Do-it-yourself DSL is no pipe dream

There seems to be a better chance of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade coming to my neighborhood this year than us getting DSL service from Verizon. . . . And I live in Massachusetts, not New York City.

Carl Oppedahl has long felt the same way about his Colorado neighborhood and Qwest. Here's the difference between us, though: Oppedahl isn't just whining about his dearth of DSL; he's going out and rolling his own.

An attorney by trade, Oppedahl is spearheading the Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative Association, whose mission since being founded last year has been to provide DSL service to the 40 homes in the members' subdivision in Summit County, Colo.

This has turned out to be easier said than done.

Assembling the necessary equipment wasn't hard - the group's DSLAM is housed in a barn - but getting Qwest to cooperate proved to be the most daunting task. (You can read everything you'd ever want to know about such a project at www.rric.net.)

"By far the biggest challenge faced by the Coop - a challenge that dwarfed any of the technical and financial challenges - was gaining access to subloops from Qwest under the Telecommunications Act of 1996," reads the homepage introduction. "The course of negotiations was such that the Coop found it necessary to file an informal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission and subsequently found it necessary to pursue arbitration before the Colorado Public Service Commission."

The Ruby Ranchers won some and lost some before that commission, but the bottom line is that they are now within a fistful of paperwork from bringing high-speed 'Net access to homes that would otherwise go on wanting.

"It took us some 10 months to go through the negotiations, which means one needs to start with the phone company maybe a year in advance of when you really want to launch service," Oppedahl says. "Others might have better luck than us with their phone company, in which case maybe they would not face a yearlong delay."

By better luck he means less grief.

"We surely hope that others will consider setting up their own DSL systems," Oppedahl adds.

Personally, I'll wait for the parade.

Can cookies be far behind?

A colleague's friend in Vladivostok offers this report on how capitalistic principles on worker protection - and perks - are evolving in Russia:

"Section 173 of the recently enacted Russian Labor Code specifies that 'any employer who has an employee work at a computer for four continuous hours shall provide that employee with 0.5 liter of milk,'" writes the friend.

Seriously? . . . Well, yes and no.

"It is law. . . . Now will employers obey this? Ha! They don't obey anything. But then, neither do the employees!"

Perhaps the compliance rate would be higher if the law allowed for leeway regarding the choice of beverage.

There's no such thing as bad news

Sometimes we in the news business have to take a step back and tip our hats to the creativity of our friends in public relations. Witness this opening sentence in a press release from Yipes:

"Yipes Communications, the defining provider of instantly scalable Ethernet services, today announced that it is seeking to restructure its business to enhance future growth opportunities."

Who'd have thought that this was another way to say the company filed for bankruptcy?

No need to mince words if you have something to say about any of this. The address is buzz@nww.com.