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Send patches or shut the fuck up

Brett Glass : brett@lariat.org

Only by protesting before the City Council were we able to get Kinder Morgan to agree to shift us to 2.4 GHz if they took over the 900 MHz band. (They almost did it, too, but then abruptly terminated their franchise when they realized it wasn't making money.) But they almost got the entire band to themselves, despite the fact that this was public spectrum. Nasty. For the full story, see http://www.lariat.org/metricom.html.

A group of college students reviewed Richochet's wireless network, with the following conclusions being made:

• TCP throughput is between 15 and 30 kb/s, across a wide range of packet and socket buffer sizes. In the commercial service, peak throughputs are observed for a packet size of 512 bytes and socket buffer sizes of 4-8 KBytes.

• TCP performance suffers from long idle periods caused by reverse channel contention; large variations in round-trip time estimates (between 250 and 5000 ms) greatly increase loss recovery times and significantly degrade performance.

• Maximum UDP throughput is between 50-58 kb/s, when there is no reverse channel contention; parallel UDP streams in the same direction show a roughly linear performance degradation.

• UDP jitter under lightly loaded optimal conditions are between 10 and 30 ms across the range of supportable transmission rates. This implies the viability of real-time video and audio transmissions at low bandwidths.

• Measurements of interactions with the WaveLAN device show that the performance of the Ricochet network does not degrade as much as the WaveLAN network when simultaneous transmissions occur.

• The performance of the experimental deployment is roughly similar to the commercial service, implying that improvements made to the former are likely to improve the performance of the latter as well.

  The main page is at this site.

If the four buildings just need to be networked together, and you _don't_ need Internet access (a lot of other posts seem to think this is for Internet access, but neatan only mentioned the Internet for use with VPN), then you should be able to simply use the copper wiring to create your own little 4-building "DSL-LAN".

This was posted on /. a while ago: I, Cringely's Roll Your Own DSL. He gives you some basic direction for grabbing extra copper pairs from the telcos and plunking modems on each end. I'm sure there's more to it than what he describes, but that should give you 2Mbps symmetric bandwidth between your four buildings. The Lariat guys might be able to give you more help.

If the four buildings just need to be networked together, and you _don't_ need Internet access (a lot of other posts seem to think this is for Internet access, but neatan only mentioned the Internet for use with VPN), then you should be able to simply use the copper wiring to create your own little 4-building "DSL-LAN".

This was posted on /. a while ago: I, Cringely's Roll Your Own DSL. He gives you some basic direction for grabbing extra copper pairs from the telcos and plunking modems on each end. I'm sure there's more to it than what he describes, but that should give you 2Mbps symmetric bandwidth between your four buildings. The Lariat guys might be able to give you more help.

Exponential backoff is braindead when you need good thoughput on a fat but noisy pipe. The reason TFTP gets lousy throughput is not because it uses UDP but because it waits for every ACK before it sends the next packet rather than having a receiver window feature like TCP does.

Apparently you have to be smarter than mister Top 2 Percent to make this work.

Here's some links for you:

• http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/monitoring/bulk/ summary1.html
• http://www.babinszki.com/Networking/Max-Ethernet-a nd-TCP-Throughput.html
• http://www.lariat.org/Berkeley/node8.html#SECTION0 0040000000000000000

Is Lariat.

Its basically a co-op out in rural wyoming that provides internet access, support, and other stuff to members of the community. Pretty interesting, really. Check out their FAQ, or their Clone Us page which has information on how to create your own local community network.

Is Lariat.

Its basically a co-op out in rural wyoming that provides internet access, support, and other stuff to members of the community. Pretty interesting, really. Check out their FAQ, or their Clone Us page which has information on how to create your own local community network.

Is Lariat.

Its basically a co-op out in rural wyoming that provides internet access, support, and other stuff to members of the community. Pretty interesting, really. Check out their FAQ, or their Clone Us page which has information on how to create your own local community network.

I meant to include this link.

Funny, I thought the 'dry pair' stuff was the boring part of the article. I happen to be in telecom and that's all a no-brainer.

What was fascinating was the potential (admittedly) limited uses for roll-your-own DSL. Read the Lariat homepage - what an amazing project for a small town!

I think the main points of the article are:

1) There are lots of last-mile solutions, and they don't all have to come from your ILEC.

