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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 ..."
" :)
-What is a nice lawn worth compared to Internet access?
-Nothing!
"
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
...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!
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....
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.
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!
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.
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!!
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...
I too live in rural Canada, but am lucky enough not to have Bell as my telco. Because of this I can get DSL out in the middle of nowhere! It's no 100Mbps connection, I wish it were, but it sure beats dial-up!!!
The problem with rural areas is that there aren't enough people around to setup a network like this. Unless you setup a 802.11a network with some good range you'll never get enough people to join your network. Of course the advantage in rural areas is that the space is wide open, and there are plenty of silos to put transmitters on. This reason alone might just make a rural network feasable.
As for you, DirectPC from ExpressVU is avaliable. You still have to dial-up with this service though so you will only get increased download bandwidth. I'm pretty sure it's over-priced too, but still an option (albeit, not a good one).