Aleq said:
A lot of us live behind corporate firewalls and can't access links. If you really want discussion on an article, cut & paste it for those who are laboring in the gardens of industry... 😉

Ok... here ya go. 🙂

Rural phone service fund under siege
Share for wireless carriers protested

Paul Reynolds was in cellphone Siberia. His cellphone worked fine in Sioux Falls, S.D., where he worked. But it was useless in his tiny hometown of Parker, 25 miles southwest.

Neither of the state's two main carriers — Western Wireless, Reynolds' provider, and Verizon Wireless — felt it would be profitable to build a cell tower in Parker, a farming town with 1,031 people.

So Reynolds, a build...
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The problem with doing what you just did (cut & paste) is that it is a violation of copyright law which can get the owners of this board in trouble if the USA Today chose to prosecute.

Interesting, but the thinking is terribly "in the box." In Hermiston, Oregon, they were faced with a similar issue, not much population and strung out over a huge area, very uneconomical to string wire line or to put up wireless towers. Instead, they blanketed the entire 400 sq mile area with WiFi and everybody uses voice over IP instead of standard phone service. Unanticipated upshot is that you can catch the internet in the middle of a watermelon field... WiFi repeaters are dirt cheap and can be focussed to incredibly long distances with the right antennas, then all you need is one satellite uplink or a wireline connection with a T1 behind it and you're stylin'... More rural communities ought to be looking into tapping that fund for th...
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