Paul,
Prices here are extremely high and that would prob. represent good value. You'd also find that most people buying that sort of thing would spent at least another 100,000 on doing-it-up.
As for the WiFi thing. There's a rather innovative state funded push to get DSL equivlants rolled out in rural areas. For example, parts of rural West Cork now have very high speed broadband provided via a hybrid infrastructure of fiber for backhaul and radio technologies feeding individual customers. The advent of cheap broadband in urban areas meant that rural businesses were put at a huge disadvantage.
Our rural phone network pretty much skipped analogue/spatial switching technologies completely and went directly from manual to E10 and AXE digital systems (1979-1985ish) so the numbering system doesn't really have a very tight structure below the area code level. There are very structured area codes but the 5-digit numbers had little or no geographical signifigance. 51111 and 78999 could be in the same building. In the past few years they've been merging the area codes and moving to 7-digit numbering. All you can really identify from the number is the parent switch most of which handle all of the local exchanges in a whole region and even that's getting difficult to identify. Phone numbers are becoming much more like IP addresses all the time.
If you're intrested, here's the other switch family used here & unheard of in the UK:
http://www.alcatel.com/products/pro...pgproduct/Alcatel_1000_E10_CENTREX.jhtml [This message has been edited by djk (edited 11-17-2003).]
