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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 ..."
I am waiting to try to get fiber done up in my apt. i am lookign at how to get the whole routing and switching done right. right now i just have a couple itty bitty cisco routers and switches sitting here. i have two machines using fiber between themselves now. and i am hounding the phone company to allow me to get a bare line for 2 Meg dsl ... just gotta keep working on them. if i can i might be able to tweak this set up a bit more
a wise man once said "two wrongs dont make a right, but three rights do make a left" and that wise man was gallagher
" :)
-What is a nice lawn worth compared to Internet access?
-Nothing!
"
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.
Living in a rural area of Canada, I probably guess that we'll have honest polititians before we ever get any broadband out here from Bell Canada. (The prospects were good for Look TV but their financies are going down the tube.) If a lot of people around the world latch onto something like this, it could help kill diversified ISP markets - everyone would just be feeding off of super-fast connections from the phone companies.
The only thing better than having more than enough conduit installed before the area where you are installing the conduit is covered over and made next to impossible to get to is to have way, way more than enough conduit installed.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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 would actually improve community interaction.
Think about it. I know that it sounds silly, but if you have all of your neighbourhood on the same little network then it becomes much easier to do things like sharing files, playing games, and seeing when everyone's online, dropping notes to everyone to have that BBQ, etc, etc. I know that all of this can be done with the current internet, but having everyone on the same lan makes things a lot easier. I remember in University the dean of my residence was complaining that the networks that we set up were making us more antisocial, but the opposite was actually true. This was before we had internet in residence, and I set up an ICQ server on my machine and had a dedicated proxy out over my phone line and a 56k modem for email access (others allowed me to use their telephone lines and I had a cellphone anyways), and it was great to have everyone in the residence on ICQ at the same time, this was quite cool. We used to talk and use it to organize games and meetings and movies and the such all the time...
Oh back to the good old days. =P
If God gave us curiosity
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.
"Claim" is a bit of a weak description for a mature product. C'mon slashdot. Proxim's 100Mpbs products and technology are well over 1 year in the field. And BTW, not only can they do 100Mbps full duplex in the unlicensed 5.8GHz ISM band, they also run two wireless T1 interfaces on top of that -- between the same pair of radios. It is an absolutely wonderful solution for bringing branch offices up for voice and data. The interfaces fall back to 48Mbps and finally 12Mbps at the maximum range (~15mi with 30dBi antennas) but they always maintain full bandwidth on the T1's.
~GoRK
Everything slower than 10 Mbps is just a toy!
Is this post a flamebait? Sparking envy to those who live in an area where bandwidth is tight? In Indonesia, 28.8K is a very good connection. 56.6K is a bliss. ISDN is owned only by corporations.
Please people... You can boast your new super duper whizbang 10E100 bits network or whatsnot, but don't taunt anyone... It can cut real deep at times... OK? Thanks for your understanding...
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Except of course if it became the main depository for MP3 / DivX / Pr0n ans the RIAA gets a liking in them...
... have they firewalled their internet access, or is everybody responsible for its own sec... ?
But what I would lile to know is
Well, next time I have a Neighbours meeting, I know what to propose... 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
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.
--------
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
So why not download 20 100 MB files simultaneously, from 20 different sources? Whiner. ;-)
Free music from Jack Merlot.
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.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
Distributed downloads? :-D
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.
They had a company do a lot of the wiring. Maybe their country is just a bit more of "free" country in terms of deregulation? I cannot think up of any things that might legally be turned against the use of the network. Except for corporate moneymongering.
+++ath0
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.
So they are some of the few lucky ones that not just have 2 inches of dirt before hitting solid rock. ;-)
There is a good thing about using fiber this way. With so many "home" computers, a lot of them are bound not to be properly grounded. And you could end up frying a lot of hardware. Using fiber is great in this way, then you are the only responsible one for shocking your pc. :-)
This i why i hate cable tv. sigh. Have toasted the video out on my Gforce card.
One of my servers at home is a FreeBSD 4.1 running on a 166mhz Pentium. The harddrive are a 10GB 5400 speed Samsung(I think). The IDE controller does not support any fancy new IDE standards(and the BIOS didn't support a HD that size, but BSD just told me that my BIOS was fu..., and that I should use its parameters).
Anyway, from this old machine I can keep a steady 5.4MB pr. second.
