Quote Originally Posted by Cuddles
Want to start a ISP company in Phillips, WI. ???? ( could be the "business" opportunity of a life-time You might even be able to retire, with all the money you'd be making )

Seriously, people here, would be lining up to sign up, if they had the "choice" - currently, the only choice people have here, is, to have it, or not, thats it... The "Phone Company" doesn't have any competition, and can do "what they want", charge what they want, drop who they want, etc... Even, mess with people's phone lines / connections, and, what can you do, nothing - they are the "only" ones who have the services.
Well, now you got me started . . .

It was like that here, too. All you can really hope for is that the base standard will get so cheap that even the grottiest option available to them will be a quantum improvement. It was really hurting economic development here - no business other than the basic small-town storefront would open here, because of the lack of bandwidth. My wife's medical practice was doing billing and processing credit card transactions by dialing up a NetZero account each time - how professional is that? Phone company insisted they couldn't afford upgrades. Out of desparation, necessity, and the desire to spur development, the city installed a loop of 32-strand fiber around the entire city to link its own facilities (needing only one of those 32), and looking to either lease dark fiber to industry or provide full-service broadband to citizens. The phone company caught wind of it and sent their lobbyists to the state capital, shich promptly passed special legislation to prevent our city from "competing" with them for services they chose not to provide.

All this happened about ten years ago. Since then, there are still 31 dark fibers laying dormant in a nice little ring around the whole city. Obviously, the legislators were looking out for the public interest when they decided that citizens and businesses shouldn't have obscenely-fast broadband and VoIP delivered to their homes and businesses, for a small monthly fee added to the water bill, right???

Oh, well, at least my wife's office finally got DSL - about a year ago. The phone company claimed they didn't have a DSLAM close enough, and it wasn't economically feasible to install one. Did I happen to mention that my wife's office is a block away from the main switching office of the phone company, in the central business district?

jd