On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 6:04 PM, Ben Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Maybe it was Pioneer co-op: > http://www.pioneer.net/internet/internet.html > or Peak DSL on a Pioneer line: > http://www.peak.org/homesolutions/broadband/pricing.shtml > > I found http://www.casco.net/communications/ and > http://www.blachlylane.coop/ > which are also pertinent :)
Maybe, but I doubt it. It's been 12 years since I lived in the Pioneer service area, but the co-op board has historically been really thin on awareness of digital opportunities. Case in point: Pioneer went digital and replaced all but the last mile with fiber optic nearly a decade before the rest of Oregon. But it left its toll charge structure in place that left most rural neighbors incurring a toll charge to call people who lived within 5 miles. This was around the time the spotted owl litigation really hit and the bottom dropped out of the timber industry in western Oregon. Hundreds upon hundreds of rural homes in the service area were left vacant. There was Pioneer with what could have become the tech sector experimental playground for an electronic cottage rural industry and the board couldn't get their heads out of all that money they were losing by loss of subscribers. So they raised the toll charges instead, creating even further disincentives for folks to migrate to western Oregon to drink deeply from fast digital communications. They finally felt pressured enough by some of us rabble-rousers to set up Casco with a couple of other rural utilities. But they stuck with 56K dial-up connections-only so long that they were left in the dust. Even toward the end of the Pioneer all-copper era, it took me three years to get them to install a relay so we could get a 52-volt telephone signal instead of 26. The only thing that saved me in those days was an old U.S. Robotics 1200-baud modem with tolerances so lout of whack that it would work somewhat better than half the time with the 26 volt signal. Even then, I had to pay a toll charge to dial into a Eugene connection for the Greenpeace Greenlink BBS. When the Pioneer board finally decided to start allowing ADSL connections, rather than providing the service themselves they contracted with Peak. But you had to live within 5 miles or so of a Pioneer switching center to use the service. That was the state of things when I moved to the Eugene area around the end of 1995. So unless there's been some kind of successful co-op member revolution out in the hills I haven't heard of, I'd really be surprised to learn that Pioneer was involved in some radically fast internet service. Too many people on the board who still yearn for the days when their phone number was 23-J, the operator's name was Thelma, and the closest thing to live television entertainment was listening in on the multi-party telephone line.. :-) Best regards, Marbux _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list euglug@euglug.org http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