Stop it???? Why on earth would they stop it? On the contrary, I would say they like such a thing. Then they don't have to do it themselves.
...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.
But how many time will this network stays up before local authorities stop it?
;-)
My god, where are you from? Sounds like your authorities are very oppressive!
Come to Europe - land of the free!
LOL - We do visit in vast numbers don't we ; )
Check out the visitor log.
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
... live longer in Borlänge :P [swedish joke]
Whooow, 4-5 ms ping reply eh?
;-)
In our LAN here at Umu (in Umea of course) we have about 1-2 ms for ping:
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 1.1/1.4/1.7 ms
And ping statistics if you ping sunet (10 packets) is:
round-trip min/avg/max = 11.6/12.5/13.7 ms
and thats 850 km away (1360 miles)
2 reptiles beneath your current threshold.
If you actually read the page you would have noticed that they got government approval for the digging and the cabling.. the connection to the Inet and Lan is being done through a company so they have no problems whatsoever.
If you walk the proper channels you can get alot of things done....
Of course we only have ~1ms within bitnet.. what fiber network within swedish-city-size would go above that?
;)
:P
// _GNU_
// http://www.modem.nu/
1 korn1.bitnet.nu (217.31.168.1) 1.061 ms 0.836 ms 0.869 ms
2 peer-gw-eth1.du.se (130.243.55.97) 1.235 ms 1.170 ms 1.279 ms
1-1.5ms to du.se, then it's sunets fault if the milliseconds tick away
Hmm.. I hope them modemusers arent too offended by our discussion, sorry
By the way... I'm looking for a job in the USA - maybe YOU know of a open position? Mail me!
Now thats gotta be a lot better advertising that putting an ad in the situations wanted of the local paper (or a usa one). Imagine having your job request slashdotted!
I think the amazing part is not the tech, but basically the vision and drive to see it through to completeion.
Well done guys.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
If the server is getting slashdotted, go here: Mirrored
Pretty nifty stuff.
heh.. yeah, swedish humor is more "abstract"
'are we here to drink, or here to talk'".
after living here for 3 years.. and, after many sweden to finland cruises... it makes sense..
Hey brainiac! I suppose you use a 28.8k dial-up right? You will never need anything faster?? Good luck to you. Those of whom are preparing for the *future* what like 15+ years in the future and installed fibre in their neighborhood will be fine in the future. Streaming video (ie phones in the future) WILL require that bandwidth. Hard drives of the future will be able to handle that bandwidth too. Maxtor is working on their ATA 133 drives. in 10 years who knows how fast they will be.
So it is not just for geeks for games and porn, it is serious preparation for the future!! Probably will be lonely in those pubs you speak of being in. Everyone will be conversing online except you; you will just be reading slashdot on your 28.8 still. Bah humbug!
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
depends on what category of people u call adults of course...(no ofeense meant btw)
:) )
;)
if u define adults as being 30+, and/or no tech background or no interest at all in internet things... then i guess your right
if u take adults as being 18+ with some interest in the internet, im sure u will find quite a few that (IF they are sure it willl work etc) would like very much to participate...
its like saying: can u really see many women saying: "whoaaa, nice car dude, what special 'features' does the engine have" and whatever other things there is nice about cars (i dont know because im not interested in cars
just because most people have the idea that only men 'flip' on cars.
U do have a point that most of the bandwidth there is (at THIS moment) not useful to have for most people... but then again... lots of types of enforced insurance (like medical insurance etc) are neither, but its the same principle that counts there: SOME people need it, the rest thinks it 'could be useful or nice to have, because yuo never know what is going to happen' and they all pay so the price would be lower for all people. MAybe you would be paying for something u would never use, but thats the same with insurance. Consider this also as some kind of insurance for the future
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).
Is it any wonder why Look TV is having difficulty with financial strategies like this:
"Due to overwhelming demand, we are no longer taking orders for our High-Speed wireless Internet services"
They are a product of the dot-bomb industry. Imagine if Dodge said "Due to overwhelming demand, we are no longer producing the Caravan". Uhhhhhh... Wow... To say the least.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Move to Sweden after college.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
We are constantly seeing stories of people who are pulling neighborhood resources together to get networks going. I think this is great, but I also think that these people are pretty lucky to live in such good neighborhoods as well. I could never have such a luxury because my neighborhood is really not well suited for the task. I live in a small neighborhood that is borderline suburbia, and is very close to a lower income neighborhood, I doubt it would be easy to pull resources in my situation. However, I guess that is the big trick, along with securing the high speed pipe. Also, this person is lucky to have a common community owned building to store the equipment which gives a sense of community ownership to the network.
