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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.
"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
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.
http://www.citylink.co.nz/faq/index.html
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
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!
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$.
Over $2.5K?
PriceWatch lists motherboards with those specs for $260US...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
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 live in Gävle and I'm using the LAN right now and I must say it's great. I guess I've 10Mbit both ways for 22 euros a month.. which is nto abd at all.
The Citylink website is:
www.citylink.co.nz
So he ran a fiber optic cable between the plants, allowing them to compensate by sharing power when one was hit by a shortage.
I really doubt that the power plants are sharing power via a fiber optic cable.
Or how about the network speed, is it 100 Mbps (Fast Ethernet) or 1,000 Mbps (Gig Ethernet).
From the article:
Citylink runs at Fast Ethernet speeds of up to 1,000Mbps
This article is so full of errors, I don't know if I should believe it.
The Economics of Website Security
... 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.
Believe it :) I'm posting from it.
Its gig ether on a (generally) switched network. You can purchase 10, 100 or gig endpoints from citylink. More details are available on www.citylink.co.nz.
You can't win a fight.
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
Citylink offers two main services. One is a "dark fiber" connection (they put it in, manage it for you) which lets you do whatever you like with it. This is the equivilent of a leased line from a telco between two buildings you own (or you and a client). You can use any addresses, protocols, etc, on that without affecting anyone else.
The other service is their public MAN. All the ISPs in New Zealand (all the significant ones with any presence in Wellington anyway) are connected to this Citylink public MAN. To use it for Internet access you go to one of these ISPs and get some addresses assigned for you to use. Because it's a layer-2 network, all these addresses from different ISPs can be used in parallel without affecting each other. (Just like you can on a LAN segment for testing, etc.)
The really big win of the public MAN and all the ISPs being connected is that changing ISP is pretty easy if you need to -- you just need new IP addresses (for CIDR allocations), or a new set of routing entries (for those with real address space of their own). Makes it a lot cheaper, and easier, than having to get new leased lines run, etc.