Is LTE over powerlines possible?

[borjam]

Do you have any links?  When I do searches the returns are saturated by ISPs offering fiber in urban regions. 

Certainly.

The passive equipment I'm talking about is DWDM equipment. Each customer is put on a different wavelength and you create a bus with a band pass splitter for each different customer.  The up front cost per customer is fairly low,
apart from the fibre installation itself, and this is pretty good for low density deployment in rural or industrial areas.

If I remember well, you could connect like 16 customers to a single fiber strand, which is quite good. The tunable DWDM weren't expensive and the service was just Ethernet, nothing fancy and complicated, which means that the CPE costs are low as well.

Regarding trenching, there is a fairly new technique called microtrenching.

http://thefoa.org/tech/ref/install/Microtrenching/index.html

http://www.bbcmag.com/2009issues/may-june09/BBP_MayJune09_MicroTrenching.pdf

It's failry quick and unobtrusive to do. A friend considering a deployment to a failry remote rural residential area told me that the costs were surpsingly affordable. Worth having a look.

[ConKbot]

Today it's much easier to install fiber. Thanks to the passive optical networks, the costs have gone down dramatically.

That means, it's not expensive to install it, being optical fiber it will have a very long service time and thanks to its reliability the technical support costs will be really low.

Do you have any links?  When I do searches the returns are saturated by ISPs offering fiber in urban regions. 

While satellite is serving my needs I might be interested in financing my own fiber to the nearest decent hub.  In my case that might be 20 or more km, but I can probably sell connections to a few dozen others nearby.  It is worth looking into, although I think you are optimistic on either support or installation costs.  Trenching makes underground installation expensive.  If done above ground, on shared utility poles (another tricky point), things like trees falling down, vehicles knocking poles down and so on are more important in service time than the intrinsic strength of the cables.

How flat is the area you're in? Got any friends or business relations within line of sight (Even with a small tower or pole) that have access to the sort of high speed youre looking for?  https://www.ubnt.com/airfiber/airfiber5/ operates in unlicensed frequencies so should be simple to get set up. (Probably simpler to set up then dealing with whatever sort of licensing nonsense a business ISP would need for a person re-selling bandwidth)

[Marco]

Regarding trenching, there is a fairly new technique called microtrenching.

If they have utility poles it would be rather stupid to be forced to trench for fiber ... not unlikely, but stupid.

[CatalinaWOW]

Thanks for the suggestions.  I'll have to look into it.  I have limited line of sight to possible connections, and when I looked into it earlier costs were a few of times higher than the price in your link.  I would also have to develop contacts as I do not have line of sight to anyone in my current circle of friends.  As I said earlier, satellite meets my needs so it hasn't been an urgent pursuit.  The only way the fiber connection would make sense would be if I could get others to participate.  The major cable companies have decided that the customer density is not high enough to be worth servicing the area, but it might make sense if not pursued in a venue where quarterly stock performance matters.

I has been more than 40 years since I was involved in shared use of utility poles, but it was a huge issue then.  Lots of lawyers involved argueing about sharing of maintenance costs, liability issues and the like.  Even for companies that had long standing agreements there was always a bunch of negotiation anytime there was a new installation.  It is not all stupid.  How do you arrange for all parties involved to be on hand to do a pole replacement?  Do you want a telephone technician moving high voltage power lines and or a high voltage lineman handling fiber optic cables?

Trenching, even micro-trenching requires right of way and going under road crossings and the like.  Not cheap.

[Marco]

You don't have to pay 2k$ a piece, unless you absolutely need the 1.2 gbps. Ubiquity and Mickotik have much cheaper solutions based on dishes with outdoor versions of more standard wlan modems. You'll pay around 2x200$.

Also this or this if you want to go really cheap, don't see many reviews of them online though so caveat emptor.