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 ..."

Comments

Too much money makes Jack a dull boy

[MosesJones]

"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.

Drool some more

[Luminous Coward]

Hehehe, some of you are drooling over 1 Gbps. You might be interested in 10 Gbps Ethernet which is now close to ratification.

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.

Citylink is extremely good

[ikekrull]

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.