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In NZ, Sharing Ethernet With A Whole CIty
ryuko writes: "Normally LANs are used by a single organization at best, but Wellington's 13-square-mile LAN comprises many of the city's businesses. The city council garnered a UNESCO Digital Access Award in recognition of its achievement in installing the 1,000 Mbps network.
The full article is here on ZDNet. Drool ... gigabit internet ..."
Citylink runs at Fast Ethernet speeds of up to 1,000Mbps, about 65 times faster than a T1 line.
Isn't a T1 1.544Mbps? If so then 1Gbps is 647x faster. However the following sentence is a bit silly:
Considering that many U.S. organizations use T1 lines to connect to faster Internet backbone providers, Citylink is offering speeds generally unmatched here.
The Gbps is extremely nice, but it's silly to presume that everyone in North America is using a T1 : Hell most home users are using cable high speed running at 2Mbps downstream.
Where they don't even have electricity most of the time in the CBD!
Are they allowed to freelance on what they want to connect within their little sections of the lan? If I have a business and I wanna run oh, I don't know, OS2 for example, would I be able to? Or would I be stuck running something else? Anyone know?
Sent from your iPad.
And Hercules the TV Show!
"We never had the luxury of spending lots of money," says Naylor. "We needed to be able to make do with less."
So in other words, all of the people elsewhere with massive budgets have been conned into buying large amounts of expensive kit to get less for their money than these guys.
Brains 1 - Suits 0
The most impressive thing about this is the simplicity of it. This isn't next gen tech or anything this is just someone who had the smarts to think
"Hang on we supply electricity via a distributed network rather than Point 2 Point, why can't we do the same with the internet... hang on its cheaper as well"
Real issue here though is that the City backed up the smart guy rather than getting CorporationX to do it, had then gone for the latter route they would be right where the rest of us are with our T1s to the Telco backbones.
I predict this won't happen in big cities because they have too much money to be sensible.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
that is pretty cool. lots of other juicy details in there as well.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Is this approach scaleable? Wellington itself is really not a large city and being the capital, an extraordinary portion of the business is governmental. Both of these have to cause problems when trying to extend this system beyond the "Windy City". BTW, Wellington is much windier than Chicago, the other "WC".
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
More like gigabit intranet. Once you hit the bottleneck, you're moving at the same speed as the rest of us. =)
Wouldn't that be a MAN, not a LAN?
It's bloomin' rad is what it is. It's actually nice when a city provides, what's seen as, neccessary infrastructure to the businesses in the city.
But, uhhhh... think of all the sheep porn going over those cables, man! The amount of sick, New Zealand sheep porn you can get on the internet will increase a billion fold once they get all 1000 Kiwi's on the network.
New Zealand - Where men are men and sheep are nervous.
I am a big, fluffy, cute, cuddly bunny. fear me.
As someone else just pointed out: Brains 1 - Suite 0.
Although I do wonder how much the service costs, and what other costs would the locals need to budget for to get running on the network?
Also, who is in charge of the Linux firewall boxes - someone inside the companies I'd hope, but what if the company doesn't have someone to run the machine?
I'd love to hear more about this system - and see the details in how it was built.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Or not????
Better to s**t on everyone else, eh?
If the raw paranoiac/Hobbesian profit motive isn't behind it, most folks areound here would never go for it. Damn the benefits. Who knows? Maybe in 2050, members of Congress will be saying, "If we vote for legislation X, then we might catch up with New Zealand's GDP."
With Wellington's population of only 166,000 (excluding the suburbs)...
Hum... out of the percentage of the population here, how many of them are online gamers? In opinion, that is one nice LAN party going on!
its slashdotted already... it sounds like an interesting article, help us out here :-)
soup
Wellington: No of windy days = 199 per year ( Any day that has a wind gust over 34 knots or 63km per hour) Average No of very windy days = 64 per year (Over 52 knots or 96km per hour). Also home of parliament.
Windy City: Chicago's nickname, probably derived from the city's status as a frequent host city for political conventions in the 19th Century and from the reputation of its aggressive resident hucksters.
I caught this:
"As another cost-cutting measure, Citylink uses a generic computer..."
Generic? I'm guessing they mean a WinTel box, with the "Win" bit replaced.
If Microsoft hadn't decided to go into the OS commodity business, we wouldn't today have a commodity hardware business.
Eat your heart out, Apple.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
With the best dist behind them how could they go wrong
Acording to the article Everyone is responcible for their own firewall. So with the firewall who really cares what software you are running. Also sience they seem to be running Linux as the main servers I dont think they have a big corperation pushing them to run a perscribed software.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
why hasn't anyone thought of this before? I could certainly see broadband catching on as a public utility type of thing, instead of a luxury thing. Much how telephones and then cable television did in the past. Not only would it allow for cheaper overall costs, but having a citywide intranet @ gig-e speeds would be amazingly useful for telecommuting/VPN, gaming with friends, or any other number of good stuff.
