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Ethernet is a local network protocol, and doesn't have much to do with the way you communicate across the internet. This will help anyone running more than one machine in a particular location.

This you say, but look at networks in Hong Kong & many European cities. Or Wellington, NZ, where I live and work. Metro Area Ethernet which connect hundreds of buildings - including residential blocks.

The future of delivery to Multi-tenant buildings (apartment & office blocks) is all about Ethernet. Anything built recently will have at least a CAT5 from the telco demarc point to each unit - and most blocks in the past ten years will have CAT3. Why spend the money on DSL and get an inferior product when you can drop a cheap switch in the Comms room of a building and give everyone an Ethernet VLAN?

I find it amusing and depressing that many of the comments on this story consist of knee-jerk responses to the term "UN" in the usual ways the UN is presented in the U.S. media (rather than based on any actual knowledge of how they work. I might just as easily say that having root server operations effectively open to control by a U.S. government department is a mistake given that administration's proven incompetence. (Oil for food the most significant scandal here? What about Weapons of Mass Destruction?) But the reality is that the ITU, while a UN body, is not "the UN".

I think the bottom line is that the ITU won't get to "control the internet", and that's a good thing. But I also think Houlin Zhao is correct that there will be changes to the governance structure that establishes ICANN through a contract with the U.S. government, as this is a non-transparent process clearly at odds with the aspirations of the "Internet" to be a global medium.

More interesting is what happens if the kind of attitude reflected in comments here (summarized as "We invented the Internet, there's nothing wrong with our mates in ICANN, and the U.N. can eat my shorts") continues to be promoted at the international level. There would be a good incentive for establishment of alternative domain systems (particularly in languages other than English) and root servers. i.e. a US Internet coordinating system, and a "rest-of-the-world" one. While most U.S. tech people express horror that this would "break the global internet", the Internet is not really global while it's being governed under its current structure. And in any case, there is already widespread de-peering happening even within countries like New Zealand. The network of Intranets is already emerging is the structure for global networks.

So here's a question for you: In a game of chicken between (say) a South&South-East Asian controlled domain name system, and a US/UK/Japan one, who will win? My feeling is that China would feel that it could survive without being able to access the ICANN internet, but it would be *very* bad news for the US & UK economies if their multinationals are not able to easily access the Chinese market.

Of course, the current US administration has shown it is more interested in control than doing what is economically sensible, so I don't see this one ending well. Nothing like the sound of empires gently crumbling in the morning...

CityLink was born out of a Wellington City Council initiative, and although a privately owned Company, CityLink still endeavours to reflect a community "flavour" in both its products, services, and pricing.

It started out with them going to a building owner and saying "if you give us $10k install fee, we'll cable you up and you can have Ethernet for almost nother per month". Then, move on up the street to the next building. Repeat a few times and you have a wired city at almost no capital cost.

This has been going for something like ten years now.

CityLink was born out of a Wellington City Council initiative, and although a privately owned Company, CityLink still endeavours to reflect a community "flavour" in both its products, services, and pricing.

It started out with them going to a building owner and saying "if you give us $10k install fee, we'll cable you up and you can have Ethernet for almost nother per month". Then, move on up the street to the next building. Repeat a few times and you have a wired city at almost no capital cost.

This has been going for something like ten years now.

• Downtow Courtenay Place
• Uptown Courtenay Palace
• The red carpet (live 12noon NZ time) Camera 1 and Camera 2

• Downtow Courtenay Place
• Uptown Courtenay Palace
• The red carpet (live 12noon NZ time) Camera 1 and Camera 2

• Downtow Courtenay Place
• Uptown Courtenay Palace
• The red carpet (live 12noon NZ time) Camera 1 and Camera 2

• Downtow Courtenay Place
• Uptown Courtenay Palace
• The red carpet (live 12noon NZ time) Camera 1 and Camera 2

Consider a country like Japan, or Korea, or Taiwan, where the population is dense, and the language is specific to that region or country.

A normal (J/K/T) kid would hardly use English, there's simply no reason to try to get something from a US website. Ie, most of the broadband traffic stays WITHIN the country. That is, you can practically lay lots and lots of cable and treat the whole country as a very large LAN network.

In Australia (where I'm at), most of the web searches ends up at at America. You surf the net and ends up in America, and the data has to be carried over fiber optic cables across the pacific ocean. That costs $$$.

It makes sense now doesn't it. That broadband prices will always be cheaper in certain parts of the world.

I expect it would be a similar case in UK. Or may be Europe.

I also suspect that the model they used is not applicable to the rest of the world, and the kiwis may have sorted out a better solution citylink/wellington

jliu

Actually we are pretty damn well connected for a couple of little islands in the middle of nothing.

In Wellington city you can get a 10/100/1000 mbit connection off citylink as featured in this slashdot article, and from there you can buy bandwidth off a number of providers which often are reselling southern cross bandwidth ( around 240 gigabit of mostly unused capacity ). Victoria University ( who are hosting the paper linked ) are just up the hill from the citylink offices.

Judging by the plea for assistance from a worried sounding VUW staff member posted to the nznog mailing list this afternoon, their web server is a fraction too slow to handle a slashdotting.

Depends on location.

