You need something to back haul to the interwebz. There is a lot of
fiber in the ground already,
Another possible way to solve the middle mile issue would again be to
use the copper plant that's already in the ground. Unlike fiber, the
copper plant is *ubiquitous*: I don't know of any place in the 1st or
2nd worlds that doesn't have copper pairs going to it. Also AFAIK T1s
are available everywhere too: if you order a T1, they'll deliver it to
you regardless of how deep you are in the middle of nowhere, although I
suppose there likely are extra surcharges involved.
Granted, a T1 at 1.5 Mbps may not be much for backhaul, but what about
bonded T1s? Bond 4 of them to get 6 Mbps symmetric - not too bad in my
book for a rural community.
And again using SDSL instead of T1 offers a cost reduction opportunity.
One could get that 6 Mbps symmetric for much cheaper by bonding 4 SDSL
circuits running at 1.5 Mbps each instead of T1s. There is a Covad
DSLAM with SDSL capability in virtually every CO in the country, but
they serve out a whacky flavor of SDSL/2B1Q. I have good reason to
suspect that I may be the last person alive on Earth who knows how to
make CPE for this flavor *and* who cares about such things.
but there are numerous layer 8 issues with
getting to it most of the time. Solving those is an exercise left for
the reader.
Layer 8? Assuming that layers 8, 9 and 10 are management, financial and
political, respectively, the issues that keep me from being able to
build that Covad-compatible bonded NxSDSL CPE device lie at Layer 9.
Anyone interested in helping me solve those issues?
MS