Citylink's genesis dates back to the late 1980s, when Richard Naylor, IT manager for the city council, realized certain areas of Wellington were susceptible to power outages even at times when there was plenty of power in other parts of the city. A plant on one side of the city might suffer a shortage, while another remained at full power.
"We needed to balance the loads by connecting them," Naylor says. So he ran a fiber optic cable between the plants, allowing them to compensate by sharing power when one was hit by a shortage.
Distributing power over fibre optics, and already in the eighties ?? That's very advanced.
"...in recognition of its achievement in installing the 1,000 Mbps network. The full article is here on ZDNet. Drool ... gigabit internet ..."
Actually, we're still 24 megabytes away from gigabyte networks. Soon, so very soon...
Some people said it was slashdotted(?).. so here's a mirror.. Mirror Here
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
George Bush and congress are considering Government incentives to build out nation wide high-speed (whatever they think that is) internet access.
So with our Government on the case we should all have 1.5 Mbps in about 30-40 years.
Never volunteer for anything -- Lackland
For both of you who read this:
I don't live in NZ. Nor do I live in Europe. I live in the U.S. If city sewer systems were invented this morning, then the following would happen:
Any town council member, in a randomly chosen Midwest U.S. town, who suggests that the city maybe ought to connect a network of sewage piping between all the houses and businesses and then further suggests instituting a system to pay for that (a collective good) out of the collective treasury, would surely encounter a right wing uproar. "How dare they take my money for a service whether I want to use it or not!"
Or not????
Better to s**t on everyone else, eh?
If the raw paranoiac/Hobbesian profit motive isn't behind it, most folks around here would never go for it. Damn the benefits.
Who knows? Maybe in 2050, members of Congress will be saying, "If we vote for legislation X, then we might catch up with New Zealand's GDP."
For the clue impaired (in addition to those who read the grammatically muddled previous cowardly post), the point is this: There is no "whether I use it or not" when you are talking about infrastructure that hastens the flow of commerce.
OK - I think the ZDnet editor should get him/herself a dictionary of computer and networking terms:
Normally LANs are used by a single organization at best true, but for a good reason. LANs that span multiple buildings are technically refferred to as WANs, regardless of the underlying technology.
And the 2.5k$ gigabit router? Not. A commodity PC cannot even reach maximum throughput on a single gigabit NIC, nevermind routing between them. The only way to do this would be to use a decent server-class M/B with 64bit/66MHz PCI bus - which would take the total system cost above 2.5k$. A more moderate PC could indeed be used for residential/small business gateways, but you would not get gigabit throughput.
Just my 2c worth...
-justin
Now if only my pr0n servers could keep up with my gigabit ethernet, I'd be happy!
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
running Debian Linux and SMTP management software
Anyone know about this? I've never heard of it before. Is it for real or is this a typo where they meant SNMP?
.
Apple invented the personal computer? What kind of history rewrite is this?!?!?!?!!!!
I mean, the 4004, 8008, 8080 were out there way before the 6502 (if that's where you're going).
In any case, even were I to accept your proposition, Apple dropepd the ball long ago.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Incentives mean that whoever lays the cable gets a monopoly on it. Then Time-Warner/AOL will start prioritizing packets so competitors' sites will perform poorly. After that, they'll realize that streaming video is competition to cable, and they'll limit video streams to a maximum of 10 minutes because "[They] didn't spend $56 billion laying cables just to have the blood sucked out of [them].
And there you have it. The internet will just become an enhancement to cable TV.
What we need is deregulation of the Cable internet access, like there is with DSL.
In Gävle, weden there is a citywide LAN already. A nifty NAT with Gigabitbackbone and 100Mbps to each houshold. Some households even got fiber installed all the way.
Västerås Sweden has built there redundant Gigabit backbone. They are working on connecting the companies and households.
The diffrent between the two city-LANs is that Gävle includes a Internet-connection as standard. Västerås only sells the fiber within the city. I think Gävle made the best, people don't want to buy cabel and Internet. They just want to surf.
Damn.. combine this with the $5k Terabyte array and you get a kick ass network for less than an average years salary... this should enable us to do some nice things for less fortunate countries with just a small fundraising....
I wan't the revolutionary power over fibre-optic cable that the article mentions. I mean, they had it back in the eighties!
Hey, let's not get carried away. Didn't your mother teach you, charity begins at home?
I want mine first.
1000MBits+24MBytes=1000+(8*24)=1192Mbps, that's more than a Gigabit, but still 7000Mbps short of a Gigabyte.
