Ask HN: Rural DSL or how to take advantage of the Universal Service Fund?

3 pointsgoodweeds14y ago1 comments

Since my father passed the duty of taking care of my mother's internet connectivity has fell to me. She lives in a rural area where she is apparently about 1,000 ft^2 too far away from the local DSLAM for DSL. Her only options seem to be 3G from Sprint (for some reason the signal from at&t and verizon isn't strong enough for connectivity) or satellite connectivity which is incredibly lag prone, and unreliable with heavy cloud coverage.

How are other people handling this? I know there's a federal fund for providing access to people in rural areas called the USF that anybody with a telephone or a cell phone pays into. Has anybody else had luck wielding this power to level-up connectivity in the sticks? Got any pointers?

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pawn14y ago

I had a friend who had to deal with this problem. He harassed his local phone company every week for years. He looked into what a DSLAM would cost and offered to buy it for them. He pleaded that all he wanted to do was give them more money. Then one day, one of their reps told him he was never going to get it, so he stepped it up a notch.

When he felt like he had nothing to lose, he wrote a script to spam them with tickets repeatedly every day, which was completely legal. When they complained about it, he told them all they had to do was get him DSL and the tickets would stop. A week later they told him they'd give him DSL.

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