2) Innovative uses of these solutions can have come really cool results - like Lariat, like paying for only one broadband connection, like establishing a neighbourhood network then networking these networks... makes you think ;)

Alex Belits, a true Metricom packet radio fan, has lots of information on this at http://phobos.illtel.denver.co.us/~abelits/metrico m/.

I have mixed feelings about the demise of Metricom, myself. Properly used, the technology could have had great benefits. However, the company was arrogant and poorly managed. At one time, K N Energy (the local gas company) announced that they were going to deploy Metricom in our town. Neither they nor Metricom had given consideration to the fact that a wireless WAN serving many community organizations and some of the schools ran on the same frequency band. (The Metricom equipment -- dozens of transmitters running at the maximum legal output -- would have blown the other users right off the air.) The existing users made a reasonable request before the City Council: If Metricom was going to monopolize a public resource -- the 900 MHz band -- they should pay at least some of the cost of moving the schools and small business users to another band. But Ralph Derrickson of Metricom (the CEO until the bankruptcy) arrogantly refused to make any such concession. Fortunately, K N Energy's management was not so coldhearted, and agreed to help the community network move to another band if Ricochet was to be deployed in our city. (The network was never deployed, however, as K N Energy dropped its Ricochet franchise shortly thereafter.) The story is at http://www.lariat.org/metricom.html.

It may have been a similar lack of consideration for others (prices too high for the market; poor customer service) that led to Metricom's recent economic problems. $80 per month for 128 Kbps or less simply wasn't competitive with DSL, and there are not enough mobile users to support such a system by themselves. $29.95 per month would be more like it.

Alex Belits, a true Metricom packet radio fan, has lots of information on this at http://phobos.illtel.denver.co.us/~abelits/metrico m/.

I have mixed feelings about the demise of Metricom, myself. Properly used, the technology could have had great benefits. However, the company was arrogant and poorly managed. At one time, K N Energy (the local gas company) announced that they were going to deploy Metricom in our town. Neither they nor Metricom had given consideration to the fact that a wireless WAN serving many community organizations and some of the schools ran on the same frequency band. (The Metricom equipment -- dozens of transmitters running at the maximum legal output -- would have blown the other users right off the air.) The existing users made a reasonable request before the City Council: If Metricom was going to monopolize a public resource -- the 900 MHz band -- they should pay at least some of the cost of moving the schools and small business users to another band. But Ralph Derrickson of Metricom (the CEO until the bankruptcy) arrogantly refused to make any such concession. Fortunately, K N Energy's management was not so coldhearted, and agreed to help the community network move to another band if Ricochet was to be deployed in our city. (The network was never deployed, however, as K N Energy dropped its Ricochet franchise shortly thereafter.) The story is at http://www.lariat.org/metricom.html.

It may have been a similar lack of consideration for others (prices too high for the market; poor customer service) that led to Metricom's recent economic problems. $80 per month for 128 Kbps or less simply wasn't competitive with DSL, and there are not enough mobile users to support such a system by themselves. $29.95 per month would be more like it.

--Brett Glass

http://www.lariat.org

Lariat is the Laramie Internet Access and Telecommunications group. It's an ISP co-op in Laramie, Wyoming, run by users and for users.

They have some information on their site that you might find useful.

J.J.

Get enough folks together, and you could have a sweet setup.

Get enough folks together, and you could have a sweet setup.

To Recap: The bottom line is that if you have a moderately large gaming club of 25 to 50 members, you can start your own ISP at a cost that compares to some hardware upgrades.

The town of Laramie, Wyoming, has done just this by setting up Lariat.net. Residents started the networking business in 1995 in an effort to bring everyone in the area online after various squabbles with the area's telephone company (now Qwest). The initial cost was around $3,000, with many residents donating their own PCs, according to Glass. Relevant equipment was stuck on private land, and copper wire was bought from Qwest for areas that couldn't get wireless.

The cost of the service is pretty good compared to what it would be otherwise. Individuals get a normal dial-up service for $5 a month, or $20-$30 a month for high speed (10MB/second). It is doing quite well thank you.

They want to clone this effort around the country, so you can contact them via this page. So get you buds together and put together a business plan. You might wind up with something you can have fun with!