The distance between Uppsala (where ftp.sunet.se is located) and Ludvika (40 km south of Borlänge) is around 165 km, so I guess the distance between Borlänge and Uppsala is around 185-190 km.
:) )
Many people believe ftp.sunet.se is located in Stockholm, which can explain some of the errors in calculating the distance between Borlänge and ftp.sunet.se
Regards
Mats (from Ludvika, now living in Umeå
who says 'chatting online' with your neighbours and going to a pub to talk to them exclude each other?
:) especially not when talking to my neighbour.. but then again, i also dont use the phone to talk to them if i can easily walk over there... but i think i would rather talk to someone online to discuss when we could go to a pub to have a good chat than walk over there if its on the other end of the block and IF he is already available online.. ah well it all depends on the situation... (and video conferencing sux too, but i guess it can be useful in some cases -- 'an image says more than a thousand words' --)
never used video phones, and i dont really intend to do so either
besides... i think its tragic that some people immediately classfy other people on 1 facet of their behaviour...
Everything slower than 10 Mbps is just a toy!
You may notice that many people didn't feel insulted or taunted by this remark, especially western cultures, mainly because most westerners don't take these types of remarks serious for a number of different reasons.
1. It is usually impolite to brag in Sweden, (people just call a an asshole in the US) thus a remark like this usually implies some irony.
2. "Everything else is just a toy" is often a parody reference to a sales and advertising culture.
3. Tech people are known for boasting the quality/benefits of a particular technology, whether or not they actually own it. (This is especially true of backbone technology. People will brag about technology it is impossible for them to own) This is also usually one of the most effective ways of advacating a technology when talking shop.
I'm sure the last thing the guy wanted to do by putting up his website was to spark bandwidth envy, but rather inspire people to take on similar projects.
Usually people who undertake projects like this often have utopian dreams and plans on how to wire the world, and I'm sure this guy was just making his point that people shouldn't settle for less than 10 Mps when the technology is clearly available.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
By the way... I'm looking for a job in the USA - maybe YOU know of a open position? Mail me!
Why would you ever want to leave your house man!!
I wonder if he had to get it ok'd by the city to run cables. Knowing the beuracracy(sp?) found in the US...the cost of installing this would skyrocket due to city permits and such. Did he have to cross any streets?
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
And I suspect most neighborhoods are like mine.
What we need to do is educate housing developers. They do see that improved network access adds to the value of their product. But they usually think in terms of DSL or (if they're very bold) Ethernet. If more of them knew how easy it was to include fibre networking in a new housing development...
articles? I'm living in South San Jose, California, and I can't get cable modem, DSL, fixed wireless. Modem is at 28k, ISDN will cost $120/mo.
BTW, I'm an excellent programmer, with experiences in C/C++, Java (EJB, Servlet, JMS,
They should have bought a cabinet from CSTONE
You should move farther outstate. :) We have DSL available all the way up to the exchanges along the Canadian Border (Lancaster, Roseau area, etc.) and we're offering wireless in Warroad (which means you could at least theoretically get it out on Lake of the Woods) PLUS we have fiber to four islands out in the lake, which all now have DSL. So yes, there are islands in Lake of the Woods that have fiber to the CO and DSL to homes, and yet some people can't even get it in the city of Minneapolis. Weird.
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
Down here in Italy a medieval village in Liguria region has been completely restorated to original form.
In the process a full fiber local loop (plus other goodies such as CATV & cordless "walkaround" phone system) has been installed.
Take a look here and read the technical overview about infrastructure.
404...
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Ok... the problem with video conferencing is... ? It is just not an established technique yet. Do you have a DSL? Not an established net connection (in my opinion). Just because you can't or don't want to (vid conference) doesn't mean millions and millions of people don't either.
Now imagine you want to show somebody something like outside your car window because you are lost, your clothes, your mom wants to see if you cleaned your pit of a room.
Then there is the 3D teleconferencing. Brand new... you have to give it time before it becomes really functional. I am also sure that using vid phones will NOT be mandatory... merely an option, perhaps the standard but audio-only will always be an option.
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)