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100 Mbps Community Fiber Network: Howto
batro writes: "The main page says it all: 'Everything slower than 10 Mbps is just a toy!' This is a nice writeup (with pictures!) of how a 100 Mbps community fiber network in northern Sweden came into being." And if over a grand in connection fees doesn't suit your locale (this took nearly complete neighborhood participation), Nurotek writes: "Check out Proxim's latest press release. They claim that they can push 100Mpbs via the 5Ghz RF band. Wonder if this will work ..."
As well they should. Although fiber PHY's are usually available for newer technologies first, to this point we have seen copper PHY's for more bandwidth than we can use, at a significant cost savings compared with fiber PHY's.
Although the cable cost of the fiber is a nit, the optics at the end are really expensive. It is hard to justify a mulitmode plant for expansion beyond gigabit ethernet, since they had so much trouble getting gigabit to work over multimode. Yet a well installed copper plant will be able to handle gigabit as well.
Will we need gigabit to the desktop in the next 10 years? Of course. Will we need something beyond that? Maybe. If we need something beyond that, will it run on Fiber? It will run on singlemode, but the cost of the optics would be prohibitive. It probably won't run on multimode. Who knows what they will eek out of copper...
I read in the Media Section of "the Australian" newspaper about a town in Western Australia that was built from the ground up with the main goal being to make it the most connected town in Australia.
From memory (and I'm sure I'll be corrected) each house had a fibre optic connection.
If I can find more info on it I'll follow this up.
Acaila
Growing Old is Inevitable; Growing Up is Optional.
100Mbps over wireless network seems pretty cool, but the article doesn't mention anything about the range at which those cards can operate at 100Mbps. IIRC, even the traditional WLAN cards operating at 2.something GHz, were having some problems with thick concrete walls. Now if we double the operating frequency, even the cubicle walls might be enough to block the transmission, on full speed at least.
This is the place where you write something that will make you seem like a complete idiot.
I can't see why the authorities would stop that net - after all, LANs such as the one described aren't _that_ unusual in Umeå.
Accually, Umeå Energi (the net owner) is digging down fiber all across the city to be able to run fiber to _any_ household in a not-so-distant future.
Geek rants since like... 2000 or something.
Isn't it nice!
I had about 5500-6000 visitors before /. posted
the story, mostly due to a posting about six months ago on [Canarie.ca] and links to my page from [Wkmn.com]
I just saw the counter exceed 10 000 hits and our webserver ([ACC.umu.se]) has served you guys with over 1 GB of data already.
I actually received 15 requests for my resume during the storm that followed the posting on the Canarie mailing-list!
One employer from San Francisco, California, actually e-mailed me one day (the first week on my first job) and said: "I'm in Stockholm now and I'm booked for a flight up to Umea (my city).". I was also in Stockholm, but to make a long story short, I chose to stay with my first employer, because it felt so wrong to abandon them after a single week...
I hope he ever will forget me. ;)
I quit that job six months later (june 2001) and now I'm taking a few courses at my old University and I'm thinking about a PhD or I-don't-know-what.
I have 1 Gbps Internet access@home
We have a lot for free because if there is a railway, there is also fibre. As I see it, the state should have the fibre for the backbone, and then whomever wants to use it should. Benefits us all.
And it's cool to hear about Norway as well, I would imagine Finland has a cool net as well (funet is cool anyways), and I hope Denmark has one as well. In fact, Europe is doing very well as far as internet infrastructure goes. Something for you americans to aspire to;) This is what the world need, creative competition in civilian areas, not more terrorists, cold wars and bombs.
If the server is getting slashdotted, go here: Mirrored
Pretty nifty stuff.
Currently the Swedish Univeristy Network (SUNET) backbone is 622 Mbit/s, but they are uppgrading to 10 Gbit/s (should be completed Oct 2002). More info here (sorry, in swedish only).
It is a problem in a situation in a nearby lightning strike. Most Cat 5 is not protected for voltage spikes over 10KV when stuff arcs over into the sensitive stuff.. Fiber on the other hand isn't bothered by a 500,000 volt surge end to end on a 500 foot cable.
The truth shall set you free!
A correction:
"Collisions" are far less of a concern on a switched, full-duplex network such as this. If you have an intelligent switch, it will queue packets for an interface, and the back-end switched fabrics of these switches generally mean zero packet loss or collisions. Your full-duplex test of transfer rates very closely simulates the transfer rate you'd receive if you had those devices plugged into a very busy but high-quality switch.
Collisions can, however, be a concern if for some reason the device at the end doesn't support full-duplex operation -- then it is possible for the switch and the device to collide with each other, but you still don't have nearly the same problems you have with traditional hubs. Additionally, it is possible that you can have line errors which force device negotiation at a lower speed, half-duplex, or simply cause random lost packets and noise on the line. This is far less likely with fiber to the home, but if the ends of the cable are not polished well you'll have lots of lost packets -- but still, generally no collisions because the switch and the end-device are not transmitting & receiving in full-duplex mode.
However, I largely agree with your point. Hard drive transfer rates are often abominable. However, the latest drives can be faster than 100Mbps. The article mentioned copying files from one hard disk to another. Write speed on hard drives is generally a small fraction of the read speed; while you may read at 18 or 19 Mbytes/sec (easily saturating a 100Mbps link), writing often only happens at 4 to 5 MBytes/sec, and on many hard drives even slower than that (one here at my house consistently comes in at 780Kbytes/sec!). Once we get writes up in the 10Mbytes/sec range for run-of-the-mill consumer hard disks, even 100Mbps connections will begin to seem quite slow...
I love switches!
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write