Broadband internet by horse

Fred, a Belgian draft horse, working with line crews to attach a fiber optic cable to a utility pole in East Burke, Vermont, on June 24, 2011. Fairpoint Communication hires Claude Desmarais and his horse Fred to pull fiber optic cable through difficult terrain in a effort to bring high speed internet to all of Vermont by 2013. (REUTERS/Brian Snyder)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Derrick

This internet has fiber AND one horsepower of awesome
wrybread

Something tells me that horse is installing internet that’s 80x faster than my diesel truck-installed internet in San Francisco…

Maybe the involvement of farm animals is the solution to America’s slow internet problem.
sigismund

Now, THAT’S steampunk !!
- Neural Kernel
  
  Steam punk? This is carrot punk!
Anonymous

animals helps internet addicts XD
Joseph Hertzlinger

I’m somehow reminded of “Horses in the Starship Hold” by Brian Aldiss.
parkar

Interesting Post. It looking great that horse is helping them.Horse are also looking great and healthy.
huskerdont

Heavy Horses
Anonymous

Belgian horse?

I do hope they don’t eat the messenger.
Anonymous

Look at my horse, my horse is amazing…
Anonymous

I don’t see what the nationality of the horse has to do with it. Belgian horses are just as capable of pulling fiber as horses of any other nation.

bkd
t00mer

That looks like a GMP lasher they are using. Probably a “J” Lasher, which is large and heavy, and a bear to pull manually.
More often these are drawn by a ground man operating a four-wheeler, although horses or mules are not uncommon, especially in difficult terrain.
OLD Video: http://youtu.be/qu3znIXMk80
Historical info website: http://www.gmptools.com/nf/PR_5562.htm
hep cat

So in Vermont the internet is hung by a horse?
Bubba

Lovely horse

Now I’m going to hoof it before the neigh sayers get here.

sorry. So very sorry.
- turbokoala
  
  don’t worry, you’re not the mane problem. now go saddle up, you have work to do!
ColGraff

Very cool, but I’m slightly disappointed the punchline to this story wasn’t “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a Belgian draft horse fully laden with USB thumbdrives.”
Anonymous

Fantastic photographic angles too! Bravo/a to the photog!!
Anonymous

if you allow a bit of conspiracy theory here, why the big rush to put us all on the internet? Could it be the modems are more than just that. Is there monitoring going on that lets the powers to be really see what we are all doing? If the companies that sell the service can see your device in order to do a reset of the device, what’s the next step?

Just curious.
Anonymous

I worry sometimes about the day when we throw out everything not mechanized. (Also sometimes thought of as “the Singularity”). At work I pointedly show all our co-op students how we did things in the old days so the rudimentary knowledge will not perish from the earth.

While this song below has no horses in it, it does have cables; it is also a holiday weekend up here in Canada + seems to cast the mind wistfully back to the formative days of yore.

Somehow the two come together in mind today while reading your post; Perhaps this ability to leap in logic will keep us ahead of the machines.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peEkWf8pNc4
Anonymous

ÐžÑ‚Ð¾Ð»Ð¸Ñ‡Ð½Ð¾!=) Ð¼Ð½Ðµ Ð¾Ñ‡ÐµÐ½ÑŒ Ð½Ñ€Ð°Ð²Ð¸Ñ‚ÑÑ! russian =)
Sarah Neptune

This just in: while plowing field, draft horse severs underground wire, cutting off internet for all of America.
Forkboy

This kind of horse was once the most important export of Flanders. As recently as 1950 there were 200.000 of them in Belgium alone, now there’s about 2000 left and they’re nearly endangered. It’s heartening to see they are still being put to good use somewhere.
- Bubba
  
  Whilst I’m glad you didn’t trot out the usual pleasantries I’m somewhat perturbed that the usual crowd hasn’t bridled my language and jockeyed for position to point out the faults in my argument, which, it goes without saying, I would have tackled at a canter.
- Anonymous
  
  interesting point Forkboy – there was a Czech movie (trilogy actually) made in the 50s about the Jan Zizka and the Hussite revolution.. For one fairly small battle scene – in which involved 2000 cavalry – they scoured the whole country and only managed to get 500 horses.
  
