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Making Last-Mile Ethernet A Reality
vannevar writes: "Is that erbium-doped fiber you're smoking, or are those bandwidth crack-heads in the Ethernet First Mile Study Group turning up GigE fiber to the garage? Of course, no good deed or innovation goes unpunished, but at least someone is busting knuckles, carpal tunnels, wallets, and reputations to make Gigabit Ethernet To The Home a reality." You may remember this earlier mention of the same concept, but rather than just ideas and proposals, here are pretty pictures and delivery speeds that might even make non-Californians want to relocate.
McLeodUSA ATS has been offering Ethernet with speeds from 256Kb up to 7192Kb to the businesses on their fiber-optic network for the last year and a half. Prices on it are unbelievably low. (Like 7Mb connections for less than a T1 would cost from anybody else.) Too bad they aren't taking any more customer right now due to capital being restricted. :-( The customers that have it that I've spoken with absolutely love it. They're using Alcatel Litespan equipment to do it.
Hmm, 67 months with timeframes like that you are never going to get it. Maybe the acronym should be NOPE.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Freedom To Surf are offering gigabit connections in the UK (last time I asked, it was only available in central London, but no doubt the area will increase over time). The thing that really surprised me was how cheap it was. No, it's not within the reach of the average home user yet, but a reasonable sized business can now afford true gigabit internet access.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Yum
I checked out a whole bunch of fuzzy pictures of what looks like a rather drab neighborhood, but couldn't find anything about how they did it or how much it cost.
:-(.
:-( ).
I can hardly blame them for being self-congratulatory in tone - they deserve it, surely - but some explanation of how they did it seems to be in order for those of us who would just love to do likewise.
As others have quite rightly said, the fact that their server survives a slashdotting is pretty impressive. I see they even have video! Now is that cheeky or what, even if the Linux system I have at work can't handle it
So tell me, how was this done? What's the history? Something like JWZ's DNA Lounge chronicle would seem to be in order, and I couldn't find it. Can some kind soul point me to that?
Thanks.
D
(who lives in Los Angeles and is stuck with iDSL
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Uncompressed HDTV runs at 1.5 gbps, and even that isn't good enough to match the resolution of 35mm film.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Back in the 60's entire neighborhoods got together to buy a big tower and put antennas up high with nice amps. then they connected that block or neighborhood's homes (the ones that helped to fund the project) to it for better reception. Everyone paid a fee to sustain the equipment and all was happy.
Why doesn't this happen today for ethernet? Basic 100BaseTX can support a neighborhood easily. but herein lies the problem... When Mr Lawyer down the street get his computer Hacked he instantly sues everyone within view of his home because he was a moron and didn't have a firewall or properly secure his box. Voila, the neighborhood net is now dead because of one a-hole lawyer or other type of idiot. Solution? you have to be a corperation to do this.. Now you have to get neighbors to give you land to run your cables,install tech boxes (basically waterproof boxes with a switch inside) etc... now you are a company, the city wants a piece of your action, and regulate you..... to death..... why? because those morons you voted for dont know jack about computing or networking... so they want to call you either a phone company or cable tv company (you are nither but they could care less... they want moola from you)
Basically... you can do it, only if you overthrow your local government or own a huge plot of land and subdivide it having this infrastructure in before you sell the plots (then they cant do a damned thing to "regulate" you.)
Hard part - fine me one cable company that sells direct burial CAT-6E... it don't exist.
sorry if I am rambling, but they didnt do anything revolutionary, they just copied what many did in the 60's.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And when you got this 1Gb what are you going to do with it, most ppl can't even configure their PCs correctly to supply a steady 100Mb feed, yet alone receive. It is very hard to fill up a Gb, today atleast but it will probably get easier every year. The problem is that to get it you have to fit some (rigorous) requirements and pay $1.500-$3000 per quarter, (which is the fee to lease the fiber to your home) and it is a all Cisco network so you have to buy some VERY expensive equipment. I mean a singlemode fiber module cost $200-$900, and then you need the switch etc. etc. etc.
Hmmm. Palo Alto, huh?
Wake me up when they do this in East Palo Alto.
As if content providers didn't have enough problem
s as it is, with hits coming in at innundating rates, imagine what they'll have to do when the limiting factor on all data transactions becomes the bandwidth of their hard drives and memory in the servers? I mean, "last mile ethernet" may sound great, but who's going to upgrade the backbones to multiple OC-4098 circuits to handle the new traffic? And what do the providers do once they've spent their entire start up capital on their own gigabit connection (you know, something with more QoS than Ethernet and therefore a higher pricetag) just so people don't bitch about their service being slow?
