Slashdot Mirror
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 ..."
"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?"
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.
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
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.
Also, as far as I know, none of the citylink-connected ISPs will give you a gigabit connection, although you can get 10 or 100 megabit. You can get a gigabit ethernet connection between two buildings, though.
You can also get a 2 megabit wireless citylink connection, which has a larger coverage area than the faster wired connections.
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