[abound]

Oof, thanks for sharing and the well wishes.

I'm funding this myself, and my current approach (hopefully!) avoids most of the red tape. I'm leasing fiber from a local ISP for the colo <-> my home connection, and once I have myself as a successful "customer" of my own ISP, I'll start doing the last mile build out, which is where I expect the red tape to begin.

But I haven't decided if I'll do fiber or wireless, and if I go wireless, I might be able to avoid pole agreements entirely by just working directly with my neighbors. The problem is that our area is pretty heavily wooded, so I'm not sure if I can place antennas high enough to cover a reasonable swatch of the area.

[Loughla]

Our best approach was to run fiber in the ground in the public right-of-way on county or local streets and avoided the state highways. It was much easier to get easements with property owners and local towns than the state (as far as I know, our request is still sitting unread with the state). That meant we had to build twice, essentially. Once for the north of the major highway that bisects the area, and once for the south. But that cut out all of the nonsense with existing agreements from the state. So that helped.

Most property owners we had to cut across were willing to forego payment of any kind for free fiber hardware, and access at reduced rates for 10 years. So that was nice.

We didn't evaluate wireless, just because of the terrain, but I do know a local chap who is providing that for folks using grain bins for line-of-site access points. That's seemed to work well for his use case.