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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 ..."
Will you be pulling the fiber at the same time as the copper? My suggestion is to investigate utilizing BICC Brand-Rex's Blo-Twist as one of your cable runs. The Blo-Twist cable has a small tube chamber attached that will allow up to 4 strands of fiber to be blown into place at any time. This allows you to install the copper and add fiber as it is needed.
You are certainly correct in planning on fiber to the desktop, I personally think those that dismiss the technology as "too expensive" are short sighted in some ways. Currently I am recommending nothing less than Cat 5e (Enhanced) cable and components on all new installations and upgrades being done for my clients. Even though a lot of the new installations are being done in facilities they will occupy for a minimum of 10 years, they have resisted planning for any fiber excepting a riser backbone.
In fact, many of you would cry if you came back after a semester with Sunet's backbone. Places like Ronneby, Stockholm, Linköping, and Lund are well connected, and I am sure that I have missed a whole bunch of them (fill me in fellow countrymen).
;)
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a few of you tech students "over there" will start thinking about a semester in Sweden. Well, you should
And for all others, check up what 100Mbit/s equipment costs, ask companies to sponsor you, ask your schools for feed, and you too can have a useful connection to the internet. No more modem, ISDN, cable, or whatever. Sweet sweet ethernet. Can't live without it, can't, ehm, well, you want to live with it;)
This kind of networks surely points at the need for faster hd's. It's your hd that limits the speed in cases like this. I tested using two computers (with 128 and 256 MB RAM) with 15 m cable between, both had a IBM 7200 rpm IDE-drive and a 100Mbps Fast Ethernet PCI-card. I reached a maximum of about 70 Mbps, sending a 15 MB file. But of course it will be lower of you send alot of small files. And notice that this test were made for a line without other packets running around in it. On a 100Mbps net you will get a much lower speed because of all the collissions that occur when several people sends stuff at the same time.
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All 100Mbps and no play makes the hd a dull boy
2 reptiles beneath your current threshold.
Sweden has actually a plan to give every home broadband access, just like telephone and electric power. Though I haven't seen much of it yet, but they are digging fiber all over the country.
Myself, I live at a student-complex in Trondheim/Norway, and here 100MBs is included in the rent :) We've got 100MBs internally, connected to gigabit switches. We got 1 gigabit to the university, and 3,5 gigabit to Oslo (where the rest of the world is linked).
Actually there is a total of 8.000-10.000 students living at such complexes here (of 20.000).
The only problem is that the world is too slow :(
"The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages." - Tao of Programming
I moved to Sweden three years ago, and the use of the Internet here has always been ahead of other countries. I live in an appartment run by a large communeral organisation and we have had a broadband network installed. Thay have wired up a 100 Meg network with a connection in every appartment, the installation was free and it's about $20 a month to get connected.
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A 10mbps connection at our end is great, but there is always the bottleneck at the other side.
:). $10/month for cable + inet with a $2000+ startup cost isn't too bad! Hopefully their network connection out of the DMZ to the net isn't still priced as high as it is in the article... Bet they exceed their daily 1G bandwidth agreement today!
See the lower part of the page where it says:
We have a really lovely ISP in our city Umeå. They are called Norrnod and they have an excellent concept - they have a large DMZ (click on it to see a schematic of the entire DMZ with speeds between parts of it and all!) to which lots of companies connect and all traffic within the DMZ is absolutely for free and of extremely high speed - 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps!
So this system sounds like it has quite a few benefits in the local area. With the cost it doesn't seem silly at all compared to wimping out and having everyone order dsl/cable
We have a MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) Called Bitnet, Borlänge IT Network (http://www.bitnet.net/) comprised of about 70 kilometers of lit fiber, and 300 kilometers of empty tubing waiting for future fiber. Neighbourhoods are connected with either straight fiber into the homes, 100Mbit ethernet (copper), or 10Mbit ethernet. My house is connected with 2 fiber pairs to a switch in the basement, providing me with 10Mbit ethernet access (probably to be upgraded to 100Mbit within a year), I have, like those in Umeå, full bandwidth within the MAN and on SUNET (Swedish University Network), we have a gigabit uplink to the local univ, providing peering to SUNET..
