Friday, September 12, 2014

German village expands its self-built broadband network...

On a Thursday evening in August, about half the residents of Sollwitt, a village of 123 homes nestled in the green fields near Germany's border with Denmark, jammed into the only restaurant in town. They were there to hear how lightning fast internet service was going to launch their village into the future.

"I think in future we will need this bigger bandwidth," said Roger Cattin, a retired computer science professor who moved to Sollwitt a year ago.

"I like it very much that the local people are doing something to get this fast internet to our village."

The project is the latest effort of Bürgerbreitbandnetz, the Citizen's Broadband Internet Company, a small group of locals who took it upon themselves to build a super high-speed internet network in the village of Löwenstedt when Germany's major telecommunications companies turned them away. The group hopes to connect 59 villages in the county by 2021.

 "Their answer was no," said Ute-Gabriel Boucsein, head of the village internet startup. "They say the region where we live [in Schleswig-Holstein] is too far away and there aren't enough people." Full story...

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