It's a double-edged sword. Rapidly increasing the bandwidth at the fringes of the Internet instead of the core is going to cause some serious problems and side-effects.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
I found out why they think everyone needs gigabit ethernet to their garage, take a look at the image sizes on that homepage. If they just took the time to find out about this new format jpg that everyone's been talking about, I think they'd be just fine with dialup.
My cable modem service is just fine, D/L wise. What I want is the ability to run servers (legally). I want to publish, damnit (on my own machines - sure, Hurricane Electric is a nice hosting company, but I would rather have the DNS pointing to my server, rather than someone else's - and I don't want to pay an arm and a leg for the "privilege")...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Oh, you mean they were clothed. Never mind.
cheers,
mike
This guy does a naptser download to compare the relative speeds of DSL, Cable and GigE to the house. While I agree with the basic conclusions (that symetric is going to be better than asymetric, and that GigE will be faster), some of the things he says stretches credibilty, and for obvious reasons.
It's just *NOT* a good test to use Napster as a mechanism for determing the relative speed of a first mile infrastructure. Or for that matter, any internet connected service. There are WAY too many variables in between me and the end site that I'm connected to on the Internet to be able to say that the underlying first mile infras is the problem. In particular the remote site may have an over subscription problem. Or the available internet bandwidth (beyond the first mile) may not be sufficient. NONE of these type of problems indicate anything about the capabilities of the first mile infrastructure.
If you want good tests for the first mile, stick a server on the other end of the first mile and do bandwidth tests to that. Otherwise, it's just useless hype, and it doesn't really tell you anything. The conclusion that a DSL or Cable modem really doesn't offer any speed advantages over a regular modem is just plain wrong.
That page, with its gross inaccuracies, would make me skeptical, as a customer as to whether or not anything provided by this organization would be reliable.
$.02
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Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
It probably got tossed in the bit bucket the same time half the companies in Palo Alto lost their VC and went belly up. Silicon Valley's tax base is a tad smaller than it was 2 years ago.
Now if only I had some fricken power to run my computer...
Yeah, it's cool but honestly, do we really need it? I guess for on-demand TV and that kind of stuff, maybe, but I see the applications as pretty limited. Let's face it: 90% of internet users out there right now, given this kind of technology, would only use it for faster downloads of music and movies. I don't see it as really being much of a necessity. I'm a heavy duty internet user and my shared DSL connection at work and my cable modem at home, are more than sufficient for my needs, even when I am downloading entire movies ;-)
I'm no knocking it and honestly, I'd probably get it 'cause I'm a geek, but do I really need it? It looks like a technology waiting for a purpose.
All of which points to the conclusion that ethernet for your average user isn't going to hammer the infrastructure too badly. Some upgrades will obviously be required, but demand isn't going to just explode to eat up the new supply.
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It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
The City of Palo Alto Utilities Department offers fibre to the home in parts of Palo Alto now. The city just leases dark fibre; there are ISPs that offer Internet and voice connections over it.
I think the possibility of Video over IP is exactly the whole point.
Now, if they'd just drop the price on that 51" flat screen monitor...
I get the impression they're trying to impress people ("look at that cool network diagram") without giving away any "proprietary and confidential" information (look at the lower right corner).
With GigE to the home, the aggregate bandwidth in the network core would obviously not scale. So, real throughput would be something quite a bit less than gigabit. However, if you are staying in your region, you could get speeds near gigabit levels. Shared resources, like neighborhood file servers would be easily done. This could be another opportunity for the ISP providing these big pipes. Phone service would take an extremely small fraction of this big pipe.. And, TV services would be no problem. All the standard channels could be multicast to everyone. A whole library of video on demand is also achievable. Even at HDTV resolutions, it only takes 20Mbps/channel.
That sounds like a lot, but the proof is in the output.. 1080i HDTV looks incredible. It blows away DVD's.
Check out the Digital TV "crash course" on the PBS web site for a lot better info than I can provide: http://www.pbs.org/opb/crashcourse/
I have to ssh to my company (from home), then hop to 2 other nodes (all with ssh), until finally I end up at my desk linux box. I then start netscrape (or even vmware...) and in a few minutes the X11 connection appears and I'm able to do those visual things that can't be done with emacs, tin and elm.
of course bandwidth and network latency are not always hand in hand. I'd usually trade some extra b/w for shorter latency; especially when doing interactive things (eg, keystrokes) over the net.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
http://www.gigabitgarage.net/images/lix_arch.jpg
Doesn't really cut it. I can't make heads or tales out of that, especially when the text on the labels is 1 pixel tall. I would really like to see a good diagram or read some detailed specs.