Back in your cage troll.
Citylink uses a generic computer running Debian Linux and SMTP management software
Somehow I don't think they're sending email messages to their routers in order to alter network behaviour.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
And then when the fiber connection terminates somewhere in the United States we slow it back down so those people down under don't look better then us.
Straight from RFC 2962:
There are currently three versions of SNMP. SNMP version 1 (SNMPv1) protocol is defined in STD 15, RFC 1157. The SNMP version 2c (SNMPv2c) protocol is defined in RFC 1901, RFC 1905 and RFC 1906. Finally, the SNMP version 3 (SNMPv3) protocol is defined in RFC 1905, 1906, RFC 2572 and RFC 2574. See RFC 2570 for a more detailed overview over the SNMP standards.
Those three letters were magic. At the time, computing was dominated by big expensive mainframes, and IBM had no less than 90% of that market. They were, in other words, the Microsoft of the 60s and 70s. To survive, your product had to be compatible with the IBM PC at every level. IBM itself took a long time to see this, and came out with non-compatible systems like the PCjr and the PS/2. Which is why the "IBM-compatible" market isn't dominated by IBM.
The one way Microsoft helped out was by providing a crappy operating system -- actually more like a glorified program loader. Since MS-DOS did such a lousy job of insulating applications from the hardware, apps had to incorporate a lot of hardware-specific functionality. Which forced IBM's competitors to emulate the PC at a very low level.
Everybody engineering to the same specs created opportunities for commodity manufacturers -- and created the "generic" computer. Which still has basic design features that totally suck -- like that big heat-generating internal power supply.
Perhaps if Microsoft had hired somebody who knew Jack Shit about re-entrant code or how to write a scheduler, we'd all still be using proprietary architectures. Kind of ironic.
Great! his father gave us Noriega (trained under GB's CIA), Husein (same time, same place), Bin Ladin (all of bin ladins trick's taught by 1980's CIA). Now his son will lose a bunch of M$-type companies on america. The ppl doing radios are already putting in a much faster and cheaper system .
I would definitely get slapped with vadalism charges for spraying in 3ft block letters on the tallest building in town-
"TRIBES 2 EVERY NIGHT AT 8PM! BE THERE"
802.3ae, as the IEEE lovingly calls it, is backed by the 10GEA (10 Gbps Ethernet Alliance). The founding members of the 10GEA are small companies you might have heard of such as 3Com, Cisco, Intel, Nortel or Sun.
I think someone stuck an Extra Zero in there. They say 1000Mb/s but then say its about 65 times faster than a T1 (1.54Mb/s*65=100.1Mb/s) and they refer to it as fast ethernet at least once meaning 100Mb/s ether net.
Not that 100Mb/s isnt bad, but I doubt they took the extra cost jumb to do 1000Mb/s and a reporter somewhere along the line added an extra zero in there...
-Booyah
#include sig.h
I hope they're using SSH. Or switches. Imagine all this stuff about insecure 802.11 blown up tenfold
"New report from police shows clan based killing up 500%."
"Three downtown businessmen fragged after work."
"City's parents concerned that 31337 haXor sqillz are not be emphasized enough in school."
"Downtown city celebrates 3rd annual Everquest celebration festival... citizens urged to stay home."
....When wellington gets a sewage system is unknown at this time... tune in for more news tomorow, same time, same place.
(thanks herman finkers)
Reading articles like this just make me so damn depressed. In South Africa, we have a major problem with our Telecommunications company. They're a monopoly who controls absolutely every single aspect of communications in this country. We are being held back by huge laws which prohibit the use of any other internet connection system or device if it is not using Telkom's infrastructure. The worst thing is that the best connection we can get to the internet in this country is ISDN if you can't fork out the megabucks for a Leased Line solution. What absolutely grates me more is the mere fact that they close down companies who attempt to run alternative connection systems. Wireless providers start up but get shut down very quickly thanks to the Telkom legislation. Connecting to your neighbour is also illegal if you take a cat5 cable and run it over the wall! By the mere definitions in the legislative clauses Telkom enjoys the right to force you to rent their equipment only. And when you have 3.5 million people connecting to the internet over a duplexed 45meg pipe to the international spectrum, it must measure up to the worst infrastructures for Internet enabled countries in the world. And we're supposed to be the gateway to Africa?
I hope that someday things will change and we can also have a 1000 mbps LAN connecting our cities.
The Citylink website is:
www.citylink.co.nz
Eh? Is that possible? In the article they talk about transmitting power across the city using fiber optic cables. We're talking mega, if not giga, watts here people. Can that seriously be done? Or is it just inaccurate reporting?
Time. Time seems... strange.
