... and he used the same dodge too; asked for an alarm circuit to his ISP, and bought two dsl headers; he said the upfront cost was app. 1500 bucks for the two headers, and 20 bucks a month for the line. He's got 1MB access each way. Of course, there's still the small matter of paying the ISP for the bandwidth used, but it's an admirable solution to the last mile problem. In fact, I've spoken with my brother about implementing something like that here in Montreal. The idea would be a block ISP; buy a line, and use it to supply everyone on your block that's interested. You could get very good access going for pennies a month with that setup... one possibility to consider would be running at T1 into an apartment and ethernet to the other apartments (downtown Mtl residential areas are essentially one big apartment building). You could then do the twisted pair alarm circuit dealy to across the road to bring in the next block... if run as a coop, it could save people a lot of money and probably result in better access.

There's only one problem with this idea; coops were outlawed in Qc sometime ago... so probably the thing to do is to run it as a for-profit, and just make minimal profit;).

The business would probably be shut down every few years because there wouldn't be a great amount of tax revenue coming out of it, so you get the next neighbour over to take it over. This does require trusting your neighbours, though...

Hey, wait... that's communist, isn't it?