<QUOTE>Don't believe it. The free market always works. Somebody will think of something, and it won't be something expected, and it won't be DSL.</QUOTE>

Maybe, It might help to understand the problem peculiar to my location.
One; it is about 1 mile to the "edge" of town. And about 1.5 miles to the local SBC switching building.

Two; This area is simi-isolated by the Lake, and a Major highway. There are somewhere between two and three hundred houses out here, granted many are lake homes that are not occupied year around. Those of us who live down here where I do are more rural types, the guy three houses over owns the local feed store. He has a pecan orchard, the guy down on the corner has a few head of cattle, last year he had ten buffalo. On the other side is about forty acres of hayfield and such. I am planning to build a shop so behind my house, I've three acres, the extra income would be nice. While is is a rural setting, it isn't as sparsely populated as you might think.

The utilites cannot come directly here, the Telephone uses the REC (Rural Electrical Cooperative) infrastructure to place their lines, what little there is above ground. Due to that odd routing there is over nine miles of copper between my house and that switching building. The local cable company will not come out because, in their own words there are not enough customers to make it economcly feasible. Hell, most of us wouldn't subscribe anyway, the sub cost is $10 more a month than Sat, is less reliable and has far fewer channels.

And finally, the 15,000 foot rule, I don't know is it is a state law, or federal, but SBC cannot provide DSL service to any location further than that distance. They are trying toi get that changed as of now, but I've heard nothing about it for some time.

This small town is about 4500 souls, we've grown some :^D was 4200. We didn't get tone dialing until 90, we didn't get Caller ID ETC until 97. Like most small towns across the country, we're last in line when it comes to upgrading any services the utilities provide. Hell, the local cable company finally went digital last summer.

Given the cost, the customer base, and the odd ways Oklahoma has of regulating Utilities, it might be 2050 before we see an affordable high speed web service out here.
So, I cope, what the hell else can I do?