Any idea what their upstream connections are? With a *neighborhood* of gigE, I would imagine they would have at least a pair of OC3s (from two different providers), probably a pair of OC12s. Unless it's paid for by some grant, that can't be cheap, even if they had 1000 customers. More details would sure be interesting.
How do you figure 20Mbps/channel without the picture looking like ass?
HDTV (1080i) = 1920*1080*16bitcolor*30fps = 9.4x10^8 bits/sec = 940 Mbit/sec uncompressed for the video alone. Ignoring audio, that's going to require 47:1 compression. Even DiVX won't be able to compress that well and still make the image look good, at least not on an HDTV. Still need to figure in the thruput required to transport the dolby digital or dts sound as well, I don't know how well they compress.
Sure, it's a tradeoff, but if I bought an HDTV or high-res projector for my PC, I'm not going to want to stream crap video through it, regardless of the cost.
I love those those two emachines boxes under that monitor...
G
http://www.fiberhood.net/first/images/DSC00111.JP
...I was using an Apple IIe that 'just worked'. No silly OS to worry about, no silly drivers or incompatibilities. Adding an 80-column card or a Grappler serial card never brought about problems. I wrote all of my undergrad papers on that thing and not once did AppleWorks fail to do its job. Even the BeagleBrothers TimeOut addons worked without a hitch. My games -- granted they were on different floppies with thier own OSes -- worked fine and no amount of gaming weakened the stability of my system.
I wish modern computers were even 1/4 as reliable and stable as that old Apple IIe. If there was an easy way to open Word and Excel files as well as interface the thing to my color inkjet printer and use different fonts, I would probably continue to use it. Over the 7 years I heavily used that machine, the only problem I ever encoundered was the lousey spacebar, I had to reseat the little metal support about once a year.
A heardy thank you to the Woz for creating such a delightful series of machines.
Interesting thread.
I was lucky enough to spend some time working with digital video at SGI (Silicon Graphics) earlier this year. Quite an education. One thing that I had overlooked was that compressed video has to come from somewhere... and SGI had that somewhere on Octane2 workstations. I belive 1080i was between 124 MByte/sec and 248 MByte/sec depending on the bitdepth (2, 3, or 4 bytes per pixel -- the film industry loves 4 byte / 48 bit color). To even play back uncompressed 1080i video required three channels of fibrechannel disk arrays attached to the workstation. Overkill, perhaps, but the machine handled the huge uncompressed video like a modern PC can handle a 320x240@15fps AVI.
MPEG2 compresses digital video very well and depending on the settings used, 1080 can be done with not much more thruput (bandwidth) than 720 or even 480. But belive me, an uncompressed digital version of a film digitized to 1080p/24Hz is a sight to be seen, especially on a Sony HD studio monitor. Without compression, "HDTV" really shines but the ungodly amounts of disk space required don't make it worthwhile with current consumer technology. Uncompressed video is beautiful, compressed video (when done right) is still *very* good.
I don't know about the thruput of streaming digital video, but based on my limited knowledge of MPEG2 and the various flavors of HD digital video would lead me to belive that 1080i at 20Mbit/sec would certainly be obtainable. I'm not sure about the audio, though, especially if it's to be played on a high-quality 5 or 6 channel system.
As far as the term "HDTV", you won't hear it used much outside of marketing circles. It's sort of like saying "computer" rather than "1.4 GHz Athlon running Linux" or "833 MHz Alpha running Tru64". HDTV is a vague consumer term.
The folks in that Palo Alto neighborhood had better upgrade their TVs/monitors/projectors! Very cool stuff indeed.
I remember a proposal to get 100MB connections to the home in Palo Alto, subsidized by the dity as a pilot project. Whatever happened to that?
a long time http://www.airswitch.com/
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Ummm that second coax doesn't give you any extra bandwidth, it's there to give you a clean signal to you cable modem. I guess they were having issues with dirty lines giving the install techs issues.
is the most appropriate one, since it also neatly summarizes the availability for most users.
sulli
RTFJ.