  Those Belgians are strong ones too – I went on a sleigh ride last year in Ontario the sleigh which must have weighed at least 500 lbs and seated 18 people was pulled by two Belgians.. King weighing 1500 pounds and Daisy around 1000lbs. Some of it uphill too.
  
  petr
eaglescout1984

Wow. So Fairpoint can get fiber-optics strung to mountainous areas of Vermont, but Verizon still can’t run fiber-optics in my neighborhood located within a city?
Ugly Canuck

Oh, folksy Vermont, with your horse-drawn internet and your covered bridges!

http://www.virtualvermont.com/coveredbridges/

In fact, let’s go visit Vermont today!

http://www.vermontvacation.com/
Christopher Mitchell

Seriously folks, FairPoint is expanding DSL to Vermont and we are pretending this is great??? Congratulations FairPoint, you are now where much of the country was 10 years ago. The fiber-optics is for the pass, not for residents and businesses to tap into.

The state of Vermont has missed big opportunities to expand real broadband and is instead helping FairPoint to pretend they are meeting the needs of communities. What a joke.
legotech

I love the look on Fred’s face in the first pic…he’s all like “whatchu lookin at, you never seen a horse doin’ his job before?”
Rich Keller

This is like a scene out of Firefly, the low-tech meets high-tech aspect of it all.

Fred’s mane makes me want to pick up some blonde Belgian ales on the way home from work.
- IronEdithKidd
  
  That’s a truely swell idea. I hope my local brewry has some blonde available for growlers tonight. Tasty!
sam1148

That’s one healthy and well cared for looking horse there.
- Anonymous
  
  Draft horses are the finest of horse-flesh.
  Check out http://www.my-farm.org.uk/webcam for the birth-watch of a Shire foal; rarest draft breed in the UK at 1500 registered!
- Anonymous
  
  absolutely! what a handsome lad!
Anonymous

Pony Express!!
dondi

fucking Vermonters, how do they work?
seriously. living about twenty miles south of Vermont, it is a pretty great State.
- hoffmanbike
  
  2nd’ed, vermont is awesome, i live about 45 miles south of VT, Springfield, MA area, it’s nice but nothing compared to Southern VT
- Jon
  
  How do we work? Very carefully. Seriously, I’m a tech worker in VT, and I telecommute. It’s a giant pain to try and get reliable broadband in unserved areas. Fairpoint _just_ made DSL available in my area, and it’s a huge relief to have fast reliable broadband. I was on “wireless to the house” for a while, and it was awful. Before that? Satellite. Seriously. I’m 5 miles from a decent sized town/city, so it’s not like I’m in the middle of a thousand acres of forest. If you’re moving to the state, make sure you check broadband options before you pick a house.
flappy

It’s so neat that Fairport Convention has found a way to stay, as always, current !
dondi

of
dondi

man.
flappy

Sorry. My mistake. It was Fairpoint Communication.
Well, tell them that fad is over.
dondi

oooops.

mind, should have been comment #4 and man, #5

state, of, mind, man.
fully failed vermont stoner reference
sorry
- Anonymous
  
  The horse is doin well………. but dondi is questionable……..
- awjtawjt
  
  @dondi… yep, massive communication fail pretty much sums up Vermont. We had a fiber-to-door project (ECFiberNet) that was killed in favor of more copper and slow wireless, and ultimately culminated in Verizon scoring state $ to pull fiber. Even in the smallest states, corporate interests trump grassroots people-driven efforts every time. Vermont gets a lot of things right, but don’t kid yourself thinking we are THAT different from the rest of the USA.
Unicorn Pie

I love these photos. It’s probably because I love horses. Agreed, that is one well cared for healthy looking horse! Horses + technology = AWESOME.