To Recap: The bottom line is that if you have a moderately large gaming club of 25 to 50 members, you can start your own ISP at a cost that compares to some hardware upgrades.

The town of Laramie, Wyoming, has done just this by setting up Lariat.net. Residents started the networking business in 1995 in an effort to bring everyone in the area online after various squabbles with the area's telephone company (now Qwest). The initial cost was around $3,000, with many residents donating their own PCs, according to Glass. Relevant equipment was stuck on private land, and copper wire was bought from Qwest for areas that couldn't get wireless.

The cost of the service is pretty good compared to what it would be otherwise. Individuals get a normal dial-up service for $5 a month, or $20-$30 a month for high speed (10MB/second). It is doing quite well thank you.

They want to clone this effort around the country, so you can contact them via this page. So get you buds together and put together a business plan. You might wind up with something you can have fun with!

CapuNet is by far the best DSL ISP in the MD/DC/VA area period. They didn't take the low road and give away the service to get subscribers, they earned each one with a great product and have some competent people working for them who inturn work with Covad to get problems solved. Even at 4am!

Anyone looking for DSL should avoid the large national carriers, should avoid the ILECS like the plague (with the exception of may one or two, can't remember them right off the bat), and support a smaller ISP that has been around for a while before the broadband hype.

Check their reviews, and sign up.

The DSL isn't as hard to get as it was say 3 years ago, when I first got it with BellAtlantic. Its much more prevelent and now that the first round of shake outs has begun, you can expect the situation to improve even more.

And for those that live in an area where your entire community is having problems getting broadband, check you this link Lariat.org. They put together their own wireless/wired broadband network for their community, all non-profit-like. 5$/mth for dialup, 20-30$/mth for 10MB/s wireless and for businesses T1/SDSL for 125$/mth... gotta admire love it...

This is actually sort of relevant: Check out the comment I made earlier today about Rolling Your Own Internet Connection.

In short:

The Register has this story about Laramie, Wyoming, where they run their own non-profit community wireless Internet service. It includes high-speed Net access service for a fraction of the price of most services in the US. Normal dial-up service is $5 a month, $20-$30 a month for high speed (10MB/second). Businesses can now get T1 wireless or SDSL for fee $125 monthly. Information on how to set up a similar enterprise can be found on their site.

Bottom line is that a bunch of geeks can get together, form their own user groups, and ust the group to set up their own ISP, with their own rules for fairly cheap.

On a separate note, I have seen some of the new Omnisky products, and I got to say that they seem to be pretty solid. They must be putting in some pretty intense QA on them, all things considered.

While you can sit around and gripe, the other option is to get togetther with a few of your friends, and start your own service.

While this may seem a bit outrageous, it is not that impractical. The Register has this story about Laramie, Wyoming, where they run their own non-profit community wireless Internet service called Lariat (Laramie Internet Access and Telecommunications). It includes high-speed Net access service for a fraction of the price of most services in the US.

The initial cost was about $3,000. Many residents donating their own PCs. Normal dial-up service is $5 a month, $20-$30 a month for high speed (10MB/second). Businesses can now get T1 wireless or SDSL for fee $125 monthly

Information on how to set up a similar enterprise can be found on the lariat site.

While you can sit around and gripe, the other option is to get togetther with a few of your friends, and start your own service.

While this may seem a bit outrageous, it is not that impractical. The Register has this story about Laramie, Wyoming, where they run their own non-profit community wireless Internet service called Lariat (Laramie Internet Access and Telecommunications). It includes high-speed Net access service for a fraction of the price of most services in the US.

The initial cost was about $3,000. Many residents donating their own PCs. Normal dial-up service is $5 a month, $20-$30 a month for high speed (10MB/second). Businesses can now get T1 wireless or SDSL for fee $125 monthly

Information on how to set up a similar enterprise can be found on the lariat site.

Corrected link. Sorry.

For internet service which is a public good, check out the town of , which offers net access for a minimum fee ($5.15 per month).
They even have wireless access downtown.

Academics all over the country are using the Sim games to teach ... financial and social interaction.

Maybe these nuts use The Sims to demonstrate the empty, souless lives that modern American cult-of-the-consumer provides... The Sims is a horrible game - give your Sim person some 'new crap' to make them happy, sounds a lot like the 90% sheeple living in USofA. The game is like 'playing' American Beauty- without the happy ending