// _GNU_
// http://www.modem.nu/
4-5ms ping reply and never below 1Mbyte/sec from ftp.sunet.se, probably the best mirror server in the world, 300 kilometers away.. =)
Oh, well.. I'm heading to the office now, also connected to bitnet, but at 100Mbit full duplex, so I never have to write cd's or bring floppies, I just leave my servers on here and access them in any way I like from work, att full LAN speed.. Quite excellent.
Thank you.
...beacuse the server that might get slashdotted sits on the other side of the door behind me - at the university of Umeå ___
Geek rants since like... 2000 or something.
I can't be sure this page will still be up in the afternoon (I'm writing this at 5:30 AM EDT), but do check the community fiber network. And while you're there, scroll all the way to the bottom and click on link that says Visitors (or go directly from here) and check out the people from all over that followed the herd.
100Mb full-duplex connections to every home in the neighbourhood, $10/month for access (plus the initial set-up fees, which would really be worth it IMO) and connections to a gigabit ISP? That would be heaven compared to the paper or plastic (cable or DSL) choices in my area... neither is reliable, and connection speeds vary considerably.
The hardest part about setting up something like this would be to get your neighbours involved. The people who are into computers would be easy to convince, it's the luddites with no future-vision that would hold up the project. I'm impressed, very nice job. I think you've also earned the right to taunt the cable and dsl users living one street over =)
With all the stories of fiber-laying companies having hard-times ahead it's nice to know that there is at least one foreward-thinking ISP in the world (even if it's not in Canada).
Actually this guy seems a little misinformed at times.
$8/mo sure, but $2000 INSTALLATION FEE! Christ, that's insanely high.
And you're telling me that 60 of 62 houses signed up to drop $1600+ just to get some fast internet? That's a little much to believe...
He also seems to have a bit of a hard time distinguishing between MBps and Mbps...
(because I soon found out that a normal harddisk isn't faster than about 30-40 Mbps, even though it is connected with U-DMA-66 etc. Try yourself to transfer files between two harddrives and divide the amount of data in megabits with the time in seconds!)
connections and 25-40 Mbps is possible most of the time - that means it is their single harddisk limiting the speed!
Umm, my hard drives here get 30MB/sec on the 5400rpm drives and 40MB/sec on the 7200rpm drives. Even my older 10gig 5400rpm drive can get 20MB/sec. That's 160Mbit/sec. He is also talking about using UDMA66 citing that as bits per second (it's BYTES folks), and talking about using a fasttrak66 controller with a new 7200rpm drive, you'll easily get at LEAST 20MB/sec off it, if not 30-35MB/sec. Strange that...
I recently have done benchmarks on my drives here and got those numbers. Bandwidth off your drive of 40Mbit/sec (5MByte/sec??) hasn't been seen since the days of the pentium class computers.
Also 1200MB/day?
Damn, I do more than that on my cable line. I know that I'm not exactly your average user, but with 60 people online that's only 20MB/day, and that can run out pretty quickly with just some gaming and some web browsing. I was stuck with 25MB/day avg when I was in university for a term, and BOY did that suck. I can't see them doing less than 1200MB/day on average. I can easily see double that. Especially if they have on average more than 1 computer online per house, and considering how a tech savvy group would be required to do this in the first place, they'll easily clear 1200MB/day.
Hey, I don't doubt that this happened, and damn that's a sweet sweet connection speed, getting 100mbit/sec to a large network of people... DAMN!! =)
Just sounded fishy...
Oh well.. Chances of that happening around where I live are.. oh... NIL! However it might not be impossible to set up a wireless network (on a street of 78 houses MAYBE I could find 10 that would pay more than $200 to set up cheaper faster internet access).
Anyone else notice these problems? Strange...
If God gave us curiosity