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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.
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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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...
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.
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.
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.
a long time http://www.airswitch.com/
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
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!
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
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