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Wireless Internet Co-Ops?
einstein asks: "How many other geeks out there are purchasing high speed commercial net connections to the remote areas they live, and then selling access to their neighbors to help cover costs? I know of a remote area with about 20-30 house all of which could access a wireless lan connection to share a 1.5 ADSL connection. I'm planning on bugging the neighbors to see if there interested soon, and I'd like to have some idea if this has worked for other people. So, who's doing this in a Co-Op fashion, and how is it working?" This probably won't be possible with most residential DSL providers, however would they let this fly on their commercial lines?"
I'm doing it now with my ISP's commercial connection and there seems to be no complaints on their part...
These are the good old days you'll be telling your children about. Make them worthwhile.
If you plan to do this, not only does it have to be a business/commercial class, the TOS will also have to allow you to resell the bandwidth. Just one more thing to check into.
And you might want to make sure the 1.5 ADSL has a good upload speed, because if it's something like 90k, that's going to fill up really quickly. (One person uploading could bring the speed down for everyone quickly.) If you get DSL, I'd probably look into SDSL.
I recently did this with a DSL connection to my condo. I have mostly ghetto neighbors, we can only get IDSL here (144K up/down), and I only need it for e-mail and casual newsreading.
It's $120 a month, a bit pricey, so I talked to a few neighbors, and told them as long as they won't leech or kazaa or download massive amounts of porn, they can jump in with me.
I have it as a commercial account, asked if there is a limit to the number of users (no), and let about 10 of my neighbors on.
Built a simple gateway that keeps track of ONLY the number of bytes take by each user (in order to see if anyone is abusing it). 3 months, no problem.
I dunno what exactly I'd do if someone DID start leaching, since I have no real contract, but then again, I have the switch in my condo, so all I need to do is pull the plug.
You'd be surprised how far a low-ping quality IDSL can go for as many people as are on it. Its definitely far and away better than ISDN or dial-up, even with 6 or 7 people browsing the web at once.
Oh, and when I need to download something big, I remote access a client who has a few T1's worth of bandwidth, and download it there, then dribble download it to my PC at home.
I haven't looked up other providers other than RR-Austin, but I would guess that most allow the resale of their services. A quick look on Roadrunner's site in Austin found something related in their business class of circuits. Though the writer isn't technically a developer or MDU it is sort of the same thing that he/she is wanting to accomplish. The drawback is the price; the business class circuits are always going to be much steeper in price (though this may be balanced out if enough people were interested). There are probably other more specific TOS's out there for other providers.
Reselling high capacity commercial circuits is extremely common. I don't see the difference between what the author suggests and the regular ole' mom&pop local isp and their modem banks.
Check out Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative Association at http://www.rric.net/
/. a few months ago about ruby ranch.
there was also a story on
As the power flows in, the screen grows warm, another day starts, I'm at work again...
I own a smallish ISP in Florida. We have been looking at this for some time. The problem is the cost of getting the neighbors equipment. Wireless equipment starts at around $100 and goes up from there. With the Phone companies and the cable companies trying to knock each other out with signup free offers this is a hard sell. Comcast is offering free sign/equipment and $20 per month until the end of the year. $40 after the end of the year. Also as stated most cable and DSL providers prohibit sharing of any kind. Some even go as far as to say it constitute "theft of servervice". Also setting up the antennas and running the coax cable inside and hooking everything up is a a very labor intensive problem. Also the range of the low end equipment along with ever present "line of sight" problem would mean selling to a fairly small radius (1/2 mile is what I think would be safe). This would mean finding enough people within this radius to make it worth while. We tested a pair of Linksys WAP11's with homemade antennas in point to point mode and got a very solid connection at 1.1 miles (across the river where we had clear line of sight) We tried starting one of these in the neighborhood where my head tech lives. We distrbuted flyers inviting everyone (about 30 people) to come over to his house for a meeting to answer questions and see the equipment needed. No one came. I am about to try here where I live and use a door to door sales technique. Since I own an ISP (www.cyberstreet.com). I am aware of the need to log everything. We would assign everyone a static IP so we could quickly track down any spammers/ DOS attacks. This would even be easer than doing this with dynamic dialup. But make no bones about it, this is a lot of work. We are activly looking for people in South West Florida who want to do this in their neighborhood. We would supply the High Speed connection and the local rep would make contact with his/her neighbors. We would take care of logging and most other server issues. I will make a future post if this goes anywhere.
I remember seeing an article somewhere regarding this exact issue. In a semi remote area of Colorado, 8 families set up there own ISP for themselves. After the initial equipment costs (with all the dead .coms, equipment can be found relatively cheap), it came to like 20 or 30 bucks a month to cover all costs. It really pissed of one of the baby bells, since they would be using the lines that baby bell installed. I believe that the baby bell tried to sue and lost since they have to share the lines according to the FCC rules.
Anyway, if you are to worried about leeching neighbors, get a satilite connection. While not as fast as DSL or cable connections, it still beats the hell out of dial up.
-Out the PC, over the LAN, through the server, down the T1, nothing but 'net-
Check out Seattle Wireless and NoCat. They are quite advanced in similar projects.
Good luck, and make sure it's legal before you do it.br. Mihai
Get extra IP addresses.
Sorry, but this actually *does* work. My condo unit splits a 1.2Mb SDSL between 20 units. That gets our cost down to $20/month/unit. The HOA takes care of billing. We had some upfront costs (installation, purchase of a switch for the basement), and it does take some time of a couple of volunteers (myself and one other) to help the less Internet-savvy folks get hooked up, but all in all, it's a great deal and everyone is very happy.
We do have to police a little about P2P systems, etc, but to date have really had no problem - education when you hook up a new user is the key. Our bandwidth usage is nowhere near capacity, and a number of people are running low-usage websites. Remember, for email and casual web-browsing, 20 users will mean 4-5 at peak, with much of their traffic interleaved. Trust me, it works.
Of course, there are loads of wireless community groups out there, with varying methods of deployment/philosophies/etc. You might look here and start browsing the different groups to see how they run things.
NoVAWireless might be a place to look at -- they seem to be involved with organization of clusters of small, neighborhood-based WISPs.
I should have used preview.... Check out Sugarloaf.net they are providing wireless broadband to a location not served by other means.... Also, you might want to check out Motorola Canopy for the wireless hardware.
--- I would prefer a prehensile tail....
I happened to read an article about Allegany Co., MD, setting up it's own wireless broadband system - a rural county which has virtually NO chance of getting any broadband from a big telecom company in this lifetime. And this is the case with most of Appalachia as well. I just tried to remember where that article was and looked it up - it was in the Baltimore Sun and so if you try www.sunspot.net and search on Allegany and wireless it should pop up for the next week or so.
I also remember reading over a year ago an article by Cringley about getting a wireless DSL connection by finding someone down a line of sight from him who he could pay to get it, and then setting up an access point and an antenna - I think his set up cost him about $1000 plus paying for the other guy's connection.
Anyway, as long as you buy a commercial connection with a contract that allows you to resell, and set yourself up properly legally for your area, it should be no biggie technically to set up. Financially and technically, you have to cover yourself if your customer decides to oh...say do something illegal. Or set up a webcam and broadcast 24/7 and other fun stuff like that.