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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 ..."

15 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Favorite quote by PhantomHarlock · · Score: 4, Funny

    "
    -What is a nice lawn worth compared to Internet access?
    -Nothing! :)
    "

  2. Re:Fiber optice networking by Spootnik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. This has been done allready by Acaila · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  4. "...compatible with the FUTURE!" by unitron · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "All cables run in PVC-tubes about 50 cm below ground. A few main-tubes are absolutely full with cables, so unfortunately it isn't possible to install more cables in them..."

    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.

  5. There are more high performace nets in Sweden by forgoil · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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;)

  6. you know, I can't help but think that... by Telek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:you know, I can't help but think that... by Organic_Info · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The only problem I see (and in this case the were ok) is finding like minded people in your neighbourhood. The street I currently live in is generally populated with non-techies and old people (no ageism intended any silver(haired) surfers out there). In streets with like minded bandwidth lovers this would be great - I mean did you see the price $8/month.

      Makes you think though that if this really took off how the comms companies would try and legislate this away from the people - a kind of comms RIAA/DMCA etc.

      All I need to find now is a neighbourhood full of like minded bandwidth lovers : )

      --
      "Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
    2. Re:you know, I can't help but think that... by Telek · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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
  7. Harddrive sets the limit by hhe_hee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Harddrive sets the limit by Doc+Hopper · · Score: 5, Informative

      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!

  8. Sweden digging fiber by Accumulator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  9. The Swedes are pretty advanced. by ayjay29 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  10. We have a similar network in Borl�nge, also Sweden by _GNU_ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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..

    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.

    // _GNU_
    // http://www.modem.nu/

  11. They will probably _not_ exceed their 1GB quota... by Hannes+Eriksson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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.
  12. Good advertising by term0r · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!