In my tests with `ttcp`, the best I can get is around 32 MByte/s between two PCs plugged together.
To get higher, you need PCI 64/66. The normal PCI bus can carry 4bytes*33 MHz = 133 MB/s (1066 Mb/s) but only during bursts. There is significant setup time, and the bursts are fairly short. Maybe I could get better throughput if I tweak the PCI registers, but I risk starving some other device.
...awww, fuck it.
do not read this line twice.
This isn't a LAN, it's a MAN (Metropolitan Area NEtwork). A MAN that's based on a protocol more normally used in LANs, but a MAN nevertheless.
They have a rather nifty one in Soho in London that servers the film industry there. No, not that sort of film! Media companies usually have prestige offices there. http://www.sohonet.co.uk/ is the link.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
This is probably anticompetitive, if my understanding of Bush is correct. He's probably following the Tauzin-Dingell "incentives" line of crap being pushed by the telcos, who want to stop supporting competitive DSL providers. I for one have zero confidence that this particular promise will go anywhere.
sulli
RTFJ.
QoS: No worries: Many IT departments say that prioritizing packets is vital if you want to run applications and send important files over the Internet. Because of Citylink's sheer speed and capacity, De Wit says adding quality of service (QoS) features isn't necessary. "QoS is a problem for others because they only have so much space in the pipe," he says. "We can fit all the traffic we want onto our Ethernet, so why do we need to worry about prioritizing?" Also, because of the generous capacity, DeWit says data collisions, which are often a concern on LANs, aren't such an issue with Citylink.
Seriously. QoS is a waste of time if you just have enough capacity.
sulli
RTFJ.
Since they consider themselves a LAN, I was wondering what addressing scheme they're using.
Are they using "real" IP addresses? If so, what class?
Or are they using public address (10.0.0.0) with a NAT box to access the internet?
Just wondering.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
http://www.bredband.com/
Something similar, anyway. It has always been very impressive when a single company takes on the immense task of wiring a large area. And people are always very impressed with it and will pay that company money for the service that can be provided once the network is in place... for a certain amount of time, anyway.
Do you think the government will eventually insist that Citylink open up the network that they created to competitors? Regardless of how good Citylink is, they're still a monopoly, or eventually will be. One can only hope that they'll be a responsible monopoloy.
RP
They did this in a larger city.. why can't I have this in my small town!? Then I could trade files with my brother like he's in the other room. Oh yeah... thats right.. small towns aren't proffitable and don't get high speed access =( *sniffle* Guess I'll enjoy my dialup untill that becomes unreasonably expensive too! Atleast I've always got ham radio! hehe
Can all fish swim?
In Sweden almost every city of larger size has a operator independent fiber optic network, by this date. Those networks has been installed by local transmission operators and the networks is usually open for (not for free of course) ISP's, local companies and other operators that might be in need for local high speed links. One of the most successful ISP's in Sweden use these fiber networks for interconnecting the access and distribution layers (this is the only global ISP in Sweden that offers truly broadband 10Mbs/fdx ethernet to the home) to it's customers. Yes, this is true and their primary customers is private persons.
"So he ran a fiber optic cable between the plants, allowing them to compensate by sharing power when one was hit by a shortage."
This is one of many strange statements in the article. I'm not the 1st one to point this out, but transmitting POWER over OPTICAL fibre is not really possible (at least outside NZ).
... I lived in Wellington for a number of years up until a few months ago (it's a terrific place BTW, wifey and I will be breeding there :) ... the main problem has been the pipe out of NZ. I had XADSL about 300 metres from a city centre exchange and had an 8Mbit connection to the 'net (wow!). Trouble was, I could still only get about 30-35K per sec from anywhere outside of NZ because of latency and pipe-size problems. This made watching streaming movies etc. impossible - unless they were on a local server (in NZ), when I could get 300K/sec speeds.
I understand that this has eased with the introduction of the Southern Cross, which is the new fibre optic channel connecting us to Australia. I'm looking forward to going home soon to see the improvements.
Unfortunately, TelecomNZ charge by volume. Even though I could get 300K/sec, I was only allowed 600MB per month before hitting excess per MB charges. I looked just a few days ago and that's still the situation, I don't know if this is because they're greedy (what, a telco, surely not...) or because they're trying to limit the Southern Cross usage by retail customers.
Ian
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
I download a 10mb file from apple faster then that. And i'm on shaw cable in Canada eh!
If you read the article it is pretty clear that they meant to say 100 Megabits. 65 x a T1 is about 100, and later down they say "With 100 Mbps of capacity...". Strangely, later still the article says "...the next generation of Ethernet, which will deliver 10 Gbps..."
I think someone is bad with numbers.
