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

open source too

[Alien54]

As another cost-cutting measure, Citylink uses a generic computer running Debian Linux and SMTP management software, as well as a number of other open-source tools: NetSaint Network Monitor, NocMonitor, MRTG, and Cricket . And the company builds its own routers, rather than dropping the money on hardware. Naylor says a comparable Cisco router would cost him $25,000 NZ or roughly $11,500 U.S.; Citylink builds its own routers for $2,500.

that is pretty cool. lots of other juicy details in there as well.

"Socialist!"

[Anonymous Coward]

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, any town council member in a randomly chosen Midwest U.S. town who suggests that the city maybe ought to connect a network of sewers between all the houses and businesses and then get a system to pay for that (a collective good) out of the collective treasury, surely there would be an 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 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."

I think the real question is

[Ionized]

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.

WAN, not LAN, and other inconsistencies....

[justin_schoeman]

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

Re:Very, very nice

[Diabolical]

As the article points out, the companies hooked up to the Wellington backbone are responsible for their own network.

It states clearly that "It's a normal LAN with client-owned routers at the edge. Clients implement their own firewall protection"

The costs will probably be very low... using opensource and all their overhead will be at a minimum. The costs a company makes is nothing more then they normally would have to pay for materials like a router and firewall.. it can be whatever they want..

What i am interested in is if this scheme would work in rural area's. What would be it's breakeven point....?

Hello! Remember IBM?

[fm6]

If Microsoft hadn't decided to go into the OS commodity business, we wouldn't today have a commodity hardware business.

I'm afraid you have your history muddled. The "generic" computer existed before MS got into the OS business, and is the reason why they did so. (The more usual term is "commodity computer", which more accurately describes its origins and role.) Of course it wasn't called "generic" or "commodity" at that time. It was called "The IBM Personal Computer".

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.

Take that, QOS heads!

[sulli]

I loved this:

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.