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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.
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
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
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