JJ
What we need is deregulation of the Cable internet access, like there is with DSL.
So that what? All the 3rd party cable ISPs would go belly up too? Get real. The first two paragraphs of what you wrote seem to vastly conflict with the third. What we need is either:
A: Telecom companies that care about more than dollars (Not bloody likely with our current stock system)
Or
B: Very intense regulation which specifically tells what companies can and can't do wit hthe infrastructure they're being prompted to install. After all, if they didn't have bad intentions to start with, then it wouldn't be an issue, right?
Furthermore, we in New Zealand are not yet familiar with the concept of flat rate broadband (except where it's been throttled to 101% the speed of a 56K connection that is), so sucks to be us.
My company has a 100Mbps connection to our ISP across Citylink and it just rocks. We also connect up with a number of clients directly across it.
It cost us a lot of money to connect up, as a small (5-person) company three years ago, but it has been worth every cent.
We also run BGP and peer with many other organisations on Citylink as well. This means we don't get traffic charges for that (we do get charged for traffic volume through our ISP).
This thing has been a great boon for internet businesses in Wellington and we certainly wouldn't have been able to do the things we have done without it.
Citylink also run the New Zealand mirror for Debian, so when I 'apt-get dist-upgrade' I get phenomenal download speeds - around 1500 kb/second
TelstraClear cable services 35% of wellington homes, I have the basic broadband at 128k, 10 gig per month @ NZ$80 and we have cable TV and a phone line for NZ$80 per month.
NZ$160 is about US$64, so it isn't anywhere near as expensive or restricted as CityLink.
CityLink only covers half the central city, while TelstraClear has cable around the whole Wellington Region, rolling out in Christchurch and starting up in Auckland.
In 3 years, TelstraClear will reach about 70 percent of New Zealand businesses and homes. Hamilton, Tauranga & Dunedin will be connected from the CBD out.
More details on http://www.telstrasaturn.co.nz/
CityLink details on http://www.citylink.co.nz/
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Someone mentioned monopoly. Actually this is not, you can still get WAN services from Telecom and Telstra-Clear, formerly Telstra Saturn. So your choices for linking to other businesses in the city are three, and for other cities two. Actually there is an extra choice if you are close, you can run your own cable to the building next door these days if you want to. That used to be illegal but is not any more.
Apart from this network, Telecom has fibre to all the suburban exchanges. Cable modem is available to some areas, and ADSL is widely available too.
Richard Naylor is quite a cool guy. I was talking to his then teenage son about 6 o 7 years back about home computers, he had a PDP8 to play with.
Considering that this net is huge and flat. Isn't it a bit silly to leave it up to the end user to not flood this network. I'd love to see the broadcat rate on this one...
The monopoly network is Telecom who offer JetStream DSL against TelstraClear who offer cable internet.
I just wish SlashDot had less people think America is the World.
NZ does not stand for some backwards state of the USA, NZ has the most advanced networks in the world.
Wellington has the world's most domain names per capita, the most internet connections per capita, the most electronic transactions per capita and the most cafes per capita.
BTW, the scenery in Lord of The Rings was computer generated, it was shot around Wellington and the countryside.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
This is rubbish, the trolley cables use electricity and the fiber optic does IP.
Wellington has never been capable of power outages, we have 8 seperate power routes which was designed to keep the capital incapable of power outages and relay the power generated in the South Island hydrodams.
We connect to the Cook Strait cables in the southern suburbs, & the power goes up through 8 separate lines through the city and the harbour.
The only way what he says could be true is if he got the trolley lines to be used as a backup route for power.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
CityLink runs on top of the trolley bus lines.
TelstraClear dug their network trenches.
Right of way is shared by companies in New Zeland, it causes less disruption.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Yes, that scenery is real. I have been to some of the places they shot the films.
I live at the bottom of Mt. Victoria where they shot the Shire Forest scenes, that track is one of the Town Belt walkways.
There is a lot of mountain biking there, we held the world mountain bike contest there in 1998.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
My name is Dylan Packman. I live in Wellington, New Zealand.
CityLink is pretty damn awesome.
Broadband in general in Wellington is good. We've got:
ADSL ( http://www.telecom.co.nz )
Cable ( http://www.saturn.co.nz )
Wireless ( http://www.walkerwireless.co.nz )
as well as CityLink ( http://www.citylink.co.nz )
CityLink was started in 1987 by a very foward thinking City Council. We also had a free Wellington only ISP up until 1996 or so, called CityNet. To join you had to go to the City Council, they checked if you were a resident, and then gave you a username/password.
Wellington has all of the options. I sit on Cable at home then ADSL at work, my previous work was on CityLink. Broadband is very well established here.
