To be fair, distances in rural Britain are much shorter than distances in rural America. That said, I applaud them for doing it, and I have occasionally thought about pursuing a project like that myself.

It would be really fun digging up places to lay fiber. I've wired up 2 offices for new networking equipment when the company moved. It's pretty satisfying seeing the stuff you rigged up light up and actually function. It was pretty fun but I can imagine doing digging with equipment would be even more fun.

Cambridge University laid a fibre MAN and presented their fun at UKNOF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CLJlmcC2c8

Until you severe a cable with said equipment and you make the news that AWS is down because if you!

That's valuable publicity & infamy.

Another anecdote, I paid for DSL to be brought to my area. A neighbor chipped in and bought an extra mile to be upgraded. It was costly but worth it. I pretty much considered it a cost of having my house where it is.

How much did that cost? and how far are you from wherever it had to be run?

About $36,000 and I am about seven miles from where they installed some new equipment in a large box on a pad. I don't actually know what is in the box. I think it might be called a DSLAM?

Correct. That's the DSLAM (most likely with fiver backhaul to the central office).

I believe I only paid for the equipment and Fairpoint paid the installation expenses. This was about nine years ago and I didn't pay as much attention to it as I should. I was pretty occupied.

There are only six residencies in my unincorporated township. All but one have DSL, now. The one that doesn't have it, doesn't want it. They live beyond where the power and phone lines stop, anyhow.

Anyhow, they are all pretty happy and grateful. As I was moving into the area, this was a good ice breaker. I'd say that I definitely got good value for the money. I get ~12 Mbps down. More importantly, a neighbor brought me some Piccadilly, just today. Worth every penny.