Make a plan for grass-roots gigabit enabling a community.
Incumbents, Shaw, Telus, etc., would prefer to not compete and innovate, so the chances that they will offer cost effective gigabit are low. Innovative technologies depend on high speed, low cost networking, so to spur economic growth in our communities, we need to take responsibility for this at a grass roots level.
Have the organization be as community oriented as possible. Non-profit, grassroots. Perhaps concessions can be obtained if organized as a community non-profit.
Stringing cable on municipally owned poles is one option. It would be good to see if some arrangement could be made where the community didn’t have to pay extra to use the poles.
Another option for stringing cable would be to only go on/over privately owned land. Trenches or masts could be dug/erected. This way there wouldn’t be any on-going expenses after the initial hardware capital expenditure.
Each home would have a single connection to a switch shared among the people on their block.
A high-speed connection could be brought in and share among however many people are on the network.
Need to source the following:
There are two types of cable
Tools are required for putting ends on fiber optic cable
These are for the in-home conversion to match peoples existing routers/wifi, etc.
May be possible to work with: http://onegigabit.ca/, in order to source gigabit networking.
Will be important to setup a router between the incoming gigabit and the community network. Some user may saturate the connection, so when there is contention their traffic should be shaped to be equitably shared among neighbours.
Sharing regular consumer internet may violate terms of service, so more expensive network connections will need to be purchased to be shared.
Incumbents network providers will try to ensure that competitors pay at least as much as they do for pole use.
Perhaps the different status, community, non-profit, will enable free pole use?