We're pretty much a testing ground for lots of different technologies. Very advanced phone systems, and something most of you probably havent heard of called EFTPOS ( http://www.eftpos.co.nz ).
Things here kick ass.
Come join us.
notreally@drunk.co.nz
Does it mean a lot of people will get their net traffic snooped? Hmm... I wonder which web sites Amy down the block is surfing right now and who she is exchanging emails with.
"Drool ... gigabit internet ..."
Having a 1,000 Mbps ethernet connecting businesses is all well and good, but the links out of Wellington to everywhere else in the world are like 56Kbps -> Well, it seems like that most of the time.
Not to mention the lags involved in being 2000km (1300+ miles) from the nearest large country, (and 14000+ km (8000+ miles) from the US) leading to massive lags (260ms+)
However, downloading from linux redistribution sites rocks :)
That sort of thing happens in the South Island.
One of the ads for Speights Beer is a guy who stays with his dad on his farm rather than go to Auckland for his girlfriend who has corporate sets at Eden Park, a 80 foot Yacht in the harbour and an SL mercedes.
I think he prefered the sheep.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
I've used the PlayHutt internet cafe for hours of counterstrike and unreal tournament.
http://www.playhutt.com/
The pings are very good there and it's near all the fastfood places in manners mall.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
No, our currency is good enough to use for paying off our international loans.
We have the world's most internet connections per capita, the most domain names per capita (I'm getting one this week) and the most electronic transactions per capita.
Wellington has more internet usage than Silicon Valley, more cafes per capita than New York City and the best cultural festivals in the South Pacific.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
I am the sys. admin for a Wellington-based technology business, and we use Citylink to connect to ISPs and other sites.
Recently, we moved premises and because Citylink was available in both locations, i have been able to securely bridge my two locations (using Linux-running routers on both ends) transparently over Citylink, which means the users don't even notice that all the servers and outbound router are still down the road.
LAN traffic averages about 2Mbps across the link, and if we had done this using our link to TelstraSaturn (our ISP) we would have ended up with a bandwith bill of extraordinary proportions.
The link was set up simply by assigning an unused 192.168.x.x address to both ends of the connection, running VTUN across this link and then bridging the virtual interfaces using Linux's bridge-utils.
There is no reason this concept couldn't be expanded to link arbitary numbers of sites into a nice, flat, stable, secure 'WAN'. In fact, this is exactly what i will be doing to fulfil some of my company's disaster-recovery requirements.
I couldn't be happier with the support, stability and speed Citylink provides.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I live and work in Wellington, and our company is wired with Citylink. My last employer (a government department) were also wired on the network.
:) We have cheap access to a high speed MAN, peering with our neighbours, and a really quick and easy way to connect to our ISPs without paying telco frame relay charges etc.
:)
Basically we get a full duplex 100Mb Ethernet cable hanging in our machine room, and we can participate on the BGP peering system available on the network.
In New Zealand, ISP tarrif charges can be high (at least, this is the dirty rumour going about). For about, er, NZD$350 per month, we can get all-you-can-eat traffic to any of our peers without crossing an ISP. It's free, and fast.
The slowest access available is 10Mb (Ethernet). So, worst case scenario is that your updates to local servers (like linux.wellington.net.nz, for example) are blazingly fast; 100Mb access to the same server is staggering.
Naylor's vision was extraordinary, and has enabled Wellington to be a wired city in ways most people can only dream about
Unfortunately, it didn't just spring up overnight. I've been working with Citylink connected places for what, about four years now. The network has grown and expanded since then, gaining better core kit and so on. It's amazing now, and promises to get better. What cities need to appreciate is that it won't happen overnight; your network needs to grow organically overnight. Pick a good location for installation, get some interested companies, and be willing to take a little bit of a hit in the first year.
Wellington is kind of unique in that the entire central business district is walking distance from everywhere; you can cover the city on foot in any direction for business purposes in about 45 minutes or so. However, Auckland (a larger city in New Zealand) is starting to get on the ball with their APE (Auckland Peering Exchange). Auckland is a sprawling behemouth that has traffic congestion problems shocking for a city its size. But if they can do it, so can you
There is a big pipe that goes into the Cook Strait and some of it pops up onto the southern beaches.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Publicly held companies have a legal responsibility to their shareholders. To suggest that a publicly held corporation should care about anything but making money shows a gross misunderstanding of the capitalist market. The ability for publicly held companies to care only about money is their only redeemable quality.
In the 1950's a device was released called "Hush-a-phone." This deviced attached to the mouthpiece of a phone to block out background noise. At&t objected, and with the backing of the FCC, they banned this "illegal, unauthorized attachment to the phone network." So if in the 1970's and 80's, At&t still had that kind of power modems would certainly be "unauthorized." Jack Osterman, an At&t executive, put it best in 1964: "We'll be damned if we allow the creation of a competitor to ourselves."