What saddens me is that although advances like this are made and some markets get a really fast connection to the Internet, there will always be more apps that come along and suck that bandwidth down. For instance, what would happen if everyone got the 1000Mbit connection to their doorstep? After downloading all the porn ever created,what will people use the bandwidth for? Yeah it would kick ass to play Q3A or Tribes 2 on the network with very low ping times, but what's to prevent another game or application (like Video over IP or something) to come along that stresses even this network?
I suppose we will all eventually have these kind of connections, but by the time it reaches my little community, it will be slow relative to the applications out at the time.
Check out Althea for a stable IMAP email client for X. Now with SSL!
Whoops, someone left the gate open again. Sorry, we're all full up, try another state.
Seriously, we've had high speed, we've had bandwidth, we've had promises, promises, promises. Problem is, you make the technology available (even something as humble as DSL (nowadays)) and you still have trouble finding any company willing to spend the billions it takes to dig up all those out-lawns or climb all those utility poles to run the stuff around. With the market the way it is right now, it's all just a dream.
Funny how most high speed is still being carried over this awful copper which was laid in the 50's and 60's. Probably has something to do with JDS Uniphase, Nortel and Lucent all biting the bullet...
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Although I'll believe it when I see it, at least it doesn't rely on old technology. People complain about the reliability and deployment schedules of DSL. Well one has nothing to do with the other. Any change like this requires large amounts of infastructure, which is what spurred the development of DSL as a stop-gap technology. Rather than repeat all the discussion about DSL, I'll simply suggest doing a search on DSL on /., but annyway, as the author says, it's great to see someone taking the bull by the horns and deploying a real solution.
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
doesn't seem like that last mile ethernet did them much good. They are Slashdotted!!!!!!
This is really cool, but as others have mentioned, I didn't find any info on how they did this. How did they deal with attenuation in the fibers? What kind of network structure did they use which can handle at theortical maximium 1 Gbps from each connected home? Are they sharing bandwidth like cable modems do, or does each person receive a dedicated connection with a personal router, etc.?
How about stringing that very delicate fiber over long distances? What about when there are breaks? Fiber is almost impossible to put back together from two ends, as it has to be 1/4 wavelength+ or scattering will result in an increased error ratio.
I also don't know why they're dissing cable. Cable is awesome, at times much better than DSL. I don't know why he thinks a cable modem only gets around 2.5 kb/s in real life performance. I have a cable modem and can get up to 2.5 Mbps download and over 500 kbps upload. You should also note cable modems ARE capable of high upstream bandwidth. My modem, right now for example, has a maximum bitrate of over 2 MB/s, with a power level of 50 db. However, this is limited at the provider and through the modem via QoS.
The Napster test was equally stupid; everyone knows 28.8 users select 'cable' for whatever reason. These programs should really report the average real bandwidth instead of allowing user selections, which are for the most part pointless.
Also: for the person who was talking about the general slowness of the net and the fact that it won't matter how fast a connection you have -- you'll still only get a max of 500 kbps at even a very good site: I've got news. If, for example, we all had Gigabit connections the net would run MUCH faster. My neighboor also has a cable modem, and if I connect directly to his modem to send files, etc. I can get up to 2 MBps transfer speed. This is partly due to the fact that in modern cable setups, more and more routing is done on the neighborhood level ('micro-routing' and many slow routers -- MSR). If everyone gets a high speed connection like this, the Internet will run a lot faster. And as soon as providers realize more small routers are better than a huge few, things should improve.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
But nonetheless, I want access!! ;)
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suwain_2
Sometimes, the need isn't there until the product/service allows for it. Downloading DVDs may seem like a pipe dream today, but it sure would save those long trips to the rental store! :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
To hell with using gold as an on-line currency, this proves that copper is far more valuable. Money is money, but bandwitdth is life!
At least in Finland, Elisa Communications has for a long time (ie., from the summer 2000) been offering Gigabit connections to homes. They are building the connections in a joint effort with some constructors (so it's only available in newly-built houses at first).
There isn't much information available in english yet, though.
Isn't this analogous to having a 6-lane driveway to a two lane country road dotted with single lane bridges?
too bad Hormel food is going to sue these guys into oblivion for this picture ... oh well it was a great thought; at least i know where my towel is.
Here is the link to the company that makes the equipment in question. I know one of the guys in the picture and he told me about this gear. Might just have to change jobs as this stuff sounds cool.
http://www.alloptic.com/
Here are some tech docs.
http://www.alloptic.com/techcorner.htm
Redq6