For example: in Wellington, we have CityLink; for a few thousand dollars per office up front and a few hundred dollars per office per month ongoing, you can have a gigabit fibre WAN (although you'd be more likely to run 100 MBps, gigabit router and switch ports not being cheap); at that point, backups to disks in physically diverse locations becomes a very viable option.

Full image backups are OK if you can install to the same hardware in the Windows world; if you toast a Dell GX1 and can only get a GX160, you're going to have a whole world of pain (which is why in my MacOS wrangling days I'd install systems for any Mac, so the system disc could be swapped into new systems at will).

Unfortunately true.

Here in New Zealand the main form of fast 'net access is ADSL. There are other systems, like the recently-featured CityLink, a 10M-1G (depending how much you pay for your link) city-wide ethernet, but unless you live in Wellington (or want to hack your routing and lose your connection every time it rains with a satellite connection), ADSL is pretty much the only way to get your fast 'net access.

The only problem is that the ISPs on the network seem to be chronically short of bandwidth. Xtra, the ISP associated with the local telecommunications monopoly, regularly has people complaining about it when they only get 4kB/sec out of their 128K DSL links.

(This is for 'JetStart', the 128K rate-limited DSL which comes for US$30/month. Even that is saturated! You can get 8 Mbit downstream with JetStream, at a horrible cost, e.g. US$250/month for 3 gigabytes of traffic).

What would be very cool would be if a provider took this up and used it for local point-to-point connections, say if I wanted to connect my LAN with my friend's one, over on the other side of town. Or a business link - a 10X speed boost would be much appreciated!

In fact, because we are a Ethenert MAN, we don't do much IP addressing, some administrative private IPs on a seperate VLAN and our corporate LAN Internet access.

IP addresses are provided by the ISPs on CityLink, after all, you don't need to leave town for PublicLAN to be of service, and so you can use selected private addresses if you just want local connection with zero volume charge.

Yup, $10/day for 10Mb/s is all you pay for PublicLAN, ISP charges are extra... (in fact all xSP charges are between you and the service provider).

Codeine.

Wouldn't that be a MAN, not a LAN?

Yes, it's strictly a MAN. Richard Naylor, the man with the vision behind this, had been talking about the idea of a MAN for Wellington for many years. I remember at one meeting when he talked about the idea of a MAN, and commented on the "gender issues" in the name, someone (Paul Gillingwater, IIRC; hi Paul), suggested it could be called WOMAN -- Wellington's Own Metropolitian Area Network

While Richard was pushing this during his time at the City Council, Citylink (the network) didn't really get created until Citylink the company was created. It's a privately owned company (owned by various ISPs, Telcos, and other people) that started with about NZ$50,000 (approximately US$25,000). It's amazing what they've been able to do starting with so little.

It's an amazing service to have available in the city, and priced very competitively with trying to get traditional leased lines from a telco. With the added advantage of being able to change ISP easily (just get some new IP addresses assigned; all the ISPs are on Citylink), it's a big win.

Thank you Richard for pushing for the vision to come true.

Umm, no.
CityLink is the highspeed network, TelstraClear is the cable tv network & Telecom is the monopoly network.

CityLink network was setup by Wellington City Council.
Cable company that most people use in Wellington

Also, as far as I know, none of the citylink-connected ISPs will give you a gigabit connection, although you can get 10 or 100 megabit. You can get a gigabit ethernet connection between two buildings, though.

You can also get a 2 megabit wireless citylink connection, which has a larger coverage area than the faster wired connections.

The Citylink website is:
www.citylink.co.nz

http://www.citylink.co.nz/faq/index.html

Wellington, New Zealand, did this around four years ago with CityLink, and it has worked really well for the city, fostering quite a lot of internet connectivity in the days before the telcos really had their act together.

My company have bootstrapped ourselves into the whole area of developing and serving dynamic content, and using this was the first step that we needed to take three years ago. Without it we wouldn't be where we are today.

I'm not so sure if it is quite as needed now, although on a different scale I guess it has a lot of value. I also do some work for a small-town ISP who provide connectivity at special rates to schools and so forth, subsidised by the commercial providers.

In Wellington we have:

Cable
ADSL
Wireless
Satelite

available to most residential areas.

The inner city also has 10/100/1000Mbps fiber options for businesses or apartment blocks.

So it's not as bad as most other 3rd world areas ;-)

You've been able to get 100 Mbps in Wellington, New Zealand for years now. Costs around NZ$600/month, IIRC (about US$250).

Glad to see the US is catching up with New Zealand...

Eventually, I foresee bidirectional wireless high-speed service offering ways around all the constant roadblocks to full-time access around the world.

Actually, Wellington NZ has already taken a few steps down this path. Some enterprising ISPs have opened up some non-traditional ways of accessing the web in Wellington (mainly to get around Telecom's _absurd_ ISDN pricing [$200 per month plus 4c per minute]):

(a) Microwave radio: Netlink offer a wireless service to anyone with line-of-sight to Wellington's University.

(b) Satellite: Ihug offer a service made up of down-link satellite and up-link modem called Starnet.

(c) Not wireless, but still interesting... CityLink is a 100 Mb/s fibre-optic circuit linking the entire Wellington central business district with about 7 or 8 ISPs, giving up to 100 Mb/s internet access (although the pipes out of NZ can't currently handle that much bandwidth... ;)

Cheers
Alastair