The internet's ability to be dumb, and do only the simplest task, transport data, is it's biggest strength. As we all know, the phone system works much better than voice over IP. The reason is because the phone network is specialized. However, the internet does not have the ability to prioritize or discriminate packets, which allows new unforseen protocols to be written, with new unimaginable uses. This all became possible (at least over telephone lines) because At&t was forced into a hands-off policy.
Before AOL acquired TW, they and At&t were pushing to open up the cable networks. Now they're pushing in the opposite direction, because of their newfound interest in keeping it closed. Now they prioritize packets in favor of themselves and their affiliates. @home (I believe) was the one who limited video streams to ten minutes.
Cable, and dark fiber (fiber w/o the electronics), should be layed with the help of the government, just like the roads are. I used to be a staunch strong libertarian in favor of completely open markets. But, corporations aren't really that different from governments: they use power to limit the rights of people, and they don't deserve a bigger exemption than does the government.
I'm not going to pretend these are all my ideas, though I believe in them strongly. If you want to learn more read "The future of ideas" by Lawrence Lessig.
Hate to point this out to you - Users pay for CityLink - the government only aided in the inital outset for the network layout. Just like they help fund ballets that most people never see, and museums most people never visit, and flower gardens that most people couldn't care less about. There's nothing out of the ordinary about CityLink recieving government funding - especially since as someone posted above, a large portion of the recipients of the network are government owned enterprises.
I think in your blaze of anger you missed the fact that this is a LAN only. After the inital outset, the businesses have to pay for their internet connections. You also have to pay for a CITYLINK connection to be wired in for your use, as well as a monthly fee for connection to CITYLINK. This is a user-paid service.
By the way, I suggest you DO use the sewerage system. Wether you want to or not.
You can also get residential access in most suburbs using Telstra/Saturn's cable network. Up to 2Mbps for $NZD110, about $50 US.
-- Welcome to nowhere fast / nothing here ever lasts.
Yes, you can run anything you want, and you get "real" IP addresses (we got 5!). Citylink is a piece of the internet set up like a LAN (i.e. no routers), not actually a LAN. They just provide the pipe, you pick the ISP you want (there are at least a dozen, IIRC) and pay them for the traffic (and your IP addresses).
As for cost, we pay NZD90/USD38 per month to Citylink for our Fast Ethernet "apartment" connection, plus NZD150/USD63 per month to our ISP for 500MB of traffic. That is, our office Fast Ethernet LAN is plugged into a Fast Ethernet NIC in a Linux box in the garage to the fibre in the street. When I say "office", it's an apartment that I live in and work from.
And you don't even have to buy any stupid cable/DSL modems. ;)
Traffic to other nodes on Citylink is free, so we can send big emails to our clients' ISPs' mail servers for nothing, and our ISP (paradise.net.nz) has RH/Debian/Mandrake/OpenBSD/FreeBSD mirrors, internet radio, and like, 40+ game servers (CS at 20-40ms pings all the time), so 500MB/month is almost enough.
Yes, there are a lot of on-line gamers in Wellington. In the last year or two, the internet cafe thing has taken off, driven by teenagers (mainly Asians, it seems) fuelling their Diablo II and Counter-Strike addictions. I blame NVIDIA. A lot of the players are pretty good. I'm not one of them.
Before I moved in here, I lived out on the beach (Lyall Bay) - literally right on the shore. And only a 20 min. cycle from town. We "only" had cable out there, but I was able to set up an IPSec VPN to here and share my traffic quota, which I thought was neat.
Nobody was supposed to know about the "optical power distribution" thing. Mr. Lipschultz (if that is his real name) has been "seen to", and will not be giving away any more of our secrets.
Yes, state-backed monopoly telcos are bad. We privatised ours, and now it isn't a monopoly in the same way that Microsoft isn't. Still makes too much money and largely does what it likes. At least there are alternatives.
Wellington kicks arse. I specifically moved back here from Europe to work on my own project because it met my criteria:
London's nice, but SOTA there is ISDN... Now if only the Kiwi dollar was a bit stronger.
--
"Tonight, Michael, I'm going to be... Donald Knuth!"
TransACT (Australian Capital Territory) has a somewhat similar system - although theirs runs on fibre and gives access to Cable TV as well as internet and intranet solutions.
c ti onName=AboutTransACT&pageName=techinfo.asp
Much slower though.
http://www.transact.com.au
'tech' info:
http://www.transact.com.au/default_Graph.asp?se
Cheers
James
... you're making me home-sick!!!
:-) Unlike Sydney or London or Cape Town or maybe soon Canada.
God, I miss Wellington, the one perfect corner of the world where everything works as it should
I've been meaning to come home "soon" for ages, now this gives me more incentive.
Next year. Maybe.
if the fact that NZ can implement these sorts of projects has anything to do with their relatively simple political system? They have no states, only a single national parliament, and even that only has one house. It certainly must streamline the legislative and funding environment that enables these sorts of forward-thinking projects. I also wonder if their relatively small and geographically localised population has something to do with it too.
Here in Australia, all sorts of good projects get held up, or butchered to the point of uselessness by petty bickering and pointless competition between the states, just so one Premier or another can say "We have brought new jobs to [insert state here]".
And we only have 6 states; I can imagine what these sorts of things must get like in a nation with 50 of them.
SofaMan -- Occasionally Battling Evil With His Mighty Powers Of Indolence.
You might be interested in the fact that this same service is being deployed in many different places around the world, for profit.
To counter the "socialist" arguments, lots of places I've lived have private water suppliers who always provide cleaner water than the "city" supply. Yes, even through their own pipes in the ground.
Metropolitan area fiber providers exist and are flourishing, selling LAN like speeds across town and further. there are lots of companies selling this kind of equipment from the startups to Lucent, the company formerly known as Bell Labs.
There are styles for wiring your own little community together on the cheap, then providing ISP service through something like the Linux router mentioned in this article.
The only "unique" feature to this project is its starting as a "community" project. However, since no one is forced to pay for it, no one is forced to use it, it's hardly "socialist".
I applaud the for-thinking of the design engineers. This might as well be called an "open source" project all by itself! Vivat!
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Check out http://www.masonpud3.org/Telecom/ - I have a friend who works for a company who is wiring fibre to the home - 6000 megabits (you read that correctly).
Creative reading of my earlier post.
However, taking you at face value, I would remind you that it was only after 1992, when the US Government stopped trying to control the routing tables, that what YOU know as "the internet" actually took off.
You might be surprised to know there was a time when it was illegal to use "the internet" for commercial purposes.
Many thousands of private individuals who worked on, contributed to, and built what you know as "the internet" didn't work for any government.
I recomend you read a book next time before posting.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Both Clinton and Gore, whilst in power, promised to do the same. Bush Senior made a smiliar unfulfilled promise re a Mars landing. Senator Moynihan of NY before he retired gave an interview in Sci American pushing the same idea, with the recognition that Federal seed capital would be necessary.
With all the cable companies and Lucent going through the wringer at the moment who but the content providers would want to get involved ?
Laying cable is comparatively easy, its having somethin commercially viable to sell down that cable which is difficult.
Welly has a lanning venue with a Gigabit internet connection via citylink. http://www.lanplace.co.nz/
Paradise Broadband 128
* $66.95 a month incl. GST (or $52.50/month if you also get home phone)*
* 128kbps downstream/ 128kbps upstream
* 10GB of international monthly traffic
* 20c per additional international MB
* 2c per additional national MB
* up to 6 email addresses
* access to paradise.net's helpdesk support, 24 hours, 7 days a week
Paradise Broadband 256
* $76.95 a month incl. GST (or $63.10/month if you also get home phone)*
* 256kbps downstream / 128kbps upstream
* 5GB of international monthly traffic
* 20c per additional international MB
* 2c per additional national MB
* up to 6 email addresses
* access to paradise.net's helpdesk support, 24 hours, 7 days a week
Paradise Broadband Max
* $79.95 a month incl. GST (or $68.95/month if you also get home phone)*
* 512kbps downstream/128kbps upstream
* 1GB of international monthly traffic
* 20c per international MB
* 2c per national MB
* up to 6 email addresses
* access to paradise.net's helpdesk support, 24 hours, 7 days a week.
Traffic upgrade:
* upgrade to a 3GB monthly traffic allowance for an extra $54.95 a month
* upgrade to a 5GB monthly traffic allowance for an extra $109.90 a month
Speed upgrade:
* upgrade to 2Mbps downstream and 256kbs upstream for an extra $30 per month
*does not include cable modem rental fee.
Cable modem rental is about $15 per month.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
bullshit on about this crap all you want but the fact of the matter is bandwidth monopoly in wellington means we gotta pay 25 cents a meg (about 10 US cents) for international bandwidth.. while people in the USA anywhere from .05 cents to .2 cents
so downloading a nice 1 gig divx pr0n movie costs me about $250 NZ.. so despite all these fat cables i stick to my dialup, leave it on all night every night and get about 1 divx porn movie a week for $20 a month, using bandwidth that in theory should be costing my isp $1000 (??)
Why pay $100 more to get half the traffic?
It's not like 128k is too slow to use 10 gig...
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer